Learn how to reuse graywater, harvest rainwater, and install composting and dry toilets.
In this google Tech Talk (recorded in May 2010) Laura Allen and Gregory Bullock show how to reuse graywater, harvest rainwater, and install composting and dry toilets.
Laura Allen is a founding member of Greywater Action (formerly the Greywater Guerrillas). Gregory Bullock is the founder of Bang for your Green Buck, an environmental enterprise that designs sustainable, productive landscapes that grow food through greywater irrigation and rain harvesting.
To listen to the companion radio segment, click here. Note that this radio show was produced in 2007, and legislation has since changed, making it legal and more affordable to recycle your own graywater.
This slide show was produced by Quest, a KQED multimedia series exploring Northern California science, environment, and nature. Interested?
Greywater Action: Learn more about your graywater from this group of educators, designers, builders, and artists who empower people to build sustainable water culture and infrastructure.
Compost Toilets and Self-Rule: The ecological toilet is one of today's most hope-filled expressions of people's power. How composting toilets help us take back our power and autonomy.
Worried about what’s in your tap?
That’s exactly what the water bottling industry hoped when it developed brands like Dasani, Perrier, and Poland Springs, which promise to be “natural,” “pure,” “clean,” even “sexy” alternatives to tap water.
But the very companies that market those brands, like Nestlé and Coca Cola, are putting public water supplies in jeopardy in communities both in the United States and overseas. They’re selling us a product that is often not any cleaner than tap water, and is a lot pricier.
Bottled water is a scam. The simplest way to understand why is to watch a new, short film released today by the creators of The Story of Stuff. Like its predecessor, The Story of Bottled Water uses simple language and surprisingly charming stick figures to walk you through the perils of the bottled water economy. “Bottled water costs about 2,000 times more than tap water,” says Annie Leonard, the film’s narrator and director. “Can you imagine paying 2,000 times the price of anything else? How about a $10,000 sandwich?”
Bottled water often comes straight from the tap, sometimes with a little filtering, sometimes not. It is not necessarily safer. For instance, in 2004, the Coca-Cola company had to recall all of its Dasani water from the United Kingdom, after officials discovered the water exceeded the legal limit for bromate, a carcinogen. The Environmental Working Group recently tested 10 brands of bottled water—on average, they contained eight chemical pollutants, no better than tap water.
But there’s something even more insidious about the way that the bottled water industry preys on our public water systems and tap water. Water is both the most basic of human needs and a product of nature. It can’t actually be manufactured, so bottling it up and selling it always means removing water from a public source. As the bottled water market has taken off, we’ve seen public water fountains begin to disappear. Meanwhile, citizens in rural towns have begun to take notice that water-bottling companies are trying to sell off water that actually belongs to them. Communities like Barnstead, New Hampshire have fought hard to keep Nestle from bottling and shipping away their local water.
Photo essay: Chengdu's most popular public park is is a 5.9 acre inner-city natural water treatment system.
We’ve gotten used to thinking we have more than enough water to go around in this country, but it’s not true. According to experts like Peter Gleick, the United States is facing a water crisis that will only get worse in coming years. Already major water supplies like the Ogallala Aquifer and Lake Mead, which together supply water for millions across the Southwest and Great Plains, are in big danger of running dry. Climate change is going to alter everything we know about water—how much stays in our reservoirs, how much snow falls in the Sierras, how our rivers flow, and how much we have available to drink, irrigate our crops, and water our lawns. When we let a private company control, bottle, or sell our water—whether it’s Coca-Cola or the private water operator Thames—we’re giving up some measure of control over our health, environment, lives, and futures.
In May, YES! Magazine will unveil a full issue about how to protect our water and keep it clean and accessible. You’ll read about radical breakthroughs in contentious Western water wars, about a community that bought its water back from private control, about farms that are learning how save water by taking care of soil, and about ways to get all the water you need, even if you live in the heart of the desert.
In the meantime, you can celebrate World Water Day by watching The Story of Bottled Water, and read more about campaigns to protect water in our online and magazine coverage.
Madeline Ostrander is senior editor of YES! Magazine. Interested? Life, Liberty, Water by Maude Barlow
A global water justice movement is demanding a change in international law to ensure the universal right to clean water for all.
It quivers at the end of a leaf in the Amazon. Rushes thousands of miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Tumbles from the sky above the Serengeti. Sits heavy and quiet at the frozen poles. Water is the blood of the biosphere—the affinity between hydrogen and oxygen that makes the Earth, as we know it, possible.
