After the two driest consecutive years in much of California in nearly half a century, reservoir levels are dropping. Lawns are brown. Water restrictions are increasing. And Californians are getting worried. Asked to name the environmental issue they are most concerned about, more California residents cited water shortages and drought than any other, according to a […]
The water purification problem is compounded even more because drinking water also is contaminated daily by industry, antiquated lead pipe delivery systems, and weakening government oversight. An estimated 105 million people receive water from public water systems that use groundwater, and one federal agency proclaims that an estimated 22 percent of public wells for those […]
Drought may be the sneakiest of natural disasters. Although human history teems with people engulfed by abrupt aridity — the Akkadians of four millenniums ago, the Maya in the ninth and 10th centuries A.D., the Great Plains farmers of the 1930s — even today drought is a poorly appreciated phenomenon. Unlike mighty storms or thundering eruptions, droughts slink into our lives invisibly, unannounced. It can […]
Photo: Rooftop Garden by Gregg Willett We build roads that allow vehicles to move safely, while channeling rainfall “away.” Our impervious developments require more infrastructure to convey stormwater “away.” We tear down buildings and throw them “away.” But there is no “away.” Our built environment burdens communities with externalities, taxpayers with costs, and future generations […]
For too long, we have been exploiting and destroying our planet’s ecosystems. Every three seconds, the world loses enough forest to cover a football pitch and over the last century we have& destroyed half of our& wetlands. As much as 50 per cent of our coral reefs have already been lost and up to 90 per cent of coral reefs could be […]
A large-scale Aqualoop greywater recycling system with NSF 350 certification for commercial-scale buildings has been approved without restrictions by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS). The system will be part of The Fig + Pico project, a 42-story hotel tower in downtown Los Angeles opening in 2022. In compliance with the LA […]
