Water shortages not mandatory

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December 18, 2009

Water shortages not mandatory

As gardeners, we know that we are held ransom to water. Rain, dew, pipe, irrigation, drip, flood, spray, weep … if the water doesn’t reach our gardens somehow – or if there is too much of it or it is timed poorly – our plantings are doomed. If we were counting on that food for our own survival, as much of the world does, things would be bleak indeed.

In many, many places, there is a thick layer of dust and doom spread over the landscape. What water is available is often polluted beyond use, too salty, a vector for horrible diseases or too deep underground to retrieve. Global climate trends have forced people off formerly arable land squarely into the lap of aid agencies. Even if the aid agencies operated in some sort of idealized state – and they do not – living from handout to handout is hardly humankind’s proper state of existence.

Enter, stage left, the incredible synergy of water projects and micro-finance loans.

And you. You’re part of the synergy or I wouldn’t waste my time writing this.

What can happen is simple: these loans can make safe water both available and inexpensive. With crop yields and human health improved and the funding for tuition available, education, one of the key needs in developing lands, can proceed. Too, decent water can help the ambitious to expand farms and businesses, employing others in the process. This is the sort of hope, not the reliance on aid agencies, which lets a family plan a future.

You don’t have to back anything in the links below. Or, if you do, you can keep your involvement very, very small. But I’d appreciate it if you would at least review their proposals for solving a problem that is at the very core of much of the human suffering our world faces.

Even if you can’t spare $25.00 to participate in the micro-finance end of things, would you at least Stumble, Tweet, e-mail or otherwise alert others to the existence of this page?

Thanks,

Bill

Links:

Water Projects:

http://water.org/2009/12/kenyan-woman-mobilizes-community-to-tackle-poverty/

http://www.charitywater.org/ << interesting ‘gift-diversion’ program

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9142.aspx

Loans:

http://bit.ly/dRxGJ

http://www.kiva.org/

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/03/17/080317ta_talk_surowiecki (it’s not all wine & roses)