But like the rest of the planet, it's finite. And that means it's valuable—and worth celebrating. As we come to terms with advancing deserts and drying aquifers, it's time we fell in love with the simple bundle of atoms that makes the world possible.
"The new American Dream emerging in Detroit is a deeply-rooted spiritual and practical response to the devestation and dehumanization created by the old dream," says Boggs.
The new documentary, Requiem for Detroit?, aired March 13, 2010 on BBC2. But I didn’t view it until last week when I received the DVD (with a thank you note) from Julien Temple, the director, and George Hencken, the Films of Record producer.
In 1960, Edward R. Murrow's documentary, Harvest of Shame, was a turning point in American consciousness because it forced us to recognize that the food we enjoy is picked by migrant agricultural workers living and working under unspeakable conditions.
Requiem for Detroit? can play a similar role in this period of transition away from an increasingly destructive industrial culture. The documentary makes very clear that Detroit’s notorious devastation is not a natural disaster but a man-made Katrina, the inevitable result of illusions and contradictions in our insane 20th century pursuit of unlimited economic growth. We witness autoworkers reduced to robots producing Henry Ford’s Model Ts—and then struggling to reclaim their humanity through sit-down strikes or battling Ford’s goons at the overpass. We meet Southern blacks who relish the “freedom” of Northern cities but also experience the racial tensions that exploded here in 1943 and 1967. Cars that grow the profits of the auto industry speed by on freeways which destroy neighborhoods to provide escape routes to the suburbs. Neighborhoods are turned into war zones as the drug trade replaces jobs that have been exported overseas.
This documentary is the odyssey of how a mode of production and transportation, once celebrated as the height of human creativity, morphed into dehumanizing consumerism at the expense of human beings and other living things.
A number of Detroiters, black and white, comment throughout. But the only named cast members are white-bearded John Sinclair, poet, former MC5 manager and White Panther Party leader; Martha Reeves, Motown's earthy, gospel-infused singing star; Heidelberg Project community artist Tyree Guyton; and me.
John Sinclair recalls the glories of the last century as he drives through disintegrating neighborhoods. An exuberant Martha Reeves helps us understand how the distinctive Motown sound emerged from the “this is my country” euphoria of blacks who had left the sharecropping and lynching culture of the South behind them. Tyree Guyton explains that he created the Heidelberg Project to depict the destruction of his neighborhood. He also describes the rising hope of today’s Detroit as neither a white or black thing but “I” becoming “We.”
My closing comments make clear that the new American Dream emerging in Detroit is a deeply-rooted spiritual and practical response to the devastation and dehumanization created by the old dream. We yearn to live more simply so that all of us and the Earth can simply live. This more human dream began with African American elders, calling themselves the Gardening Angels. Detroit’s vacant lots, they decided, were not signs of urban blight but heaven-sent spaces to plant community gardens, both to grow our own food and to give urban youth the sense of process, self-reliance, and evolution that everyone needs to be human.
That’s why growing numbers of artists and young people are coming to Detroit. They want to be part of building a City of Hope that grows our souls rather than our cars.
I hope Requiem for Detroit? will be shown at the 2nd U.S. Social Forum (USSF) meeting in Detroit from June 22-26. It is the story behind the USSF mantra: "Another World is Necessary. Another World is Possible." "Another World" is happening in Detroit!
Viewing it can help Detroit’s mainstream media become less shallow. It can deepen the imagination of the new generation of media makers attending the annual Allied Media Conference which precedes the USSF. These young people need this deepened imagination to do justice to the present escalating struggle between the Bings and Bobbs, scheming to gentrify Detroit by closing down neighborhood schools. And so will grassroots Detroiters who are organizing not only to save our schools, but to bring the neighbor back into the ‘hood by inventing new forms of education that motivate schoolchildren to learn through community-building activities. Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change. Interested?
A series of studies find that activism brings pleasant emotions, greater life satisfaction, and more experiences of freedom, competence, and connection to others.
Democracy depends on the time, energy, and engagement of ordinary people. But it remains quite difficult to motivate average citizens even to vote, much less to engage in the more intensive forms of political activism needed to counteract powerful forces that work against rule by the people.
That's why Malte Klar and I set out to determine whether people's engagement in political activity might be associated with the motivator of personal well-being. In other words, despite the struggles inherent in political activism, does being politically active brings its own rewards in terms of happiness and life satisfaction? Such a relationship seemed plausible to us, given past studies illustrating the well-being benefits of volunteering and of having pro-social attitudes and values.
