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Water — Page 5

From the Community: waste and the environment

Turning wasteful Styrofoam packaging into biodegradable, mushroom-based materials, the current news on Hungary’s alumina sludge disaster, Frito Lay changes back to original chip bag packaging after consumer complaints about the “eco-friendly” bags and cities wasting water and using new technology to turn wastewater into energy.

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A Conference about Water V: The EcoEd Digital Library

This post was submitted by Teresa Mourad and Jennifer Riem of ESA’s Education Office. The ongoing discussions at the Millennium Conference are highlighting the role that ecologists and social scientists play in issues related to water, ecosystem services, and drought. Preparing the next generation of scientists to research, adapt, mitigate and manage these challenges is a responsibility that we all…

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A Conference About Water IV: Scum and Sludge

The scum (technical term) that rises to the top of waste water during processes. The ESA Millennium Conference took its participants out into the field yesterday in a series of field trips to learn about local water-related issues.  This blogger ventured out to the Wayne Hill Water Resources Center in Buford, GA, which processes around 28 million gallons of water…

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A Conference about Water III: Perceptions of Water Use

Todd Rasmussen takes questions after his talk at the ESA Millennium Conference. Yesterday’s morning sessions at the ESA Millennium Conference on water and drought wrapped up the keynote talks and moved into posters showcasing social and ecological studies surrounding water use. Denise Fort, a professor of law at the University of New Mexico, gave an overview of water law and…

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A Conference about Water and Ecology

Nancy Grimm welcomes attendees to the first ESA Millennium Conference. ESA’s first Millennium Conference kicked off today in Athens, GA. The meeting is bringing together ecologists and social scientists to engage in conversations about one of the most dramatic emerging challenges in ecology: that of clean water and water scarcity.  While ecologists’ main expertise is in providing and maintaining adequate…

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ESA Conference: Drought & environmental justice

The first conference in ESA’s Millennium Series begins on Monday at the University of Georgia in Athens. The conference, titled “Water-Ecosystem Services, Drought, and Environmental Justice,” will bring 100 scientists and land managers together to work on the resolution of social issues related to localized drought. The conference will focus on issues surrounding one of the biggest emerging environmental issues…

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Exotic plants can be water-hoggers

We often think of vegetated areas as being ecologically friendly; that is, plants are good for the environment, right? But it turns out that even that statement has caveats. In a study out in this month’s Ecological Applications, researchers have found that some exotic trees in Hawaii can use water at a rate of more than twice that of native…

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ESA Policy News: Aug. 14

ESA’s biweekly Policy News, produced by our Policy Analyst Piper Corp, was released on Friday. You can read the full edition here. One theme is the revival of the Sustainable Watershed Planning Act, which was drafted in June but then tabled. Ecologists are becoming increasingly aware that a world potable water shortage may be looming (see remarks by Sandra Postel…

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Ethical water stewardship

The international World Water Week meeting has attempted to raise awareness in developed countries of the growing water sanitation crisis in developing nations. According to the Huffington Post, more than 3 million people are killed each year from water-related diseases, and 98 percent of water-related deaths occur in the developing world. A large part of the world’s water crisis is…

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World Water Day 2009

Yesterday marked the 16th annual United Nations World Water Day, a day of advocacy for sustainable and careful management of clean freshwater supplies worldwide. This year’s theme was “Shared Water – Shared Opportunities.” The goal of the theme is foster goodwill and collaboration among neighboring nations to promote working together to preserve their waterways. More than 45 percent of the…

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