To test this possibility, Klar and I surveyed one group of 344 college students, and then a larger group of 718 adults (all United States residents, half of whom were recruited from an online activism registry, and the other half of whom were community members recruited to match the activists on several demographic variables). Subjects’ political activism was assessed via measures like their commitment to activism (e.g., “I take the time I need to engage in activism”) and their sense of identity as an activist (e.g., “Being an activist is central to who I am”). Subjects were also asked how often they planned to or had participated in activist behaviors—ranging from sending “a letter or email about a political issue to a public official” to higher-risk activities like engaging “in a political activity in which you knew you will be arrested.”
Statistical analyses showed that after controlling for demographic factors like age, race, political orientation, and education, study participants who scored higher in political activism also reported higher levels of personal well-being. Specifically, political activism scores were associated with feeling more pleasant emotions, reporting greater life satisfaction, and having more experiences of freedom, competence, and connection to others. Our application of past research on “psychological thriving” further showed that 28 percent of the politically active adults had reached this highest level of well-being, compared to 18 percent of the community sample.
Because these correlational findings cannot establish whether being politically active actually caused increases in well-being, Klar and I conducted a third study. We asked students to write letters to the head of their college’s dining services; some students were assigned to write about “hedonistic” aspects of the food, commenting on the food’s taste and how enjoyable it was to eat, while other students were assigned to write about ethical and political aspects of the food, such as whether its production supported fair trade and social justice. Afterwards, students reported on their current personal well-being. Even with this relatively weak and short-term political action, results showed that subjects assigned to write about political issues reported feeling significantly more alert, energized, and alive than did those who wrote about the hedonistic aspects of food.
There are of course many limits to the three studies Klar and I conducted, including their use of only U.S. citizens and their short-term nature. Our results also have an important caveat: Engagement in “high-risk” activist behaviors that can lead people to get arrested or physically injured bore no systematic associations with personal well-being. Nonetheless, the results clearly suggested that being politically active is associated with higher levels of personal well-being, and may even cause improvements in vitality.
Politicians and activists typically attempt to motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democracy on the basis of moral appeals or attempts to fix a problem. Our results suggest that it might also be worthwhile to highlight the internal rewards citizens can obtain from being politically engaged: A sense of satisfaction, the experience of pleasant emotions and of connection with others, and a feeling of aliveness.
Tim Kasser, Ph.D., wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Tim is professor and chair of Psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. The paper this essay is based on was published in the journal Political Psychology under the title “Some benefits of being an activist: Measuring activism and its role in psychological well-being.” Interested?
Having a Voice Makes People Happyby Frances Moore Lappé
Most human beings are not couch potatoes and whiners. We are doers and creators. In fact, humans need to 'make a dent.'
Happiness-in-Action Heroes
Real people show how to live the good life and share their secrets to happiness.
New Visions Solving today’s big problems will take more than a quick fix. These authors offer clarity about the roots of our problems and visions of a better way.
Be Happy Anyway If money equals happiness, a financial crisis means we’re all gloomy, right? Or could the crisis actually work for us?
By Sarah van Gelder and Doug Pibel :: WHAT YOU SAID: Readers tell us What Makes Them Happy?
World & Community New models that foster justice, real prosperity, and sustain the Earth’s living systems. How can we bring these models to life and put them to work?
Life Reclaimed
A drug dealer starts a new life restoring prairie ecosystems.
An interview with Jarid Manos, by Madeline Ostrander
Christmas with No Presents?
One family’s daring experiment: Christmas without all the stuff.
By Colin “No Impact Man” Beavan :: The Story of Stuff: A fun and fact-filled look at our consumption patterns.
Living Large in a Tiny House
Dee Williams relaxes in her 84-square-foot home in Olympia, Washington. She lives in a friend’s backyard—and she’s never been happier. Tour Dee Williams' house
Breaking Open Humor, story-telling, and the arts—taking you into unexpected spaces where business-as-usual breaks open into new possibilities.
Rescue the Planet
Stop this happiness! Before it’s too late.
By Stephanie McMillan
How Thankful Are You?
The more grateful you are, the happier. Want to know your gratitude score? Take the test.
No Foreclosures Here While homeowners and renters across the country are losing their homes, a community land trust in Boston is showing how residents can keep a roof over their heads.
By Holly Sklar
Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography 
10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy
