DBA Verde - Blue Planet Run

Smolan
&
US Price $45.00
Erwitt ENVIRONMENT/PHOTOGRAPHY

continued From Front flap S THE ARAL SEA, once a glistening body of water, has lost two-thirds
of its volume because its source rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation
S TAEKO TERAUCHI-LOUTITT runs along the Donau River in Vienna,
Austria on June 18, 2007. Born in Tochigi, Japan, Taeko started running 16
during the Soviet era. Previously the fourth-largest lake in the world – the years ago. Her selfless decision to run around the world had an unexpected
size of Southern California – much of it is now a dry graveyard of rusting personal benefit when she fell in love with fellow runner Canadian Jason
shipwrecks. This desertification has produced toxic dust, resulting in Louttit during the three month relay race. Chris Emerick

Michael Malone, Bill McKibben Jeffrey Rothfeder,
respiratory diseases and cancers in communities downwind of the lake.
Gerd Ludwig IN REGION AFTER REGION AROUND THE GLOBE, water — or put another way, control over
rapidly diminishing supplies of clean water — is at the heart of many of the world’s most

Jin Zidell asked if we could meet because he wanted to do something to make a raw geopolitical disputes, some of which have already rippled into dangerously destabilizing

difference in a world that appeared to be spinning out of control. Like Ashok, Jin had conflicts.

Michael Specter, Paul Hawken and Mike Cerre.
lost a loved one, his wife, and had spent a long and profound period in mourning. To Not surprisingly, among the hottest flashpoints is the Middle East, where water is at a
those of us who were his friends, his heartache seemed bottomless and immeasurable. premium and disagreements are in abundance. Virtually every political, social and military
But on that day we met for lunch, Jin seemed different. He wanted to do something strategy undertaken by Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and other nations in the area is
to honor Linda. What struck me as we spoke was the scope of Jin’s dreams. His eyes driven by its impact on access to water. Consider the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during
were as big as his love for Linda. His grief had become resolve. the Six-Day War in 1967. Formerly southwest Syria, this rugged plateau is home to headwaters

BLUE PLANET RUN
When Jin asked me to suggest a way he could make a real difference I suggested that of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, two of Israel’s most essential sources of water.

he do something that was measurable, something that could change an individual’s life Despite Syria’s saber rattling and widespread international condemnation for its occupation

In keeping with the theme of the book, two trees
in a single day, that he focus on a global problem that could be solved in a decade, of this territory, Israel refuses to retreat from the Golan Heights because it fears that Syria

an endeavor that could actually push the needle with respect to improving peoples’ would divert the water supply, as had been threatened in the early 1960s.

lives and the environment. He looked at me puzzled and asked, what would that be? Similarly, the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli war was fought primarily in southern

I knew of only one thing: water. Ninety minutes later, he left determined to find a way Lebanon, where tributaries of the Jordan River lie. Hezbollah

to provide safe drinking water to 200 million people for the rest of their lives by 2027. has vowed to control the water resources for Lebanon, even if

will be planted for each tree used in the production
Since that day, Jin has never looked back. Israel has to do with less.

Five years later the Blue Planet Run Foundation has three major initiatives under way. Meanwhile, in a mirror image of these disputes, the Palestinian rejection of peace accords in

The first is the Peer Water Exchange, which aims to enjoin thousands of the late 1990s grew in large part out of concern that these pacts ensured that Israel could

non-governmental organizations to find, fund and share the best water projects around determine how much water Palestinian areas receive. The Palestinians claim that Israel has

of this book and 100% of all royalties will fund safe
the world. The second is the extraordinary photography book you are holding in capped their per capita water consumption at about 18 gallons of water per day, compared to

your hands, designed to bring home Jin’s belief that that pure water is a right, not a about 92 gallons for the typical Israeli.

commodity. It’s no wonder that soon after signing peace treaties with Israel, the late King Hussein of Jordan

The third initiative of the Blue Planet Run Foundation is the circumnavigation of the and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt pointedly noted that only a quarrel over water could bring

drinking water projects. For more information on
globe by runners, symbolizing a circle in our hearts and minds, a closing of the loop them back to war with Israel.

50 percent
of love, care and responsibility that people share for each other. From June 1 through In large or small ways, similar brinksmanship occurs with disturbing regularity in regions already
September 4, 2007, a team of 22 dedicated runners set aside their own lives for 95 tense with enmity that has evolved over generations:
days to carry a message to the entire planet that undrinkable water is unthinkable in
S In Southern Africa, the waters of the Okavango River basin are pulled in four directions
today’s world. If the Blue Planet Run Foundation can change the world to ensure that

how you can help, visit www.BluePlanetRun.org
by Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, with hardly a cordial word spoken;
no child will ever be harmed by the water he or she drinks, then it will be one of the

The number of people who don’t have great miracles of the 21st century. And Jin’s dedication to the memory of the person he S In the Indian-controlled territories of Kashmir, where headwaters of the Indus River

access to the quality of water available loved most will have changed the world. basin reside, Pakistan has threatened to use nuclear weapons against India if any of its

to the citizens of Rome 2,000 years ago — PAUL HAWKEN
water supply is interrupted;
S AN ARMED GUIDE walks on a cliff above the Nile River near Amarna, Egypt. The Nile flows
through 10 countries in eastern Africa, but by force of a nearly 80-year-old treaty, Egypt commands
most of its waters, a source of dispute and strained relations for decades. Upstream countries, such as
Ethiopia and Sudan, have proposed dams on the river to aid their own development. But these plans
have been condemned by Egypt as it anticipates its population doubling over the next 50 years.
Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic, Getty Images
134 Blue Planet Run

S In Sri Lanka, violent conflicts have broken out between government armies and a rebel
group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who closed a provincial sluice gate in protest
over government delays in improving the nation’s water system;

S In Kenya, dozens were killed and thousands fled their homes when youths from the
1.1 billion
The number of people worldwide
Maasai and Kikuyu tribal communities fought with machetes, spears, bows and arrows
and clubs over water in the Rift Valley. — 1 in every 6 — without access
to clean water
The behavior is irrational, yet the motivation has an undeniable logic. Decades of poorly
designed irrigation techniques, the construction of massive dams, toxic dumping, wetlands and
forest destruction, industrial pollution, residential sprawl, lack of conservation and misuse have
taken a dire toll on global water resources, and clean fresh water is becoming scarcer in every
corner of the planet. The worst conditions are in places like Haiti, Gambia, Cambodia and
Mali, where residents subsist on an average of less than 2 gallons of water per day — fewer
than three large bottles of bottled water and well below the 13 gallons per day considered
the amount of water needed to meet a minimum quality of life. With less and less water to go
around, the idea that people would begin to fight over what’s left — and over who determines
who gets what remains — is anything but outlandish.

And while richer countries like the United States have been hiding water shortages with
engineering sleights of hand, this strategy is now backfiring. Southeast Florida, southern
California, Atlanta and parts of Texas are all likely to be dry within 20 years if their growth
patterns and management of water aren’t sharply altered.

In the United States, the water wars are more often waged in court. For example, after
30 years and no end to the amount of money being spent on attorney fees, three states in
the southeast are still feuding over the Chattahoochee River. Rising north of Atlanta, the
Chattahoochee is the sole water supply for the sprawling city’s metropolitan area as well as a
source of downstream water for two neighbor states, Alabama and Florida. Providing water
for Atlanta’s uncontrolled population boom — the city has grown from 2.2 million people in
1980 to 3.7 million people in 2000 — severely taxes the Chattahoochee. The city’s largest
treatment plant tapped 3.8 billion gallons a year of the river’s water when it opened in 1991;
now it pumps nearly 20 billion gallons annually. If, as expected, Atlanta’s population reaches 5
million by 2025, the Chattahoochee won’t be able to handle the load.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
But that isn’t slowing Atlanta down. Instead, the city is aggressively making plans to squeeze
more water out of the Chattahoochee by building a dozen additional dams and reservoirs on KIBBUTZ HATZERIM gained a territorial foothold in Israel’s Negev Desert
and kicked off a global revolution in agriculture when it partnered with water S WITH A POPULATION of 18 million growing by almost 400,000 every year, the water needs of
the river. This, in turn, has raised the ire of Alabama and Florida, which claim that Georgia is
engineer Simcha Blass in 1965 to develop and mass-produce drip irrigation. the residents of Mumbai, India, are staggering. Because water is prohibitively expensive, many slum
stealing the river for itself. Farmers in southern Georgia are siding with Alabama and Florida Netafim, the kibbutz’s irrigation business, now controls a large portion of the dwellers rely on leaks found — or created — in the massive pipelines that carry water to more affluent
drip market, with $400 million in sales last year. Manager Naty Barak checks neighborhoods. Mumbai’s have-nots avoid the garbage and human waste surrounding their dwellings by
against Atlanta, as their irrigation allotment falls. Depending on the outcome of the many
the kibbutz drip lines, which feed corn, cotton and tomato crops in an area that walking on top of the pipelines. Around the world, losses of fresh water due to leakage are routinely

Rick Smolan is a former Time, Life and National
receives less than 8 inches of rain annually. Alexandra Boulat reported as high as 70 percent in some major cities. Christopher Brown, Redux

Geographic photographer best known as the

THE RACE TO PROVIDE SAFE DRINKING WATER TO THE WORLD
creator of the Day in the Life book series. He and
his partner, Jennifer Erwitt, are the principals of
Against All Odds Productions, based in Sausalito,
Blue Planet Run provides readers with an
It is estimated that one billion people across the
California. Fortune Magazine featured Against 5.3 billion extraordinary look at the water problems
The number of people — two-thirds
of the world’s population — who will planet now lack access to clean water. But, as
All Odds as “One of the 25 Coolest Companies
suffer from water shortages by 2025
facing humanity and some of the hopeful the extraordinary images on the following pages
in America.” Their global photography projects solutions being pursued by large and small show, there are solutions to the world’s fresh
combine creative storytelling with state-of-the-art
companies, by entrepreneurs and activists, We call our planet Earth, but its surface is mainly water. We
should call it Ocean. In the hollows of space, Earth abides as a
water crisis, and they are within reach. This book,
technology. Many of their books have appeared
sparkling oasis, afloat with jumbo islands, and always half

ostensibly about a world crisis, is also a work of
hidden beneath a menagerie of clouds.

and by nongovernmental organizations and
In my upstate New York town, seven waterfalls tumble and spume
in lofty dialects of water. Liquid scarves loop through glacier-carved gorges, and winter reminds

on the New York Times best-seller lists and have
us that light, airy bits of water can hurdle fences, collapse buildings and bring a burly city to its

optimism and hope.
knees. In winter, ice forms a cataract on the eye of Lake Cayuga, but the lake never freezes
solid. It can’t.

foundations. By the end of the book, readers
Luckily for us. Eccentric right down to our atoms, we’d be impossible without water’s weird

been featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek
bag of tricks. The litany of we’re-only-here-because begins with this chilling one: We’re only
here because ice floats. Other liquids contract and sink when they freeze, but water alone
expands, in the process growing minute triangular pyramids that clump to form spacious, holey
designs that float free. If ice didn’t rise, the oceans would have frozen solid long ago, along with

are left to form their own conclusions as to The Blue Planet Run volume you are holding
all the wells, springs and rivers. Without this presto-chango of water, an element that one

and Fortune. Their books include America 24/7,
moment slips like silk through the hands and the next collapses rooftops and chisels gorges,
Earth would be barren.

S SLUM DWELLERS scramble for water in Jai Hind Camp in the heart of Since life bloomed in the seas, we need perpetual sips of fresh water to thrive. Become
dehydrated, as I once did in Florida, and the brain’s salt flats dry out, mental life dulls, and only

in your hands represents two extraordinary
Delhi, India. The camp is home to more than 4,000 migrant workers who are

One Digital Day, 24 Hours in Cyberspace, Passage to
dependent on daily deliveries from public and private water trucks. Ironically, S THERE IS NO MORE or no less water available for human use now than there

whether or how the human race is capable of
electrolytes dripped into a vein keep death at bay. We are walking lagoons who quaff water
the middle class in India, which receives water via home faucets, pays a tenth was at the dawn of humankind. But some areas of the planet have always had
of what the poor pay for their water delivered by truck. India has nearly 17 more than others. In Canada, where karst limestone cliffs line Death Lake in the
percent of the world’s population but only about 4 percent of its freshwater Northwest Territories, a twentieth of the world’s population enjoys almost a tenth
resources. Stuart Freedman of the world’s fresh surface water. Raymond Gehman, Getty Images
Drinking Dinosaur Water 27

Vietnam, The Power to Heal and From Alice to Ocean. projects. The first is the result of a worldwide
taking the steps necessary to solve this global search for images and stories to capture the
They live with their two children, Phoebe and
Jesse, in Northern California. crisis before it is too late. human face of the global water crisis. For one
month, 40 talented photojournalists crossed
ARMED MEMBERS of the rebel group MEND (Movement for
Emancipation of the Niger Delta) have destroyed oil facilities and forced the
closure of a significant percentage of the area’s oil operations. They have
turned to violence to protest the pollution of their country’s waterways
Blue Planet Run is two books in one: First, it It will cost up to $1 trillion in the next 30 years to clean up contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States. The world’s major cities could save more than 40 percent of their annual water supplies by fixing leaks in water mains and pipes.

the globe taking photographs to show the
is about an extraordinary 15,000-mile relay
and alleged degradation of the natural environment by foreign multinational
corporations. On May 1, 2007 MEND caused Chevron to shut down

extent of the problem. At the same time, a team
some oil production when it reportedly attacked the company’s Oloibiri FOUL SMELLING WATER mixed with coal had been running from Kenny Stroud’s faucet for
floating production, storage and offloading vessel off southern Bayelsa state. more than a decade before clean tap water was finally provided by the city of Rawl, West Virginia, last
Michael Kamber March. For years, residents of the Appalachian coal-mining town had to rely on water trucks and bottled
deliveries, a reality unknown to most citizens in the developed world. Their fight still continues in the
courts against Massey Energy, a mountaintop coal-mining corporation, who they blame for pollution and
illnesses disrupting their community. Melissa Farlow

race — the longest relay race in human history of researchers contacted photographers on every
— in which 20 athletes spent 95 days running continent to identify existing bodies of work
focused on this crucial issue. Simultaneously,
around the globe to spread awareness of the EVEN IN PROSPEROUS CITIES in India like New Delhi and Mumbai, city dwellers often have
water access for only a few hours a day. The public water distribution system is under so much

20 runners representing 13 nationalities embarked
stress that residents must rise at 3 or 4 a.m. to pump water into rooftop storage tanks. Here
Vineela Bhardwaj vents her frustration to water authorities about frequent service failures. Battles
over the water supply have become so common that Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, the Minister of
Water Resources, sometimes describes himself as the “Minister of Water Conflicts.”

world’s water crisis. Secondly, it is a showcase
Stuart Freedman

lawsuits and negotiations over water in the U.S. southeast, new residents of Atlanta may one day
soon turn on the tap to find it empty, southern Georgia farmlands could become permanently
parched, or economic growth in Florida and Alabama could be significantly stunted.
more economical — and perhaps temper the water disputes — as the supply of water continues
to diminish and the price of water inexorably rises.

Other solutions that could minimize the inevitable water wars require viewing water in a
on a 95-day nonstop relay race around the globe,
of powerful, inspiring, disturbing and hopeful
While the global water crisis is growing ever more dangerous, there are nonetheless a few different light — that is, as a shared resource that demands global cooperation to manage
potential winners — namely, those nations or individuals who have a surfeit of the precious
commodity or who develop new ways to produce and distribute it. With a population of only 30
million and vast amounts of territory containing more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water,
Canada stands to become the leader of an OPEC-like cartel as water takes its place next to oil
correctly. To that end, international funding agencies like the World Bank should use their
financial leverage to direct that water development projects be initiated solely under regional
umbrellas, jointly controlled by all of the nations in the area. And water mediation groups, such as
Green Cross International, founded by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, should
serving as messengers to raise awareness of the
images captured by leading photojournalists severity of the water crisis.
as a depleted essential resource. To ship this water from Canada, as well as places like Russia, be backed by a United Nations mandate to fulfill the charter of, as GCI describes it, “preventing
Greenland and the northern reaches of China, barges with massive liquid-holding bladders and and resolving conflicts arising from environmental degradation.” ALLISON COLE says the water in her well in Sheridan, Wyoming, turned into slurry after
gas drilling operations began nearby. The rolling plains of the Powder River Basin have been
streamlined piping systems for bulk water transfers are already on the drawing boards, while new,
None of this will be easy. Ultimately, conflict is less difficult than cooperation. But we really have transformed by the drilling. Forty thousand wells and hundreds of miles of roads, pipelines and
less expensive and more efficient desalination techniques to make saltwater fresh are close to power lines now cover the landscape. To access the methane, companies pump millions of gallons
no choice: The way we respond to the water crisis will determine whether we survive.
of salty groundwater out from deep coal seams. Area residents have said the process pollutes their
completion. All of these inventions and new ones beyond our imagination will become more and
surface water and groundwater. Joel Sartore
– JEFFREY ROTHFEDER

around the world who documented the human
102 Blue Planet Run We're All Downstream 103

The Blue Planet Run is designed to be a wake-up
face of the crisis and its possible solutions. The call to the world, sounding both a warning and a
result of these two parallel projects is the book note of hope, letting us know that there is still
Published by Earth Aware Editions time to solve this problem if we act now, before
17 Paul Drive
you hold in your hands.
it is too late.
San Rafael, CA 94903
800.688.2218 One hundred percent of the royalties from US $45.00
The book also features insightful original essays
ISBN-13: 978-1-60109-017-1
Fax: 415.526.1394 this book will be used to provide clean water ISBN: 1-60109-017-X
www.earthawareeditions.com from an extraordinary range of noted writers,
5 4 5 00
to people around the world who desperately environmentalists, inventors and journalists includ-
Against All Odds ing Diane Ackerman, Fred Pearce, Dean Kamen,
PO Box 1189 need it.
Sausalito, CA 94966-1189
CREATED BY RICK SMOLAN continued on back flap
www.againstallodds.com And Jennifer ERwitt
9 781601 090171
Blue Planet Run
www.blueplanetrun.org 32 Blue Planet Run Drinking Dinosaur Water 33

www.blueplanetrun.org Cover image: Robert Randall

This book was made possible by a generous grant from the Blue Planet Run foundation

Scott Harrison

Earth Aware Editions/Against All Odds Productions
17 Paul Drive
San Rafael, CA 94903
www.earthawareeditions.com
415-526-1370

Created by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt
Against All Odds Productions
P.O. Box 1189
Sausalito, CA 94966

www.againstallodds.com

Copyright © 2007 Against All Odds Productions.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 1-60109-017-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-60109-017-1
FOREWORD BY ROBERT REDFORD
Introduction by Fred Pearce
REPLANTED PAPER
Essays by Diane Ackerman, Paul Hawken
Palace Press International, in association with Global ReLeaf,
will plant two trees for each tree used in the manufacturing Dean Kamen, Michael Malone, Bill McKibben
of this book. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign by
American Forests, the nation’s oldest nonprofit conservation Jeffrey Rothfeder and Michael Specter
organization and a world leader in planting trees for
environmental restoration.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in Korea by Palace Press International
www.palacepress.com
Created by Rick Smolan & Jennifer Erwitt
against all odds productions

 For centuries, Brazil’s Pantanal, the largest freshwater wetland in the world, has been home to 3,500 species of plants,
400 kinds of fish, 650 bird species, 100 kinds of mammals and 80 different types of reptiles. At 68,000 square miles, roughly 10
times the size of the Everglades, the region has served as a natural water treatment plant, removing chemicals and other pollutants
as water passes through its myriad winding channels. But today this delicate and remote environment is being affected by the rapid
S a n R a fa e l , C A l ifo r n i a
growth of industries, including gold mining and the demands of a thriving ranching culture. Scott Warren, Aurora Photos

1.1 billion
The number of people worldwide
— 1 in every 6 — without access
to clean water

 With a population of 18 million growing by almost 400,000 every year, the water needs of
the residents of Mumbai, India, are staggering. Because water is prohibitively expensive, many slum
dwellers rely on leaks found — or created — in the massive pipelines that carry water to more affluent
neighborhoods. Mumbai’s have-nots avoid the garbage and human waste surrounding their dwellings by
walking on top of the pipelines. Around the world, losses of fresh water due to leakage are routinely
reported as high as 70 percent in some major cities. Christopher Brown, Redux

 THe Aral Sea, once a glistening body of water, has lost two-thirds
of its volume because its source rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation
during the Soviet era. Previously the fourth-largest lake in the world – the
size of Southern California – much of it is now a dry graveyard of rusting
shipwrecks. This desertification has produced toxic dust, resulting in
respiratory diseases and cancers in communities downwind of the lake.
Gerd Ludwig

50 percent
The number of people who don’t have
access to the quality of water available
to the citizens of Rome 2,000 years ago

1.8 million
The number of children who die
every year from waterborne
diseases – one every 15 seconds

 These fifth-grade students in Beijing are quickly discovering
that the environment is paying a steep price for their nation’s booming
economy: China’s water and air are becoming increasingly toxic. Seventy
percent of the country’s major rivers no longer support life, and 25 to 33
percent of the population more than 300 million people — do not have
—
access to safe drinking water. Fritz Hoffmann

40 billion
The number of hours spent each
year in Africa due to the need to
collect and haul water

Kenyan villagers on low-lying Pate Island gather
brackish drinking water from small holes in the sand, less
than 300 feet from the ocean. More than 2 billion people
around the world rely on wells for their water. Clean water
has become an increasingly scarce resource as water tables
continue to drop at an alarming rate. George Steinmetz

5.3 billion
The number of people two-thirds
—
of the world’s population who will
—
suffer from water shortages by 2025

 Slum dwellers scramble for water in Jai Hind Camp in the heart of
Delhi, India. The camp is home to more than 4,000 migrant workers who are
dependent on daily deliveries from public and private water trucks. Ironically,
the middle class in India, which receives water via home faucets, pays a tenth
of what the poor pay for their water delivered by truck. India has nearly 17
percent of the world’s population but only about 4 percent of its freshwater
resources. Stuart Freedman

Foreword by Robert Redford 19

Introduction by Fred Pearce 20

Essay by Diane Ackerman

Poisoning the Well 44
Essay by Bill McKibben

Water 2.0 80
Essay by Michael Malone

We’re All Downstream 90
Essay by Michael Specter

Water : The New Oil 134
Essay by Jeffrey Rothfeder

A Billion Slingshots 168
Essay by Dean Kamen

Blue Planet Run 212
Essays by Paul Hawken and Mike Cerre

 Unlike millions of women in Africa who must walk an average
of 4 miles to collect potable water every day, Violet Baloyi of South Africa
is fortunate to get her drinking water directly from a tap. Thanks to the
PlayPump water system, powered by the motion of children at play, Violet
and other residents of Vuma Village have access to free and clean drinking
water. Samantha Reinders

s Boys play in polluted, oil-fouled water
near Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The Niger Delta
has been the scene of significant unrest in recent
years as rebel groups have emerged to protest
oil extraction by multinationals and the Nigerian
government. In the delta’s urban communities, less
than 50 percent of the people have access to safe
drinking water; the number drops to less than 25 Foreword by Robert Redford
percent in rural areas. Michael Kamber

You Are the Solution
There are many myths about water.

One is that we have an infinite supply, if we could just figure out how to liberate it — from
the sea, from aquifers deep in the ground, from ice caps and glaciers. Another myth is that
the cycle of evaporation and rain alone will continually provide us thirsty humans with clean
water to drink.

Yet another is that the rivers, streams and oceans are so vast, so deep, so plentiful that we
tiny human beings can just keep dumping our trash, our waste and our chemicals into these
waterways and nature will simply absorb it all and miraculously transform it back into clean
drinking water.

The final myth is the most disturbing. Many people in the developed world still assume the
global water crisis has nothing to do with them — that it’s a crisis for “those poor people,
over there.” The painful truth is the water crisis is now on every continent and in cities large
and small. The water crisis affects every human being on the planet, but most of us just aren’t
paying attention yet.

The cost of our neglect can be seen in the disturbing images in this book. It is estimated that
1 billion people across the planet now lack access to clean water — and that number is
growing by the day. This doesn’t have to happen. As the extraordinary images on the following
pages show, there are solutions to the world’s freshwater crisis, and they are within reach.

The idea of a billion people without access to clean water may seem too immense to ever be
solved. And yet, we already know the solution for half of those people: Five hundred million of
the world’s poorest people, particularly those living in rural areas, could obtain clean water for
life for a cost of just $30 each by using such simple techniques as wells, boreholes, gravity-fed
springs and rainwater harvesting. No fancy technologies, no big, expensive institutional projects
— just pragmatic applications of low-tech solutions can get us halfway to our goal of clean
water for every person on the planet. And we can do it right now.

It is facts like these that make this book, ostensibly about a world crisis, also a work of
optimism and hope. All that we need is the will to make that hope real; to make the emotional
and financial commitment to get the job done.

Water is life. As we share this Blue Planet, we must promise each other that no person will
ever again have to live — or die — without clean, fresh water. Fulfilling that promise is within
the reach of each of us.

Foreword 19

Introduction by Fred Pearce
Blue Revolution
It begins with a few thin clouds in the clear blue sky over the Indian Ocean. Monsoon rituals are repeated all across Asia, and in modified form in communities around the world.
Almost everywhere, the first rains are a time for celebration and thanksgiving. In Southeast Asia,
The clouds are barely noticeable at first, as the wind picks up water vapor that has evaporated from
fishermen and farmers wait for the first spring flows to revive the Mekong. In China, the Yangtze
the ocean and carries it north toward land. The vapor condenses to form droplets, and the droplets
River brings waters that will feed more than 1 billion people. In the Americas, farmers watch the
coalesce. The clouds grow and darken. Thunder claps, and the first giant raindrops fall on the
skies for the first hint of storms that have formed over the Caribbean. In Africa, there is a special
southern tip of India.
nervousness: If the rains fail, it can mean famine and starvation.
The monsoon, the planet’s greatest annual weather system, has begun its magic. The clouds sweep
Water is our most fundamental natural resource. The stuff we drink today is the same water that the
north across the subcontinent, enveloping the land in curtains of rain and bringing relief to a parched
first fish swam in and that froze across much of the globe during the ice ages. Our planet probably
and overheated land. Life returns.
has no more and no less water than it has ever had.
The drenching is brief but complete. In about 100 hours, spread across 100 days, millions of villages
And yet, in some places, we are beginning to run out of water. Underground reserves that farmers
across India receive virtually their only rain of the year. The rain swells rivers, floods low-lying land,
could once reach by dropping a bucket into a well only a few feet deep are now so low that a hole
fills reservoirs and irrigation canals, turns deserts green and brings crops to life. The water then
bored half a mile down still finds no water. The great rivers we first heard about in geography
percolates down through soils to fill the pores in rocks beneath.
lessons — strong blue lines on our atlas maps stretching all the way from mountains to the oceans

 Even though 70 percent of the planet is covered with water,
Greenland's frozen landscape provides hard evidence that most of the
world's fresh water is locked up in glaciers and ice, leaving less than one
percent available for human consumption. NASA-JSC, Getty Images
20 Blue Planet Run

 The seasonal runoff from glaciers provides drinking water for a sixth of
the world’s population, more than 1 billion people. But with global warming expected
to permanently melt one quarter of the world’s glaciers by 2050, these natural frozen
reservoirs are beginning to disappear. Sean Nolan

— are running dry. In the real world, the blue lines have sometimes given way to desert. The Nile Take cotton, the poster child of water consumption. Cotton grows best in hot lands with virtually
in Egypt, the Ganges in India and Bangladesh, the Indus in Pakistan, the Yellow River in China and year-round sun. Deserts, in other words. But it needs huge volumes of water. In order to grow its
the Colorado in the United States are among the rivers that no longer always make it to the sea. cotton, Pakistan consumes almost a third of the flow of the Indus River — enough to prevent any
Nature’s water cycle is not faltering. But our demands on it are increasing so much that, in some water from reaching the Arabian Sea. Australia does much the same to the Murray River.
places at some times, we are exhausting our water sources.
In many places around the world, we are taking two, three or even four times more water from local
Few of us realize how much water it takes to get through the day. On average, we drink not much rivers than we took a generation ago. And there is a surprising reason for this: It is the flip side of a
more than a gallon of the stuff. Even after washing and flushing the toilet we consume only about great global success story — the green revolution.
40 or 50 gallons each. But that is just the start. It is only when we add in the water needed to grow
I am old enough to remember, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the great fear was that the world
what we eat and drink that the numbers really begin to soar. It takes between 250 and 650 gallons
would not be able to feed itself. Population was expected to double in 30 years. And we asked
of water to grow a pound of rice. That is more water than many households use in a week. For just
ourselves, how on Earth could food production double to keep up? California biologist Paul Ehrlich
a bag of rice.
announced: “The battle to feed the world is over…Billions will die in the 1980s.”
It takes 130 gallons to grow a pound of wheat, and 65 gallons for a pound of potatoes. And when
But it didn’t happen. The world’s population did double. But so did food production. Scientists came
you start feeding grain to livestock for animal products like meat and milk, the numbers become yet
to the rescue. They produced a new generation of high-yielding varieties of crops, like rice and corn
more startling. It takes 3,000 gallons to grow the feed for enough cow to make one quarter-pound
and wheat, that kept the world fed. But it now turns out that those super-crops use much more
hamburger, and between 500 and 1,000 gallons for that cow to fill its udders with a quart of milk.
water than those they replaced. So, while the world grows twice as much food as it did a generation
Agriculture is easily the biggest user of water in the world today. Two-thirds of all the water that we ago, it takes three times more water to do it. We thought we were going to run out of land to grow
take from nature ends up irrigating crops. Whenever you eat burgers made of meat from Central food. Instead, we are running out of water.
America, or clothes made from Pakistani cotton, you are influencing the hydrology of those countries
In India, the rivers are so dry that farmers have sunk more than 20 million tube wells into the Earth
— taking a share of the Indus River, the Mekong or the Costa Rican rains.
in the past decade to find water and irrigate their crops. But these farmers are essentially “mining”
ancient water, and now even these underground reserves are running out.

Economists estimate that by 2025, with current water use patterns and the growing population, Second, there needs to be a revolution in the way we use water. We have to begin treating it like
water scarcity will cut global food production by 350 million tons a year. That is rather more than the the scarce resource that it is. Municipalities need to reduce leaks in water mains — in most of the
current U.S. grain harvest, and the equivalent of a loaf of bread every week for every person on the world’s cities, between a quarter and half of the water put into distribution networks never reaches
planet. For hundreds of millions of people, that disappearing loaf may be the only one they have. And homes because it simply leaks away. Similarly, we need to reduce the vast losses from evaporation
if the current boom of growing crops to make biofuels continues, then the demand for water from at reservoirs. Did you know, for example, that more water evaporates from behind the Aswan High
the world’s farms will be even greater. If, say, the world converted a quarter of its fuels to biofuels, Dam on the Nile in Egypt than is delivered to homes and factories throughout Britain in a year?
that would effectively double our water demand for crops.
Meanwhile, much, much more wastewater should be recycled by humans a few times before we give
No wonder that in dozens of countries — Pakistan, Mexico, India, China and Indonesia among them it back to nature. We can do that in our homes. Changes to domestic plumbing would allow water
— there have been water riots in recent years. And soon, nations may even go to war over water. from the shower to be used to flush the toilet, for instance.
In the Middle East, water is as big a source of conflict between Israel and its neighbors as politics and
But the biggest water savings worldwide must be made by farmers, who are the biggest users of
religion. There are no treaties for the sharing of some of the world’s greatest international rivers,
water, especially in the driest countries. Tens of millions of farmers around the planet still irrigate
upon which tens of millions of people depend for survival.
their crops by flooding their fields. It is an incredibly wasteful process: Most of the water evaporates
It all sounds like bad news. Yet I remain optimistic. Access to water is widely regarded as a human and little, in practice, reaches the plants. But cheap, modern systems of drip irrigation — delivering
right that no one can be denied. We need to come together over water. And to do that, two things water drop by drop close to the crop roots — can cut water demand by 40 or 50 percent, or in
need to happen. First, we need to use the water cycle better — for instance, by catching the rain some soils even 70 or 80 percent. We need a “blue revolution” to breed crops that use water better
where it falls. We need a modern version of the old water tank catching rainfall from the house roof. and to train farmers to use water more sparingly.
And it is starting to happen: In Asia, farmers are reviving ancient methods of capturing the rain as it
falls on their fields, and then pouring it down their wells for storage underground. Whole villages join The simple truth is that we are abusing nature’s water cycle. To protect our rivers and assure water
in, and the effects on their crop yields are often profound. supplies in the future, we must use less water and leave more to nature. The days of seeing the stuff
as a free resource, available in unlimited quantities as a guaranteed human right, are over.

 Clouds move toward Chicago above Lake Michigan, one of the five Great Lakes, which together hold a fifth
of the world’s — and 90 percent of U.S. — surface fresh water. Proposals to divert some of this water to fast growing cities
in the United States have prompted border states and Canada to ban bulk water transfers out of the region. However, due
to international trade agreements, like NAFTA, debate will continue over water’s classification as a commodity.
Jon Lowenstein, Aurora Photos

We call our planet Earth, but its surface is mainly water. We
should call it Ocean. In the hollows of space, Earth abides as a
sparkling oasis, afloat with jumbo islands, and always half
hidden beneath a menagerie of clouds.

In my upstate New York town, seven waterfalls tumble and spume
in lofty dialects of water. Liquid scarves loop through glacier-carved gorges, and winter reminds
us that light, airy bits of water can hurdle fences, collapse buildings and bring a burly city to its
knees. In winter, ice forms a cataract on the eye of Lake Cayuga, but the lake never freezes
solid. It can’t.

Luckily for us. Eccentric right down to our atoms, we’d be impossible without water’s weird
bag of tricks. The litany of we’re-only-here-because begins with this chilling one: We’re only
here because ice floats. Other liquids contract and sink when they freeze, but water alone
expands, in the process growing minute triangular pyramids that clump to form spacious, holey
designs that float free. If ice didn’t rise, the oceans would have frozen solid long ago, along with
all the wells, springs and rivers. Without this presto-chango of water, an element that one
moment slips like silk through the hands and the next collapses rooftops and chisels gorges,
Earth would be barren.

Since life bloomed in the seas, we need perpetual sips of fresh water to thrive. Become
dehydrated, as I once did in Florida, and the brain’s salt flats dry out, mental life dulls, and only
 There is no more or no less water available for human use now than there
electrolytes dripped into a vein keep death at bay. We are walking lagoons who quaff water
was at the dawn of humankind. But some areas of the planet have always had
more than others. In Canada, where karst limestone cliffs line Death Lake in the
Northwest Territories, a twentieth of the world’s population enjoys almost a tenth
of the world’s fresh surface water. Raymond Gehman, Getty Images

 Underground aquifers dozens of miles deep and hundreds of
miles wide, are the Earth’s second-largest reserve of fresh water (after ice
caps and glaciers). These vast underground repositories contain more than
100 times the amount of water held in rivers and lakes. Filled over billions
of years, aquifers are today being drained at two to four times their natural
recharge rate in order to supply a third of the world’s drinking and irrigation
water. Here, a team of recreational spelunkers drops into the 160-foot-deep
and also bathe in it, irrigate with it, paddle through it, simmer with it and are rained on by it, so Neversink Pit in Alabama. George Steinmetz

we rarely notice how magical water is. A natural insulator, it can cool overheated cars, mills or
humans, and it can slowly change the air temperature, giving us the gradualness of seasons.

Water can be solid, liquid, vapor, crystal. It can cascade or seep, be soothing or corrosive, act
as mirror or lens, serve as a traffic lane or a roadblock or a sacrament. And though water
often looks like glass, and in some brittle forms can shatter like glass, and in others flow thick
and slow as glass, it’s not made of silica as glass is. But it does sponsor glass. The sandy skirts
edging some oceans are a form of glass, crafted by water.

We live in bondage to hydrogen, a small, common waif of an atom, and fat, combustible
oxygen. When hydrogen cozies up to oxygen, the magnetic attraction is so fierce it’s hard to
pry them apart. They always assume the same open-armed pose, the three atoms angling at
precisely 104.5 degrees from each other. In portraits water looks animal: two hydrogen atoms
form the ears, one plump oxygen atom the face. This makes it versatile, flexible, dynamic, its
bonds continually breaking and reforging, and every puddle of water reacting as one electronic
whole, a fellowship that may extend to entire oceans.

A flowing thermos, water absorbs, holds and transports heat for long enough to create
hospitable coastlands. The Gulf Stream, a wide river inside the ocean, every hour delivers
millions of miles of warm water to northern shores. Rivers also churn through the air, as water
evaporating from the tropics becomes water vapor that drives the winds. Endlessly levitating,
falling and condensing, no water is new — all of it, every drop, is recycled from somewhere
and somewhen else. The water in the stalk of celery I am eating right now may have fallen as
rain in the Amazon last year, or it may have been slurped up by a dinosaur millions of years
ago. We’ve learned how to catch and carry water, but 97 percent of Earth’s water lies in the
oceans, 2 percent in snow; the rest falls to us for irrigation, drinking and survival.

Covering half of the planet, clouds look collaged onto the sky, Rorschach-like nomads that
collapse and fall as rain. Thousands of tons of water, millions of drops, they look serene but are
unstable, jostling hordes. In one form or another 70 cubic miles of water falls to Earth every
day, but not, alas, precisely where we may wish. Half of the world’s rain showers down on the
Amazon, where it falls thick as rubber. That’s the only place I know where the air can hold 100
percent humidity without raining.

Aerial water can’t compete with the oceans for sheer volume, of course, but snowmelt and
rain replenish lakes and rivers, springs and wells, and abounding life forms, including 6 billion
humans. Drinking, eating, excreting and thinking water, our tissues are marshes and estuaries,

 The water cycle endlessly repeats itself. Every day, enough water
to cover the planet’s surface a tenth of an inch deep falls from the sky. And
roughly the same amount evaporates from the oceans and land. It stays in
the air for about 10 days until it eventually condenses to form clouds before
falling back to the Earth as rain. Daniel Beltrá

our organs islands, our bloodstreams long rivers with creeks and feeders. Sloshing sacs of Our food is mainly water. Water connects us to every other facet of life on Earth, in one
chemicals on the move, we leak from many orifices throughout our lives and still carry the salty large flowing enterprise. Predator and prey share water holes, friends and foes share oases.
ocean in our blood, skin, sweat and tears. Menstrual periods mirror the tides. We need water Without water, cultures founder and civilizations die.
to oil joints, digest food, build the smile-bright enamel on our teeth. We are water’s way of
We may say and think humans walk, but what we really do is flow. When we lie down like
reflecting on the life it promotes.
spirit levels, our waters flatten, but they keep moving, sliding, gliding, renewing. Does life
The soul of water is change. Colorless, transparent, odorless, tasteless, water will dissolve exist elsewhere in the universe? Look for water. Water allows even unrelated substances
almost anything on its travels through the ground and body, carrying sap and serum, minerals to mix, tumble, blend and bark with electricity. Because water dissolves things, it’s easy to
and blood, tiny chem-labs to power thought, and at times abominations. It sponges up the world pollute, and because water is persuadable, it’s easy to rule.
around it, absorbs new personas. And, then, for a while at least, it struts out of the shadows,
Water, water everywhere. Insistent, incessant, in torrents, in teacups, water clings to cool
takes the stage and becomes visible, seasoned, a creature of substance with a real personality.
rocks, wobbles prisms of dew, shapes pudgy fingers and eyes, inks the layout of cities and
For one bushel of wheat, farmers need 20,000 gallons of water. A tree is 75 percent water, the love life of squids, reflects so poignantly we use the image to describe our mental world,
an apple 80 percent water, a fetus 97 percent water, an adult man 70 percent water, an adult tempers the rain-guzzling cottonwoods and willows, pools below ground in the water table
woman 50 percent (more body fat). This means a 150-pound man is about 105 pounds of water. where life dines, swirls on invisible winds across the sky, bubbles saliva at the sight of a ripe
apricot, oozes sweat during a dragon boat race, imbues even the driest dust with a smidge of
Because we’re mostly water ourselves, surrounded by water, we go with the flow, water down
damp, puffs up seed pods, supplies a bucket brigade of bees with coolant for summer hives,
proposals, spend money like water, have liquid assets, dilute drinks, take the plunge, booze until
corrupts the face of cliffs, incises granite, incants as it trickles over pebbles (whose echo lives
we’re pickled, go through baptisms of fire, try not to be bores or scoundrels of the first water.
in the Aramaic word “poet”), excites the nutrients in broth, incubates life in womb-time,
No one wants to be shallow. Past events we banish as water under the bridge.
incurs the wrath of both neighbors and nations (the word “rival” originally meant to share
Gushing out alive after nine months afloat, we nonetheless fear death by water, fear getting in the same stream), incites border wars, indents coastlines, invigorates farmlands, stiffens plant
over our heads, until we’re drowning in work, flooded by emotion and flailing just to keep our stems, conducts traffic between empires, cools forges and whetstones, frets rock until it
head above water while we dissolve into tears. Unless we deep-six whatever was needling us. leaches minerals, echoes with whale songs, crackles with fish talk, one moment shimmers

Water can be docile, too, and so easily influenced that the slightest breeze blowing on it, or like a drape of shot silk and the next lies gray as pewter, twirls petticoats, hoists chemicals,

the tiniest pebble dropping into it, is enough to roll small waves across the surface. And so we is easily indoctrinated or nimbly coaxed into silos, geysers up as life’s wellspring and, upon

picture laughter rippling around a table, or a few words setting off a froth of excitement. reflection, heralds the beginning and end of all thirst.

On our planet at least, living plants and animals need to ferry nutrients and send messages. So, protecting the planet’s fresh water becomes an act of self-preservation. Though we can’t

Both require a benign liquid. Life is opportunistic, it adapts, and it exploits what’s available. In always see downstream from reckless events, we pay dearly for that short-sightedness. Not

one form or another, water greets us every day, from the liquid we splash on our faces to water if, but when. The web of life trembles on such fragile threads. Listen, now, in the distance, a

locked inside the cells of nutritious heads of grain. We water our plants, our homes, our bodies. calamity, can you hear it? Like thunder warnings before a summer storm.

— Diane Ackerman

32 Blue Planet Run Drinking Dinosaur Water 33

On average, no more than a third of the wastewater in developing countries is treated before being discharged into rivers, streams and lakes. 100 years ago, London, New York and Paris were centers of infectious waterborne disease, but today they boast some of the best public water systems in the world.

Shamans perform a soul-cleansing ritual at Peguche Falls in Ecuador during the Inti Raymi fiesta,
an ancient Incan celebration of the sun. The water is believed to give a person power to work and courage
to dance for the fiesta. Ivan Kashinsky, WPN

Hindu pilgrims travel thousands of miles to collect a bottle of water from the headwaters
of the sacred Ganges River, and they proudly display the bottle in their homes for the rest of
their lives. An important part of ritual purification in Hinduism is the bathing of the entire body,
particularly in rivers considered holy. Qilai Shen, Panos Pictures


Over the last three decades, the portion of India’s population with access to clean drinking water has grown from 17 percent to 86 percent.

Water plays a central role in many religions around the world.
In Varanasi, India, 60,000 Hindus bathe in the Ganges River every day. While
the faithful believe that water cleans and purifies the body, the World Wildlife
Fund considers the Ganges to be one of the world’s 10 most endangered
rivers due to the over-extraction and pollution of its waters.
Ami Vitale, Panos Pictures

Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem collect water from a mountain spring to
be used to bake matzoh (unleavened bread) after the Mayim Shelanu ceremony,
which involves letting water settle in a cool place overnight. Water is a source
of increasing conflict in this region because Israel controls water supplies for
both the West Bank and the Jordan River. Menahem Kahama, Getty Images

Frozen Assets
Every day, hundreds of millions of people throughout the world
awaken in the fearful knowledge that, before anything else, they must
find fresh water to survive. And in their single-minded pursuit, these
multitudes often go to incredible — sometimes superhuman — lengths
to find, gather, carry, store and sometimes even sell to their thirsty
neighbors that precious fluid. In ways we can hardly imagine, their lives are
defined by the scarcity of clean, fresh water.

Take Baltasar Ushca, for example. Ushca, 64, is a hielero, an “ice man,”
and every week for a half-century he has climbed to the very top of the
world to collect that ice. Ushca spends four hours climbing to the summit
of Mount Chimborazo, the farthest point from the center of the Earth,
and uses his pickax to harvest as much glacier ice as his donkey can carry.
The precious cargo is wrapped in paja, a plant found high in the Andes,
and loaded onto the burdened animal. The two then trudge back down
to the mountain to the village of Riobamba. There, he puts the ice into a
covered hole to protect it from melting.

On market day, Ushca delivers the ice blocks to anxious local vendors,
who quickly chop the ice up to make hugely popular fruit drinks. Much
of the appeal of the drinks lies in the belief by locals that the pure glacier
water is especially good for their health.

Within hours the ice is gone. Only then is Ushca paid $7 for his efforts.
When the following week rolls around, the ice man and his long-suffering
donkey once again embark on their climb to the top of the mountain.

— Michael Malone

Ivan Kashinsky Drinking Dinosaur Water 39

Baltasar Ushca starts the four-hour trip up the Mount Chimborazo on his quest to bring back ice from ancient glaciers. Ivan Kashinsky At the markets of Riobamba, Ushca lugs the ice, still wrapped in straw to minimize melting, to local drink vendors. Ivan Kashinsky

Ushca uses axes and spades to hack away chunks of glacial ice before he loads his donkey for the return trip. Ivan Kashinsky Locals rave about the freshness of Maria Leonor Allauco’s fruit smoothies, which are blended with Ushca’s glacial ice. Ivan Kashinsky


According to the United Nations, children in the developed world consume 30 to 50 times as much water as they do in the developing world.

In July 2007, remote sensing experts at Boston University reported
the discovery of an enormous underground reservoir of water the size of
Massachusetts beneath Darfur in western Sudan. While this vast Sub-Saharan
region used to be among the most lush and fertile in the world, today it
is one of the driest and most troubled places on Earth. In recent years,
more than 200,000 people have died in Darfur, partly due to disputes over
water and other natural resources. Humanitarian groups working to end
the conflict in Darfur are optimistic that this “mega-lake” could help ease
tensions in the region. Michael Kamber
In Iran, Sayed Shukrallah performs maintenance on a qanat, an ancient
subterranean water distribution system consisting of tunnels that can
transport groundwater to settlements almost 40 miles away. These plaster-
lined tunnels, some as deep as 30 feet, are difficult to dig and require almost
constant maintenance due to silt buildup. The arduous and dangerous work
is traditionally left to boys; their fathers stand near the entry shafts in case a
tunnel collapses and they have to rescue their children. George Steinmetz
42 Blue Planet Run

It’s common knowledge that you can survive for weeks without food. But without water?
A few days, at the most. We are mostly water and our planet is mostly water — indeed it’s
often called the ‘water planet,’ its blue seas and white cloudy mists forming the dominant
features we see from space.

Yet in many ways water is scarce. Ninety seven percent of the planet’s water is undrinkable
sea water, most of the rest is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, or falls in places far from
people. Even so, we’d have enough places, if we hadn’t figured out a
staggering list of ways to pollute and squander our birthright.

The most obvious examples loom large in our collective memory.
Forty years ago America awoke one morning to discover that the
Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was on fire. When a river catches on
fire, that gets our attention. One would think that billions of dead fish
bobbing to the surface of ponds and lakes and rivers all over the world would be a clear sign
that something was seriously wrong, but in most places those warnings are still being ignored.

These are examples of our collective failure to see what is right before our eyes. But the
subterranean, slow-moving and subtle water disasters — many of them occurring literally
beneath our feet — should frighten us even more.

Consider, for instance, the ways the United States has managed to overpump the invisible
deep aquifers under its fields and cities. This might have been a warning to other nations,
but greed and short-term gains have a curious ability to blind us to the bigger picture.
Unfortunately, all of the major grain-producing countries adopted deep water pumping in the
years right after World War II. The United States implemented this technology quicker, and
thus encountered its problems first — but not by much, and by then, the rest of the world
was already deeply committed.

The result is that China, India and the United States, as well as scores of other countries,
are all starting to pump their reservoirs dry at the same time, which is right now. Over the
last decade the water table beneath the North China Plains and the Indian Punjab has been
dropping by meters each year — in some places, tens of meters. These deep aquifers took
millions of years to fill, and we are draining them in less than a century. This is not a resource
that can be replenished overnight; it may take decades, if it’s even possible at this late date.
And that’s only if we have the resolve to do it.

Wastewater gushes out of a pipe at the state-owned Lianhua factory
in China. Lianhua, which means “Lotus Flower,” is the largest producer of MSG
in China and the largest polluter in the Huai River Basin. Worldwide, it is estimated
that half of all major rivers are seriously polluted or depleted. Stephen Voss

One result of this unconscionable and blind draining of humanity’s lifeblood is that a once-invisible disaster is Take Bangladesh, home to 150 million people and one of the wettest places on earth. It’s the delta of the great
now suddenly surfacing. Just travel the countryside north of Beijing. You’ll meet scores of people who are in sacred rivers of Asia — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra both reach the ocean here, finishing their descent from
despair because the same wells that their families had used for generations have suddenly run dry. China’s crisis the high Himalayas in slow and stately fashion. One might think that water would be the least of the country’s
is so severe that the country is re-routing entire rivers in the south through thousands of miles of aqueduct in a problems — indeed, Bangladesh has so much water that travel in many seasons is easier by ferry than by bus.
desperate attempt to serve the needs of the north.
But because Bangalesh’s water sits on the surface, it is vulnerable to many kinds of pollution — some from
But that diversion, in turn, is creating its own crisis. To deal with the water shortage, large regions of China are industry, some from the spread of human waste. From the latter, for example, waterborne cholera has become
now switching from growing wheat, a notoriously thirsty grain, to corn, which uses less water but also produces an endemic problem.
lower yields. The impact of that shift is, in turn, depressingly predictable: With smaller harvests, China has been
The United Nations thought it had a solution to the polluted surface water: Go underground. Mile-deep wells
forced for the first time to import grain from the West. In effect, China, for the very first time in its long history,
were dug across much of the nation, and people were urged to stop drinking surface water. Unfortunately,
is importing “virtual water” in the form of goods.
the U.N. forgot to check the underlying geology or to even test the underground water. Only when entire
The world has become too small in the 21st century for any nation to export its problems. And if you think these communities of Bengalis fell sick did scientists determine that the new deep wells were bringing massive
problems are simply those of the developing world, then visit Las Vegas. Or Phoenix. Or… quantities of arsenic to the surface, slowly poisoning the population.

This is just the beginning. When it comes to water, disasters cluster. Already, there are places on Earth where Bangladesh is the canary in the coal mine for an impending water crisis that may well engulf us all: climate
water-based crises are mounting so fast that it is hard to know where to begin to solve them. The solution to change. Mankind, without much forethought, has been conducting the largest and most extensive hydrological
one problem exacerbates another. experiment in history — and, like the sinking cities and drying wells of the world, the disastrous results are only
now beginning to reveal themselves.

Visitors are cautioned to stay away from the Las Vegas Wash, an artificial wetland that helps recycle
wastewater from the fastest-growing city in the United States. Approximately 65 million gallons of treated water, including
water from casinos, are returned to Lake Mead every day by the city’s Water Pollution Control Facility. Tiffany Brown

Consider the Ganges and Brahmaputra, both now fed by ever-faster melting glaciers. The
two rivers in turn pour into the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean, an ocean that has now
begun to rise. That higher sea in turn acts as a kind of fluid dam, forcing the rivers to spread
out in a devastating flood. By mid-century, according to some estimates, much of Bangladesh
will be underwater.

Raising the planet’s temperature, in fact, will disrupt almost everything aquatic on earth.
The salient scientific fact is that warm air holds more water vapor than cold. Thus in arid
areas, one can expect more evaporation: Computer models show that virgin flows along the
Colorado River, for example, may drop by half as the century proceeds. That’s bad news for
a West that already strains that river to slake its thirst.

But if humanity seems to always ignore problems until they reach crisis proportions, so too
does it have the capacity, once mobilized, to bring vast amounts of energy and ingenuity to
solve those problems. And so it is good news that we’ve at least begun early experiments in
water-saving agriculture, such as new, less-thirsty varieties of plants, drip irrigation and water
recycling. In the United States, 35 years of the Clean Water Act have meant that we can swim
in and drink from far more of our lakes and rivers in the first years of the 21st century than
the last years of the 20th.

But will our solutions be efficient and sweeping enough to deal with what is now a rapidly
expanding world-wide water crisis? Can our experiments spread fast enough to keep up with
the pace of expanding consumer life, a life that, by its very nature, uses more and more water?

Perhaps the only real hope is a change in mind-set toward valuing clean, fresh water at its true
worth. Some of that new valuation will be, for lack of a better word, spiritual — learning to
once again see water not as a commodity, in infinite supply, but as something precious, to be
preserved and not taken for granted.

The most spiritual human moments involve water, whether it is baptism in the Christian
church or the ritual bathing by Hindus in the Mother Ganges. Pious Muslims wash before
prayer; pious Jews before marriage. Water has always cleaned us — cleaned us literally,
cleaned us of our sins, cleaned our minds and hearts. Now we must learn how to return the
favor, to wash water itself free of the thousand stains we’ve inflicted on it in our heedless
rush toward prosperity.

— Bill McKibben
The United Nations estimates that half the hospital beds in
the world are occupied by people with easily preventable water-related
diseases. Here a young boy with malaria lies in a hospital bed in Sierra Leone.
Worldwide, nearly 5,000 children die every day from water-related illnesses.
Brent Stirton, Getty Images

50 Blue Planet Run Poisoning the Well 51

Home to more than 10 million people, metropolitan Manila is one of the most
densely populated cities in the world. The world’s population has increased by 150
percent in the last 50 years, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to more than 6 billion in 2000.
The good news: national birthrates actually decrease as countries, like the Philippines,
become more affluent. Mads Nissen

Multiplication Problem
Overpopulation is the root of most, if not all, of the challenges facing mankind today,
including global warming, food shortages, air pollution, loss of plant and animal habitat, ocean
contamination and of course, water shortage.

The statistics are all too clear. During the 2 million years that human beings have been on the
planet, we amounted to less than a quarter of a million individuals. Worldwide population
didn’t hit the 1 billion mark until the early 1800s. But human growth has been exponential:
We reached 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1975, 5 billion in 1987 and 6 billion
in 1999. Today population experts believe there are now 6.5 billion of us, with another hungry
and thirsty 80 million mouths being added this year.

We no longer simply inhabit the planet, we overwhelm the planet. And there’s no end in
sight. According to the World Wildlife Foundation, “Our collective exploitation of the world’s
resources has already reached a level that could only be sustained on a planet 25 percent larger
than our own.”

Ironically, the biggest problem is that we’ve become too good at prolonging our own
lives. Major advances in science, technology, hygiene and medicine have doubled our life
expectancies and dramatically lowered our mortality rates. Today, around the globe, six babies
are born per second and three people die per second.

At the same time that more of us are living longer, we are also reproducing more. More people
living longer lives means exponential population growth, since each person has the ability to
produce numerous offspring, and each offspring can birth many more.

The United Nations projects that by the year 2050 there will be somewhere between 8 billion
and 10 billion humans — an increase of roughly 50 percent over today’s world population.

Resources like fresh water are already at a straining point in many countries around the world.
What do we do when there are 50 percent more of us vying for the same dwindling resource?


Cape Town, South Africa, has grown rapidly since the end
of apartheid in 1994, and it embodies a demographic sea change: Soon
a majority of the world’s population will live in cities for the first time in
history. Worldwide, population has tripled in the last century while water
use has grown sixfold. George Steinmetz

Anna Hazare demonstrates the power of the indi-
vidual. A former army truck driver, he was a self-described
brawler before he decided to change his life, and his village,
Ralegan Siddhi. As a result of Hazare’s efforts, his village
has become a model of rural economic development in
India. He advocated the building of dams and canals, which
enabled villagers to grow new crops. Trees were planted
and slopes terraced to help retain rainwater. After 20 years
of such efforts, the village now has water all year round.
Hazare, strongly influenced by the teachings of Gandhi, says,
“It is impossible to change the village without transforming
the individual. Similarly, it is impossible to transform the
country without changing its villages.” Atul Loke

Residue from antidepressants, birth control pills and antibiotics are found in 80 percent of U.S. waterways and groundwater, according to the EPA. The United Nations has recognized 1,400 wetland areas around the world that are being protected from development, a collective area the size of southern Europe.

Water supplied by the public utility in the Brittany region of France has become
unsuitable for human consumption due to contamination from pesticides and intensive
livestock farming. Today nitrates, toxins, heavy metals and harmful microorganisms are
found in groundwater in nearly every European country and the former Soviet republics.
Johann Rousselot, Oeil Public

Green algae is growing almost everywhere off the Florida Keys, even on an underwater
statue known as “Christ of the Abyss.” Divers often scrub the statue with wire brushes but have
a hard time keeping it clear of the algae. Sewage and water runoff that contains fertilizers feed the
growth of algae and bacteria, which in turn consume huge amounts of oxygen, choking plant and
animal life, including 220 miles of Florida coral. And every day, about 1 billion gallons of sewage is
pumped into the sea or into aquifers that leak into the ocean. Stephen Frink Collection, Alamy


Beneath the frozen ice of the Ural River in Russia, affected by
waste from Lenin Steelworks, fish have become too contaminated for local
fishermen to eat. Instead, they send their catch to distant markets. The Ural
River is not an isolated case either. Many water sources have become so
polluted and overfished that 1 in every 5 of the world’s freshwater species have
become extinct, threatened or endangered in recent decades. Gerd Ludwig

One quart of untreated wastewater pollutes 8 quarts of fresh water. U.S. cities began chlorinating water 100 years ago, saving thousands from diseases such as cholera, typhoid, dysentery and hepatitis.

In Varanasi, India, untreated sewage flows directly into the Many residents of Queens, New York, say they won’t drink from
Ganges River, the source of drinking, bathing and irrigation water for 500 the tap anymore after officials in May 2007 found higher-than-normal levels of
million people. Despite the government’s best efforts, including $130 million tetrachloroethylene, or PERC, which is often used by dry cleaners and in auto
for the river’s cleanup, millions of gallons of raw sewage are dumped into repair shops. Chronic exposure to elevated levels can lead to dizziness, confusion
the Ganges every day. Worldwide, 2 million tons of human, industrial and and nausea, and the Environmental Protection Agency says it is a probable
agricultural waste are discharged into rivers and lakes every day. carcinogen. Fire hydrants are flushed to draw new water into the system, diluting
Amit Bhargava, Corbis any chemicals that might linger. Uli Seit, The New York Times, Redux


Half of the world’s 500 major rivers are seriously depleted or polluted by industrial, agriculture and human waste. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, infamous for catching fire in 1969, has been subsequently removed from the EPA’s National Priority List due to collaborative cleanup efforts.

Industrial pollution, garbage and human waste have fouled the Congo
River, yet those who live near its shores have no choice but to use it for their most basic
needs — hydration, sanitation and transportation. In the poorest parts of Kinshasa,
residents wind their way through mounds of garbage to obtain enough water to bathe
and cook. Per-Anders Pettersson, Getty Images

Money contributed by the leading industrial nations of the world has helped preserve
the natural lifestyles of Indians living on their ancestral homelands in the Amazon. Concerned
about the destruction of the rainforest, G8 countries set up a program that allowed 160 tribes in
the region to mark and preserve their own territories. Non-indigenous people are required to
have special permits to be in the area. Here, a Waipi family takes advantage of the fresh running
water of the Amazon. Gerd Ludwig


Ecuadorian special forces stand in riot gear as hundreds march on the Superior
Court of Justice in the Amazonian town of Lago Agrio, Ecuador, on Oct. 21, 2003. It was the
first day of court proceedings in a lawsuit filed by indigenous people seeking environmental
cleanup costs from Chevron. Lou Dematteis, Redux

The People vs. Chevron
THE DAY THAT crude oil began to flow from Texaco’s wells in the
area around Lago Agrio in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1972, was the
day that hundreds of square miles of surrounding rainforest began its
transformation into a toxic waste dump.

Today, Chevron (which acquired Texaco in 2001) is in a multi-year legal
battle with “Los Afectados,” 30,000 Amazonian settlers and indigenous
people who contend that Chevron should be held responsible for
the pollution and toxic compounds spread over 1,700 square miles of
rainforest that have contaminated the Amazon watershed.

Chevron presents itself as the victim and is spending millions of dollars a
year on a high-priced team of lawyers, claiming that it is being extorted
for problems it didn’t create. Interestingly, “Los Afectados” aren’t
asking for money for themselves; they are asking for Chevron to accept
responsibility for its actions and to invest the money needed to fix the
mess so future generations are spared the health problems that currently
plague the region. Even if the local inhabitants win, the cleanup could take
decades and cost upward of $6 billion — meaning this might represent a
landmark as the largest environmental lawsuit in history.

In the May 7, 2007, issue of Vanity Fair, writer William Langewiesche
commented on Chevron’s response to the lawsuit: “Chevron denies
that it contaminated the forest, denies that there is a link between the
drinking water and high rates of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, and
skin disease and denies that it bears responsibility for any environmental
damage that might after all be found to exist. If Chevron can convince the
court of the validity of even a few of those points, it will win the case and
leave town. Worldwide the oil industry is watching.”


Unlined waste pits filled with crude oil are a sad legacy of Texaco’s 28 years of drilling in Ecuador. It could cost as much as $6 billion to
ignore the waste oil left behind, but who will pay for it and how the oil will be cleaned up are still at issue. Lou Dematteis, Redux

Texaco sprayed crude oil on dirt Angel Toala Marin’s home is near an oil well in Shushufindi, Ecuador, where waste has been dumped into local water supplies. When
roads to keep dust down while it operated in the Angel contracted stomach cancer, doctors who diagnosed him blamed the contaminated drinking water. “I don’t think the oil company worried if
Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 through 1992. they contaminated the water,” Angel’s wife, Luz Maria Marin, said the day after her husband died. “We knew the water was bad for our health, but
The practice still continues today in the town of what could we do? There wasn’t water anywhere else.” Lou Dematteis, Redux
Shushufindi. Lou Dematteis, Redux


Secoya indigenous leader Humberto Piaguaje (in red) speaks at a demonstration after emerging from Chevron’s annual shareholder A technician wearing a hazardous materials suit checks for life-threatening carcinogens in soil samples gathered in 2004 in the Ecuadorian
meeting in San Ramon, California, on April 25, 2007. He announces, “Our struggle is not for money. We want you to repair the damage so our forest near the town of Sacha. Lou Dematteis, Redux
children do not have to continue suffering.” Lou Dematteis, Redux

The case against Chevron has been going on for four years, and it may take many more to decide. Soldiers stand guard at one of the Chevron Vice President Ricardo Reis Veiga holds a news conference after the first day of hearings in Ecuador in 2004. The company
company’s wells in 2004 as evidence is gathered for the case. Lou Dematteis, Redux denies that it contaminated the region and that the forest is polluted. It also dismisses the link between the water in the region and the high rates
of cancer, leukemia, birth defects and skin disease. Lou Dematteis, Redux


Indigenous group members use their bodies to spell out the
message “Long live Yasuni” on July 5, 2007. The demonstration was part of
a larger public awareness effort to protect Yasuni National Park, home to
some of the most biodiverse habitat in the world. To avoid repeating the
environmental disaster in the northern Amazon, Ecuadorian President Rafael
Correa has reached out to the international community for compensation to
protect the rainforest. Lou Dematteis, Redux

Pablo Fajardo is the lead Ecuadorian lawyer repre-
senting indigenous people in their landmark environmental
case against ChevronTexaco. In many ways he personifies
the David vs. Goliath quality of the case. Fajardo, who was
born into extreme poverty, earned his college diploma at
night and then completed his law degree in correspondence
school. With only a year of law practice, he took over the
case against the oil giant, squaring off against some of the
most prominent U.S. corporate attorneys. But Fajardo says
he is not intimidated. He attributes his confidence to the
years he spent working in the oil fields of the rainforest,
where he learned about the problems of pollution firsthand.
Lou Dematteis, Redux

The world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, but it uses three times as much water to grow it. Drip irrigation reduces water use by 30 to 70 percent compared with traditional flood irrigation or sprinklers.

Foreign workers harvest tomatoes on the edge of Saudi Arabia’s
Rub’ al Khali desert, also known as the Empty Quarter. Agriculture
accounts for 70 percent of all fresh water used every year, far more
than industry or domestic uses, and by 2050 farms will have to feed an
additional 2.7 billion people. George Steinmetz

Center pivot irrigation systems feed alfalfa crops near Wadi Dawasir, Saudi Arabia.
Farming is viable in this desert climate only four months a year, but fields need year-round water to
stop salt from building up in the soil. Even outside the Middle East, salination is a growing problem
in large-scale irrigated farming. Overhead sprinklers use less water than flood irrigation, but waste
far more than ground-level drip tubing. George Steinmetz

Third-generation farmer Matthew Procter uses a GPS-wired tractor to plot, seed
and lay out drip irrigation for 500 acres near Rocky Ford, Colorado. Water is scarce here, so low-
and high-tech solutions come in handy for growers: Concrete-lined irrigation ditches eliminate
seepage, and laser-leveled fields prevent runoff. With a computer, Procter can even set the water
flow for his crops on any given day. Sergio Ballivian


Four quarts of oil discarded during an average oil change can contaminate up to 1 million gallons of water. Outside Shanghai, the village of Dongjin is known as “Cancer Village”
for its polluted waters and resultant illnesses. Farmers say the Julong Chemical
Co. plant’s wastewater poisoned the water supply, contaminated the region’s
crops and contributed to dozens of cancer-related deaths. Residents are now
trying to shut down the plant and restore the river to health. Mads Nissen

The children standing next to these outhouses in the Niger River Delta
symbolize a paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty. Despite the fact that multinational
oil companies have pumped more than $400 billion of wealth out of the world’s third-
largest wetland, local residents have little to show for it. Pollution has affected the air
quality, soil fertility, waterways and wildlife, and it has even resulted in acid rain. As a
result, fishing and agriculture are no longer productive enough to sustain the area.
Ed Kashi, Aurora Photos

74 Blue Planet Run

Americans now consume more than 28 gallons of bottled water per person per year. Only about 23 percent of the bottles are recycled. New water bottles engineered with cornstarch biodegrade in 80 days, compared with traditional plastics, which may take several hundred years.

Mountains of “e-waste” have been shipped to China, where A worker at a recycling center in Shanghai sifts through the plastic
families who used to work on farms have taken to scavenging among the bottles that arrive in China by the boatload. Bottled water is now a $100
piles of keyboards, motherboards and discarded computer components in billion a year industry, second only to soft drinks in the beverage sector.
Chaoyang County in southern Guangdong Province, among other places. In the United States, the leading consumer followed by Mexico and China,
The e-waste contains hundreds of extremely toxic substances, including fewer than 25 percent of the bottles are recycled, contributing 2 million tons
lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury and other heavy metals that leach into per year to landfills. Reuters
the groundwater. Alessandro Digaetano


More than 1 billion people live in slums around the world, often without access to water, due to utilities refusing connections without a formal property title. Over the last 30 years, 5,244 patents for water purification have been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

There are 37 shantytowns in the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most of
which do not have reliable water services. The city has 2 million inhabitants, a tenfold
population increase in the past 30 years. People and animals bathe together in water
that is provided by the city but is not fit to drink. Shaul Schwarz, Getty Images

Dean Kamen is a man full of ideas and enthusiasm. Probably best known for his Segway
scooter, he recently turned his attention to the world’s water crisis. He has developed a small
refrigerator-sized machine called the Slingshot, which can transform the most polluted water into
clean water in just a few seconds. A team of engineers and scientists is working around the clock
at his DEKA laboratories to reduce production costs so the device can be made more widely
available. A veteran inventor, Kamen already holds more than 440 patents. And as the founder
of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), Kamen hopes to instill his
excitement for the prospects and promises of technology in the next generation of innovators.
Jason Grow


When a crisis seems too big to solve, the real problem may be that we are applying the Clearly, the strategies have failed. But if national governments and giant international institutions,
wrong solution. regional bureaucrats and community leaders can’t find the answer, who can?

For the last 50 years, governments, foundations and other major institutions have tried to tackle The answer may lie at the nexus of two new powerful technologies: the Internet and online
the global clean water crisis through big, and often hugely expensive, regional water projects. communities. It just may be possible to harness the creativity and the real-life experiences of
Billions of dollars were spent, dams built, wells dug, rivers diverted. the millions of people affected by the water crisis — and then tie them with potential funders,
together using the extraordinary collaborative power of the Web.
The result? The crisis has only gotten worse. The big
water projects, while generally successful, also required In other words, an online community could share best practices, monitor itself and be capable of
enormous funding; Even among more modest projects, it scaling up to deal with a vast number of unique local water challenges, all at the same time. Such a
is estimated that less than 50 percent of all ventures over the last half-century actually succeeded scenario would be impossible for even the biggest traditional institution, but it is precisely the kind
in achieving their goals. There were successes, but not enough to keep up with the deteriorating of challenge solvable by the Web.
global situation.
The Peer Water Exchange, or PWX, a project of the Blue Planet Run Foundation, is the brainchild
None of this was the result of bad intentions; on the contrary, almost all of these projects, big and of a former high-tech executive, Rajesh Shah. PWX breaks with the traditional — and failed —
small, were based upon goodwill. Yet cumulatively they still failed to solve — indeed, even make a models for dealing with the world water crisis. Instead, it recognizes that the only real answer
dent in — the problem. for the needs of hundreds of millions of people in rural communities will come from thousands
of small projects, implemented and managed by locals and customized for the unique problems of
And so, we fall ever further behind. Today, an estimated 1.1 billion people around the world
each community. PWX believes that it is these local projects that will ultimately find real, practical
lack clean and safe water. And the crisis, once largely restricted to the rural poor in developing
and sustainable solutions.
countries, has now spread around the planet. At the beginning of the 21st century, most of
the world’s citizens facing shortages of fresh water were poor. But now millions can be found The challenge becomes: How do you stay on top of all of these grassroots efforts? There are
everywhere from tiny farms and villages to giant metropolises. They live on every continent except likely to be more than one million new water project proposals over the next two decades, tens
Antarctica. And right now, their prospects of ever enjoying safe drinking water are slim. of thousands of them worthy of funding. But how do you manage all of these projects efficiently?

 Change is the word of the day in the village of Ralegan
Siddhi in the Ahmednagar District of India. With funding from the Blue
Planet Run Foundation, the local community has transformed itself
into a model of self-sufficiency by repairing ponds to harvest rainwater,
planting trees and terracing hillsides to reduce soil erosion. Most
recently, the community has installed solar panels and windmills.
Atul Loke

80 Blue Planet Run

 Vietnamese children like Tran Quoc Xu, 11,
used to spend a significant portion of their day fetching
water. Today a water system funded by the Blue Planet Run
Once funded, how do you track their progress? And, finally, how do you disseminate tested
Foundation via PWX, in Dong Lam hamlet means villagers
no longer have to travel great distances for water nor pay principals from those that prove successful?
high prices to have it delivered. They previously paid $3.20
to have 250 gallons of water delivered by a truck vendor. Shah readily admits that this kind of undertaking is beyond the ability of any individual organization
Now residents spend just 12 cents for the same amount. or agency. “My knowledge of water issues is intellectual,” Shah admits. “I’ve never dug a well or
Doan Bao Chao
organized a community. So, just because I can fund projects, does that mean they should take my
advice, too? No — they are far better off talking to each other.”

The answer, Shah believes, is to use the Internet to turn the traditional process upside-down —
beginning with how projects are selected and funded, how they are managed and staffed and how
their results are reported.

This is where Shah’s technology and consulting experience has served him well. He understands
that many of the most successful new enterprises in the 21st century are social networks. That is,
from MySpace to Wikipedia, to giant online games such as Second Life, the most powerful new
business model is one in which traditional top-down, “command and control,” business models
are replaced with a radically new one in which the participants themselves build, manage and
police the enterprise. As the hundreds of millions of users on these sites have quickly come to
appreciate, this new participatory model results in a richer and more customized experience with
greater flexibility and responsiveness.

These efficiencies are precisely the results Rajesh Shah is looking for with PWX, as it knits the
implementers in the field into a collaborative community so unique that the Blue Planet Run
Foundation has applied for a patent. What this means in practice is that PWX invites reputable
nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, to join the community. Periodically, PWX places funds
into the program and requests that participating NGOs submit their applications for funding. That
in turn sparks PWX’s most important innovation: peer review.

Participants are asked to review each other’s proposals. Each proposal is seen by as many as seven
participants — a process that not only results in large numbers of proposals being scrutinized
quickly, but also ensures that innovative new practices are shared amongst the reviewers
themselves. Funding is then awarded based upon these peer reviews. And the process begins again.
As the reviewers will be judged by the success of these projects, they are motivated to stay in
contact, offer advice and share best practices.

All of this creates a transparent experience for everyone involved, Shah believes, a break from
the old style of closed meetings held within giant foundations. “The participants are learning
from each other; in fact, by having to review each other’s projects, they are forced to.” Expertise
and experience can now be administered quickly where it is needed most. “We end up with a
distributed volunteer staff that is far more expert than any we might hire,” says Shah.

Water 2.0 83

Chilukwa Primary School provides 400 boys and girls in Malawi,
Africa, with a sound education, but until recently the school had no running
water or bathrooms. In addition, waterborne illnesses caused many students to
miss classes several times a month. To address the problem, a local organization
used PWX to apply for funding to build a community tap, latrines and bathing
facilities. Beth Gage

The result is a mutually supportive and collaborative community that
encourages, in fact requires, sharing and learning. It also enlists those
people closest to the problem — the hard-working practitioners in
the field — thus recruiting expert hands at extremely low cost and
overhead to address the problem. But most important, by enlisting
members into the decision-making process, PWX should be able
to scale up to almost any size and deal with almost any number of
programs on a global basis — all without having to increase its own
staffing or overhead. PWX can grow as big as the crisis it is taking on.

Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and one of the world’s
leading experts on the global water crisis, says of PWX: “I’ve seen
nothing else like it, and think it offers serious potential for improving
transparency, information availability to the user, and the ability to
understand what really works in the real world.”

The Blue Planet Run Foundation has a goal of bringing clean and
safe water to 200 million people by 2025. To achieve that, PWX is
committed to acting as both platform and process to fund more than
200,000 peer-managed water projects around the world efficiently,
transparently and effectively.

The global water crisis will be one of the biggest challenges facing
humanity in this century. But thanks to innovative ideas like PWX,
which mix new technologies and organizational models in an explosive
combination with the untapped genius of thousands of people, the goal
of clean water for everyone no longer seems impossible.

We may not have the right answers yet for the world water crisis, but
we may now at last be closer to implementing the right solution.

To experience the Peer Water Exchange, go online to www.peerwater.
org. There you can read the proposals as well as the review comments
…and perhaps be inspired to participate.
— Michael Malone

84 Blue Planet Run Water 2.0 85

On average, 30 percent of all charitable donations is consumed by administrative overhead. 100 percent of the donations to the Blue Planet Run Foundation goes directly to fund Peer Water Exchange-sponsored programs.

Over the past 30 years the famed “Barefoot College” organization, started
by Skoll Foundation Award winner Bunker Roy, has worked with the poorest of the
poor — women, dropouts and unemployable youths — in remote villages in 13 Indian
states. It has provided them with training through a self-help model that respects
local knowledge and capability and promotes local organizations to make community
decisions. The college’s heralded programs have been expanded thanks to funds
received through PWX. The Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia

Alfred nysunda has spent the last three years helping to alleviate critical water shortages
at the Kisii hospital in Kisumu, Kenya. Rotary International has received funding through the Peer
Water Exchange and has broken ground on a system that will provide more than 80,000 gallons
of water per day — well above the hospital’s current daily need for 35,000 gallons. The hospital
serves a population of 585,000, many of whom suffer from AIDS and malaria. Stephen Digges

IN LAS ROCHAS and other rural communities in northern Nicaragua, El Porvenir works
closely with residents to install hundreds of wells and thousands of latrines, thanks to financial
support from the Blue Planet Run Foundation. In an effort to increase sustainability, the group limits
its projects to requests initiated by rural villages. At the same, it encourages residents to elect local
committees to oversee the long-term maintenance of the water systems. Tim Wagner
Water 2.0 87

A salmon counter at the Bonneville Dam in Oregon counts fish
as they swim upstream in the Columbia river. There are 45,000 large dams
around the world that generate almost 25 percent of the world’s power.
But dams are far from a perfect alternative to burning fossil fuels for energy
production. They have a dramatic impact on the environment and have
displaced millions of people from their homes. Joel Sartore

When used properly, nothing drives growth and eliminates The result is both predictable and staggering. Half the hospital beds on Earth are occupied by people with easily
poverty more effectively than water. preventable waterborne diseases. In just the past decade, more children have died from diarrhea than all the people
who have been killed in armed conflicts since World War II. If we did nothing other than provide access to clean
Clean water has done more for the health of humanity than any medicine or scientific achievement. In developed
water, without any other medical intervention, we could save 2 million lives each year.
countries, diseases that were responsible for the great majority of deaths in human history — cholera, typhoid and
malaria, for example — have been washed away by clean water. Often, all it took was a working sewer system. The tragedy is not just one of illness, it’s also the devastating loss of human productivity. Across vast stretches of the
developing world, there is a daily routine that has hardly changed throughout the course of human history. Every day,
Good water has not only prevented illness, it has also produced the healthy crops that improve our nutrition.
for millions of women, the first duty is to forage for water. And as rivers run dry, sometimes along with the aquifers
Irrigation for agriculture accounts for more than two-thirds of all water use. Sophisticated systems and giant water
beneath them, the women have to keep going farther to find that water.
projects have helped produce an ever-increasing yield of food to satisfy the surging population of the Earth. Nearly
a quarter of all electricity is powered by hydroelectric turbines. Our products and services, the building blocks of In parts of India and Africa, these women walk an average of 3.7 miles simply to collect potable water and bring it back
our cities and towns, our ability to forge steel and build spaceships, water plays a role in everything we do. to their families — a long march home with 44 pounds of water balanced precariously on their heads (more than most
airlines allow for luggage). Heavy as the burden may be, though, it is almost never enough. Back in the slums and huts
Sadly, in most countries water is not used effectively or governed well or intelligently controlled. Nearly half the
that half the planet’s population considers home, each person will need 1.3 gallons just to make it through the day,
people on Earth fail to receive the level of water services available 2,000 years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome.
roughly the amount of water used in a single flush of a standard American toilet.

Oil spills from legal oil extraction as well as smuggling operations
have destroyed much of the natural environment and fishing grounds in the
Niger Delta. Although international oil companies have extracted billions
of dollars in oil from the impoverished region, little of the oil wealth is
distributed to residents by the Nigerian government, routinely rated one of
the most corrupt in the world by Transparency International. As a result,
most inhabitants live without clean drinking water or electricity.
Michael Kamber

Chronic pollution, promiscuous use, overcrowding and human waste have turned water into one of our most When there are bountiful reservoirs and little threat of drought, nations thrive. But in the all too many places where
profoundly endangered assets. Two thousand years ago, there were 300 million people on the planet. Within the next water policy amounts to little more than a distant dream and praying for rain, prosperity remains an empty promise.
50 years, demographers expect the number to grow to at least 8 billion — the great majority of whom will live in We don’t think or even worry very much about water in the United States because here we have a per capita average
developing countries — yet the amount of water we all share and depend upon remains a constant. of 6,000 cubic meters of reservoir water capacity, the world’s largest. Middle-income countries such as Morocco have
about 500 cubic meters, and the poorest countries — Ethiopia, for example — have less than 50. Without adequate
Without enough water, no country can achieve even modest economic goals. Irrigation helps communities overcome
storage, entire nations become hostage to the frequently violent whims of nature.
poverty. When water is plentiful more children go to school, they are healthier, and their parents work more.
Yet, throughout the Middle East and south Asia and much of Africa, water is growing scarcer by the month. Since The number of illnesses caused by lack of water is hard to fathom. More than 3 million people — most of them
reservoirs aren’t sufficient, and many rivers have turned into junkyards or fetid swamps, millions have turned to digging under age 5 — die each year of malaria and diarrhea alone. To put that another way, according to the World Health
wells to suck the groundwater from their land. But dig too deep and you’ll eventually hit arsenic, a deadly poison that Organization, nearly 10,000 people die every day from easily preventable water-related diseases. Simply providing
pollutes all the water above it. In Delhi there are fewer than 30 days of rain each year, so people simply force tubes access to clean water, without any other medical intervention, could save 2 million of those lives each year. And
into deeper and deeper holes and take what they can get away with. But when that water is gone, it is gone forever. the solution is devastatingly simple: Studies show that access to piped water and sewers can, in many places, nearly
The city and its 15 million residents already suffer; when the water disappears from the wells it will get infinitely worse. eliminate waterborne disease at a cost of less than $1,000 per death averted.

Delhi isn’t alone: Many other great urban centers are suffering the same fate. The water table under Beijing has fallen A thousand dollars. What is a life worth? It’s not a small sum, but we live in an era when it is possible to participate in
by 200 feet in just the past two decades. Mexico City was built on the edge of a lake that no longer exists. video conferences that link New York with China, or Tokyo with Tibet. There are people who earn millions of dollars

The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake and one of its biggest environmental
dilemmas. Early in the 20th century, water from the Colorado River was mistakenly
diverted into the Salton Sink, a prehistoric lake bed. Seeing an opportunity, developers
dreamed of creating a resort oasis, but the idea never took hold, and the lake
properties have since fallen into neglect. Now, the lake water is saltier than the ocean,
and only tilapia can live in it. Still, migratory birds have made the area a rest stop on the
Pacific Flyway, and more than 400 species visit the area. Gerd Ludwig

of interest income every day. What would it take to convince the rich world to spend enough so that African children years ago,” he said. “It’s a shocker. People don’t believe it, but it’s true. We have changed the nature of our economy,
no longer die of illnesses that some of us don’t even realize still exist? and we have become more efficient at doing what we want to do.”

In 2000, the United Nations established a series of urgent targets, called the Millennium Development Goals, aimed It turns out that the biggest potential new source of water, not just in Delhi or Dar es Salaam but in Tokyo and San
at eliminating the world’s most desperate poverty. One of the goals seeks, over the next decade, to cut by half the Francisco as well, is us. By conserving water and pricing it more realistically, we can dramatically reduce our needs.
proportion of people without access to clean drinking water. Another sets a similar target for improving sanitation Agriculture will always require more water than any other human endeavor, but that doesn’t mean it has to be wasted.
services. The United Nations, which has designated this the “Decade of Water for Life,” estimates that if both goals Until the 1960s, none of the vineyards in California used drip irrigation, which applies minimal amounts of water
are met, “only” 30 million to 70 million people would die in the next 15 years from preventable water-related diseases. directly to the roots of crops. Today, 70 percent of them do, using less water to produce the same yield.
Yes, you read that right: “only” 30 million to 70 million.
Some farmers have begun to level their fields with lasers, making irrigation even more precise. And although genetically
Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, argues that modified crops remain controversial, researchers have produced several strains of rice that require only a fraction of
management failures and political myopia are at least as responsible for water problems as shortages and population the water most farmers use today.
growth. “Providing enough water to grow food for the planet is and will continue to be a challenge,” he said. “So
“I would argue that almost everything we do on Earth we could do with less water,” Gleick told me. “This is really
is limiting the damage pollution has caused. Still, how can any government that cares for its people let them die
good news, you know. Because it means we can do better. We don’t need to run out of water. We just need to think
of something so simple as a lack of clean water? But they do, in numbers that are staggering. This problem is so
more seriously about how we can avoid using it.”
fundamental and so widespread, yet it’s not like curing AIDS or eradicating malaria. It is not scientifically challenging. It’s
just a matter of whether or not we care about the most vulnerable people on our planet.” Try to think about that the next time you water the lawn with federally funded filtered water, which is safe enough to
drink. Or brush your teeth. Or when we leave the shower running for a few minutes to answer the phone. Every drop
While Gleick can cite dreary statistics, evidence of governmental inaction, and worrisome trends with great rhetorical
of water we casually waste is literally a drop of life taken from the mouth of someone else we will likely never meet,
force, his central message, which is often ignored by both planners and environmentalists, is surprisingly hopeful. “It is
but whose fate we will most certainly determine.
a little-known fact that the United States today uses far less water per person, and less water in total, than we did 25
— Michael Specter

High levels of bacteria, fluoride and cancer-causing
hydroxybenzene have polluted the water in the village of Liu Kuai Zhuang,
China, where Ji Shaolian, with her daughter, weeps over the death of her
husband. He died of lung cancer at age 58. Villagers say that even after
government crackdowns and factory closings, smaller operations continue to
pollute secretly as local officials turn a blind eye. Natalie Behring, WPN

Developing countries with access to improved water and sanitation enjoy average annual growth rates more than 30 times countries without such access.

Two Chinese soldiers check bottled water in Harbin after the
city’s 3.8 million residents lost access to drinking water for five days due
to a chemical plant explosion in 2005. The initial announcement of water
stoppages led to panic buying of water and food, sending prices soaring.
Authorities said there was no sign that the city’s water supply had been
contaminated, but the Beijing News showed pictures of dead fish washed
up on the banks of the Songhua River near the city of Jilin.
Chen Nan, epa, Corbis

Lago de Chapala , in the Mexican state of Jalisco, has shrunk to
a quarter of its original size and has DDT levels 3,400 times higher than
regulations allow. Sewage and fertilizer runoff have fed huge algae blooms,
and at certain times of the year it becomes difficult for indigenous people to
navigate the lake in their small fishing boats. Anders Hansson, WPN
We're All Downstream 101

It will cost up to $1 trillion in the next 30 years to clean up contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States. The world’s major cities could save more than 40 percent of their annual water supplies by fixing leaks in water mains and pipes.

Foul smelling water mixed with coal had been running from Kenny Stroud’s faucet for
more than a decade before clean tap water was finally provided by the city of Rawl, West Virginia, last
March. For years, residents of the Appalachian coal-mining town had to rely on water trucks and bottled
deliveries, a reality unknown to most citizens in the developed world. Their fight still continues in the
courts against Massey Energy, a mountaintop coal-mining corporation, who they blame for pollution and
illnesses disrupting their community. Melissa Farlow

Even in prosperous cities in India like New Delhi and Mumbai, city dwellers often have
water access for only a few hours a day. The public water distribution system is under so much
stress that residents must rise at 3 or 4 a.m. to pump water into rooftop storage tanks. Here
Vineela Bhardwaj vents her frustration to water authorities about frequent service failures. Battles
over the water supply have become so common that Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, the Minister of
Water Resources, sometimes describes himself as the “Minister of Water Conflicts.”
Stuart Freedman

Allison Cole says the water in her well in Sheridan, Wyoming, turned into slurry after
gas drilling operations began nearby. The rolling plains of the Powder River Basin have been
transformed by the drilling. Forty thousand wells and hundreds of miles of roads, pipelines and
power lines now cover the landscape. To access the methane, companies pump millions of gallons
of salty groundwater out from deep coal seams. Area residents have said the process pollutes their
surface water and groundwater. Joel Sartore


Since 2000, floods, droughts and other water disasters have killed nearly half a million people and affected 1.5 billion people. Despite population growth in the United States, total water use today is lower than it was in 1980, and per capita use has dropped 25 percent in the last 30 years.

When severe monsoons hit Bangladesh in 2004, only water pumped from wells was safe
in the district of Munshiganj, about an hour from the capital of Dhaka. The worst flooding in 15 years
killed 700 people and left 10 million homeless. And an estimated 76,000 became ill with symptoms of
diarrhea from drinking contaminated surface water. Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures

Beverly Landrey’s well in Gillette, Wyoming, went dry after decades of regular use, so
she has to depend on bottled water from her neighbors. Landrey and other homeowners believe
the water supply disappeared because of nearby coal bed methane operations.
Kevin Moloney, Aurora Photos


Freshwater wetlands, though threatened by human activity, are vital habitat to more plant and animal species than any other terrestrial ecosystem except rainforests.

The dry season in Kenya puts animals on the move in search of
water. Elephants arrive from the arid surrounding plains to the green grasses
at Lake Amboseli in Amboseli National Reserve, Kenya. An elephant will
never stray far from a water supply because it needs to drink about 40 gallons
a day. Over the course of a year, an elephant can drink more than 15,000
gallons of water. African elephants can detect water flowing underground and
when desperate will dig down to find water in a riverbed that has run dry.
George Steinmetz

Nilawati Shelake balances precariously as she retrieves water from
one of the 200 wells dug in the village of Sindhi Kalegoan, near Aurangabad,
India. She, like many women in the developing world, is the primary water
gatherer in her family. On any given day, she may make five to seven trips to
her well to meet the needs of her farm and family of five. Atul Loke

In the developing world, when a water source is farther than half a mile away, per capita daily consumption drops from 5 gallons to approximately 1 gallon. The Blue Planet Run Foundation has found that it can provide one person with safe drinking water for a lifetime for just $30.

India is digging more wells in a desperate search for fresh water.
There were just 2 million wells in India 30 years ago; today there are 23
million. But as more water is taken from aquifers beneath villages like Dudu,
Rajasthan, the country is running through its groundwater supplies faster than
they can be replenished. Ruth Fremson, The New York Times, Redux

The daily ritual of collecting water has worn a pattern into the Bandiagara escarpment of
the legendary cliffside village of the Dogon Valley in Mali. Less than half of Mali’s 12 million people
and only a third of its rural inhabitants have access to safe water.
Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures


At any given time, approximately half of all people in the developing world are suffering from a waterborne disease. Simply washing hands with soap and water can help reduce the 2 million deaths attributed to diarrhea every year by more than 40 percent.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the West Bengal area of
India have been affected by high levels of arsenic in the groundwater. Hafiza
Begam warns the villagers of Chandalati, outside Calcutta, about using the
tainted water for drinking and cooking. As India has had to sink its wells
ever deeper in the search for water, the danger of arsenic contamination has
increased. Thousands of people are suffering skin lesions caused by arsenic-
contaminated water. Sucheta Das, Reuters, Corbis

When Bangladeshis were advised by UNICEF in the 1970s to dig wells rather than use
dirty surface water, the results were unintentionally catastrophic. Millions of people were exposed
to toxic levels of arsenic, and 40,000 developed internal and external cancers, pulmonary diseases,
neurological disorders and arsenicosis, a painful combination of skin lesions. UNICEF has since
tested half of the country’s wells for arsenic. Michael Rubenstein, WPN

Abul Hassam grew up in Bangladesh learning firsthand about the need for inexpensive
water filters that remove arsenic. Now, as a member of the faculty at George Mason University
in Washington, D.C., he has designed a filter that uses recycled materials, including sand, charcoal,
bits of brick and shards of porous iron. For his innovation, he was awarded a $1 million Grainger
Challange Award, 70 percent of which he has pledged to spend on making the filters more widely
available in Bangladesh. More than 30,000 filters have been distributed so far, and about 200
filtration systems are being made each week. Shahidul Alam

Liu Tianheng looks at his X-ray at the Shenqiu County Hospital. Liu has
stomach cancer and brought his X-ray along with his medical records to meet with
the head of the cancer unit at the hospital, Dr. Wang Yong Zeng. Stephen Voss

Population in Peril
The cancer ward of Shenqiu County Hospital is busy on this
weekday morning. Bicycles and motorbikes are scattered around the
dusty brick courtyard, and a doctor’s jacket hangs from a tree to dry.
People stand in a line outside a small one-story concrete building,
patiently waiting their turn for a few minutes with Dr. Wang Yong
Zeng, the chief oncologist. Most carry a life’s worth of medical records
with them, clutching the thick folders full of X-rays and documents
tightly to their chest.

Shenqiu County, in the eastern part of Henan Province, has seen
occurrences of stomach, liver, esophageal and intestinal cancer rise
dramatically in the past 15 years. Houses sit empty where whole
families have died, villagers are bedridden with sicknesses they are too
poor to have diagnosed, and many continue to drink the polluted water
because there is no other option. The majority of the 150 million
people who live along the Huai River Basin are farmers and depend on
the river water to irrigate their crops. Unfortunately, the Huai is one
of the most polluted stretches of water in the country.

“Many people come here after it’s too late,” says Dr. Yong Zeng as
he holds an X-ray up to the window light to examine it. Poor farmers
suffer for months and even years before they go to the hospital,
knowing that if they are diagnosed with cancer, they won’t be able to
afford any treatment. In many villages, entire families go into debt for
medical bills they will never be able to pay.

China’s handling of the environment has been nothing if not consistent
over the past 2,000 years. It is difficult to find a time in China’s history
when anything but environmental devastation occurred in the name of


economic and social progress. As far back as 202 B.C., the Han Dynasty dealt
with the growing population by urging its people to cut down forests to make
way for more farmland.

More recently, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward sought to combat the
Industrial Revolution of the West by forcing people throughout the country
to build steel smelters. From 1958 to 1959, an estimated 10 percent of
China’s forests were cut down to fuel these backyard furnaces. Over China’s
long history, the lack of environmental regulation has led to the growing
desertification of China’s grasslands, massive flooding that has devastated
its farmlands, famine that has killed tens of millions of people and industrial
pollution that has poisoned the river.

“People don’t live here anymore,” explains Wang Zi Qing, pointing to a
rundown house in Dong Cun Lou Village in the Henan Province. Like most
houses in the village, the floor is made of dirt, and steel bars in the windows
do little to block the cold wind. A faded red bed frame sits in a corner of the Xue Huaqi is prepared for radiation treatment at Shenqiu County Hospital. Xue, 64, has lung cancer that has spread to his brain. His
main room, and dusty ceramic dishes are neatly stacked in a row on a woven records indicate the areas that will be targeted in the treatment. Stephen Voss

mat by the door. This house, however, is empty, left behind by an entire family
that died of cancer.

Zi Qing lifts his shirt to reveal a thick red scar on his stomach from a recent
surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. His older brother and his younger
brother died of cancer within a month of each other. He has been a fisherman
for most of his 60 years, but he is no longer able to make a living or even feed
himself from the river.

Dong Cun Lou Village is similar to many of the villages in rural Shenqiu
County. Muddy dirt roads run through it, and chickens and stray dogs roam
freely. None of the one-story brick houses have running water, and only the
Party official in town can afford electricity. Its population of 1,500 used to
rely on the Shaying River, a major tributary of the Huai that runs by the town.
They fished, washed their clothes and even drank directly from the river.
The fish are mostly dead now, and contact with the water can bring on itchy
rashes and peeling skin.

Debris lies at the base of a pipe that releases black water from the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company, which manufactures MSG,
among other products. It was only after villagers blamed their stomach and intestinal ailments on the dumping that Lianhua provided them
with clean tap water. However, the factory continues to pollute the water that runs through the village. Stephen Voss


Huo Daishan grew up near the Huai River and worked as a newspaper
photographer before he began hearing stories about the river pollution and
cancer cases. After seeing two of his friends die from cancer, he decided to
devote his life to cleaning up the river.

Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company is surrounded in every direction by
farmland. Daishan climbs the metal staircase to the top of the factory’s
massive wastewater treatment tanks during a recent and unexpected tour
of the factory, and they roar to life. The still, black water begins to swirl and
foam, turning a silty brown, while an acrid odor like rotting meat fills the air.

According to company executives, the treatment plant cost $430,000 to
build, and it appears to sit unused except when tours are given to outspoken
environmental activists. During a long lunch at the company hotel, executives
toasted to each other’s health with numerous glasses of sake. They talked at
length about the workings of the factory and the pollution, seemingly oblivious
to the illness and death occurring downstream. This openness was clearly
precipitated by their knowledge that as a state-owned business, as well as the
top taxpayer and top employer in the area, they are untouchable.

A mile away from the factory, steaming black water pours steadily into the
river from a large metal pipe. Young children play near the banks of the river,
and a noxious odor hangs in the air. While there are few stories of cancer in
this village, there is a history of birth defects, infertility and skin ailments that
began in the early 1990s. According to Daishan, this secret dumping site is one
of many that Lianhua has, ensuring that it will be a long time before it has to
answer any hard questions about what it does with its wastewater.

And at the cancer ward, a man is carefully helped into a metal trailer lined
with a canvas vegetable sack and attached to a motorbike. He has just finished
his radiation therapy for the day, and his family presses close to him, draping
blankets over his legs to make him comfortable for the long ride home. As he
is slowly driven away he looks up at no one in particular, saying, “Too many
diseases, too many diseases.”

— Stephen Voss

Jia Jiale has lotion applied to her face by her grandmother to
treat rashes that have recently appeared. She has lived in other villages
and never had any health problems, but soon after she moved with her
family to Sunying in Shenqiu County, she began developing itchy rashes
all over her body. Stephen Voss


A fisherman examines his net for fish after casting it into the polluted
waters of a river in Shenqiu County. After an hour’s work, he had caught only
10 small bait fish that had blisters on their bodies. Stephen Voss

Huo Daishan carries a slight smile on his face, al-
most beatific at times. The smile is the same whether he’s
meeting with factory owners who dump their wastewater
into the river or singing an old folk song about the Huai.
Daishan was a former newspaper photographer before he
converted his small apartment into the headquarters for the
Guardians of the Huai River, a nonprofit group he formed
to clean up the river and bring attention to the situation. He
has become a tireless advocate for environmental reform.
“It is the mess that gives me the energy,” says Daishan.
Stephen Voss

1,374 square miles of land turns to desert every year, an environmental crisis that affects 200 million people and threatens the lives of many more. Irrigation systems synchronized with satellite weather data can save nearly 24 billion gallons a year in the United States.

The Hadramaut Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in Yemen, is a neighbor to one of the hottest and driest places
on Earth, the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter. Temperatures rise to 131° F in the valley, which has an area the size of the Netherlands, Belgium and
France combined. As a result, it remains under persistent threat of desertification. To meet irrigation demands and hold off the desert, water is being
pulled out of the ground faster than it can be replenished, by a rate of almost 400 percent. George Steinmetz

Mohammed Ali Zein uses trucked-in water to nourish a lone Balanites Aegyptiaca tree in
Yemen, making a stand against the advance of the desert. Global warming, overgrazing and poor
irrigation threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, as increasingly large regions of the
world become incapable of producing food. Desertification doesn’t just mean that there is more
sand; it means that the land has become incapable of supporting life. Gerd Ludwig

Drought is a farmer’s nightmare. In New South Wales, Australia, where drought
has persisted for the last five years, sacrifice has become a way of life. Water restrictions limit
consumption to 40 gallons per person per day, less than a quarter of normal usage levels.
Sheep are sold by the herds at deflated prices by farmers who are unable to support them and
desperately need money to pay off crushing debt. But most troubling is the staggering number of
farmers turning to suicide — one every four days, according to the BBC. Paul Blackmore


Everything about the Three Gorges Dam is
huge: Engineering feats, financial costs, social consequences and
environmental impacts all loom large. When completed in 2009, it
will be the largest hydroelectric dam ever built, nearly five times the
size of the Hoover Dam, with an electrical capacity of up to 22.5
gigawatts. It will displace more than 1 million people from their home
and will cost China about $25 billion. Edward Burtynsky

Indian dam protesters and local homeowners stand prepared to drown themselves as waters rise
from monsoon rains, flooding homes on the banks of the Narmada River in 1997. The government plans to
build 30 large dams and thousands of smaller ones to provide water and electricity for the booming nation. But
the Save the Narmada Movement, which has campaigned against the dams for 20 years, says the government
is choosing to ignore the interests of thousands of poor people whose homes will be flooded in the state of
Madhya Pradesh without proper compensation. Karen Robinson, Panos Pictures

An Issue on the Rise
Woody Guthrie once sang an anthem to the Grand Coulee
dam, calling it “the greatest wonder in Uncle Sam’s fair land.” Half a
century ago, great dams like the Grand Coulee and the Hoover Dam
in the United States and the Aswan Dam on the Nile were symbols
of a brave new world, bringing electricity to the rural poor and
economic development to the world. Environmentalists praised them
as a clean source of renewable power. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first
prime minister, called his country’s dams “the new temples of India,
where I worship.”

During the 20th century, 45,000 large dams were built in 140
countries. Today, virtually none of the world’s major rivers is
without a dam. Many have been successes: Dams generate a fifth of
the world’s electricity and irrigate a quarter of the world’s crops.
Despite their contributions to humanity, many dams became mired
in corruption, engineering failures, cost overruns and social conflicts
even before they were finished. And, in operation, most have huge
and unintended environmental consequences.

Dams have flooded tens of millions of people from their land —
2 million from China’s Three Gorges Dam alone. They have inundated
fertile river valleys, destroyed fisheries, dried up wetlands and caused
the very floods and droughts that they were supposed to prevent.
Many reservoirs are now gradually clogging with silt brought down
from the hills.


Although dams were built to capture and harness water, it turns out
they also lose it — especially to evaporation. More water evaporates
from the surface of Lake Nasser behind Egypt’s Aswan Dam than
the people of Britain use in an entire year. A tenth of the flow of the
Colorado River evaporates from the reservoir of Lake Powell. Other
dams swarm with malarial mosquitoes, and in some locations rotting
vegetation in reservoirs can emit as much greenhouse gas as a coal-
fired power station.

Today the relative value of dams is subject to widespread debate
around the world. Controversies range from environmental
destruction to water scarcity, the effect on indigenous people, loss of
biodiversity and inequality of water access between the poor and the
rich. How the dam debate is resolved will affect the lives of millions of
people in every corner of the globe.

— fred pearce

Chinese boat trackers pull a vessel upstream along a tributary
of the Yangtze River, just as their ancestors have done for thousands of
years. Starting in 2010, China plans to divert water from the Yangtze and
other central rivers to Beijing and the arid northern plain. Opponents fear
that the project, which includes three 700-mile channels, could dry up the
river in 30 years. They say the $60 billion proposed cost doesn’t take into
account the environmental toll or the 500,000 people who will need to find
new homes. Reuters


The primary purpose of Iceland’s Karahnjukar Hydroelectric Yu Xiaogang founded the environmental group Green
Project, meant to harness two of the nation’s great glacial rivers, is not Watershed in 2002 as he worked to rebuild the area around Lashi
water supply, but power supply. It is Iceland’s largest-ever construction Lake in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. A dam had destroyed
project, and it will provide electricity to a new Alcoa aluminum the local ecosystem, putting both fishermen and farmers out of
smelter. The site has been a frequent target of environmentalists, as business. Today, Lashi Lake is a model of sustainable development,
the area under construction is also is the second-largest unspoiled with a community fishery, women’s schools and micro-credit loan
wilderness in Europe. David Maisel programs. Yu, who won a Goldman Environmental Prize, is fighting
plans to build a dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge on the Yangtze River. It is
one of more than a dozen dams he is helping locals oppose throughout
China. Tom Dusenbery


Engineers are dwarfed by the turbines in one of the generators. When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is completed in Upon completion, the Three Gorges Dam will span one mile wide and will flood a reservoir 230 miles back upstream, roughly the distance
2009, the project will generate 22.5 gigawatts, making it the world’s most powerful hydroelectric station. That’s enough electricity to meet the needs between New York and Washington, D.C. It will displace more than 1 million people, submerging their homes and businesses beneath 262 cubic
of Shanghai’s 20 million people. Reuters miles of reservoir water. Worldwide, dams have displaced an estimated 40 million to 80 million people. Fritz Hoffmann

Syria, Iraq and Turkey almost went to war over control of the Euphrates River during the construction of the Keban Dam in southeastern The dam at Grimsel Pass, high in the Swiss Alps, is a popular site for ecotourism. Switzerland is able to make great use of dams because of
Turkey. It was the first of 22 dams proposed to expand agricultural production and double hydroelectic power capacity. The World Bank refused to its mountainous geography and its ample supply of water. Overall, the developed world can store as many as 175,000 cubic feet of water per person,
fund the $32 billion project because of its potential impact on other countries dependent on the river. Roberto Caccuri, contrasto but in some nations that figure can sink as low as 7,000 cubic feet, as it does in India. Chlaus Lotscher, Peter Arnold, Inc.


Arundhati Roy, center, walks with Medha Patkar during a protest
against the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in India. Roy, author
of the Booker Prize-winning novel “The God of Small Things,” is a leading
anti-globalization activist. She has lent her support to India’s anti-dam
movement, even donating her entire prize purse to Patkar’s organizations.
“I suddenly realized,” Roy said, “I command the space to raise a dissenting
voice, and if I don’t do it, it’s as political an act as doing it. …To stay quiet is as
political an act as speaking out.” Joerg Boethling, Peter Arnold, Inc.

Medha Patkar is the founder of the Save Nar-
mada Movement, and she is one of the most prominent
civil-rights activists in modern India. In March 2006, she
began what ultimately became a 20-day hunger strike
against the construction of dams on the Narmada River,
a fight that resulted in an emergency hospital stay and a
case with the Supreme Court. News about her hunger
strike became so popular that the government could not
ignore it. A commission was established to hear claims
from people displaced by the rising dam waters. The
team found that the families were being urged to accept
cash settlements, but no long-term arrangements were
being made for their well-being. The Supreme Court
eventually decided that construction could continue, but
careful monitoring was needed to prevent further injus-
tices. Joerg Boethling/Peter Arnold, Inc.


In region after region around the globe, water — or put another way, control over
rapidly diminishing supplies of clean water — is at the heart of many of the world’s most
raw geopolitical disputes, some of which have already rippled into dangerously destabilizing
conflicts.

Not surprisingly, among the hottest flashpoints is the Middle East, where water is at a
premium and disagreements are in abundance. Virtually every political, social and military
strategy undertaken by Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and other nations in the area is
driven by its impact on access to water. Consider the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during
the Six-Day War in 1967. Formerly southwest Syria, this rugged plateau is home to headwaters
of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, two of Israel’s most essential sources of water.
Despite Syria’s saber rattling and widespread international condemnation for its occupation
of this territory, Israel refuses to retreat from the Golan Heights because it fears that Syria
would divert the water supply, as had been threatened in the early 1960s.
Similarly, the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli war was fought primarily in southern
Lebanon, where tributaries of the Jordan River lie. Hezbollah
has vowed to control the water resources for Lebanon, even if
Israel has to do with less.

Meanwhile, in a mirror image of these disputes, the Palestinian rejection of peace accords in
the late 1990s grew in large part out of concern that these pacts ensured that Israel could
determine how much water Palestinian areas receive. The Palestinians claim that Israel has
capped their per capita water consumption at about 18 gallons of water per day, compared to
about 92 gallons for the typical Israeli.

It’s no wonder that soon after signing peace treaties with Israel, the late King Hussein of Jordan
and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt pointedly noted that only a quarrel over water could bring
them back to war with Israel.

In large or small ways, similar brinksmanship occurs with disturbing regularity in regions already
tense with enmity that has evolved over generations:

 In Southern Africa, the waters of the Okavango River basin are pulled in four directions
by Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, with hardly a cordial word spoken;

 In the Indian-controlled territories of Kashmir, where headwaters of the Indus River
basin reside, Pakistan has threatened to use nuclear weapons against India if any of its
water supply is interrupted;
 An armed guide walks on a cliff above the Nile River near Amarna, Egypt. The Nile flows
through 10 countries in eastern Africa, but by force of a nearly 80-year-old treaty, Egypt commands
most of its waters, a source of dispute and strained relations for decades. Upstream countries, such as
Ethiopia and Sudan, have proposed dams on the river to aid their own development. But these plans
have been condemned by Egypt as it anticipates its population doubling over the next 50 years.
Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic, Getty Images
134 Blue Planet Run

 In Sri Lanka, violent conflicts have broken out between government armies and a rebel
group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who closed a provincial sluice gate in protest
over government delays in improving the nation’s water system;

 In Kenya, dozens were killed and thousands fled their homes when youths from the
Maasai and Kikuyu tribal communities fought with machetes, spears, bows and arrows
and clubs over water in the Rift Valley.

The behavior is irrational, yet the motivation has an undeniable logic. Decades of poorly
designed irrigation techniques, the construction of massive dams, toxic dumping, wetlands and
forest destruction, industrial pollution, residential sprawl, lack of conservation and misuse have
taken a dire toll on global water resources, and clean fresh water is becoming scarcer in every
corner of the planet. The worst conditions are in places like Haiti, Gambia, Cambodia and
Mali, where residents subsist on an average of less than 2 gallons of water per day — fewer
than three large bottles of bottled water and well below the 13 gallons per day considered
the amount of water needed to meet a minimum quality of life. With less and less water to go
around, the idea that people would begin to fight over what’s left — and over who determines
who gets what remains — is anything but outlandish.

And while richer countries like the United States have been hiding water shortages with
engineering sleights of hand, this strategy is now backfiring. Southeast Florida, southern
California, Atlanta and parts of Texas are all likely to be dry within 20 years if their growth
patterns and management of water aren’t sharply altered.

In the United States, the water wars are more often waged in court. For example, after
30 years and no end to the amount of money being spent on attorney fees, three states in
the southeast are still feuding over the Chattahoochee River. Rising north of Atlanta, the
Chattahoochee is the sole water supply for the sprawling city’s metropolitan area as well as a
source of downstream water for two neighbor states, Alabama and Florida. Providing water
for Atlanta’s uncontrolled population boom — the city has grown from 2.2 million people in
1980 to 3.7 million people in 2000 — severely taxes the Chattahoochee. The city’s largest
treatment plant tapped 3.8 billion gallons a year of the river’s water when it opened in 1991;
now it pumps nearly 20 billion gallons annually. If, as expected, Atlanta’s population reaches 5
million by 2025, the Chattahoochee won’t be able to handle the load.

But that isn’t slowing Atlanta down. Instead, the city is aggressively making plans to squeeze
more water out of the Chattahoochee by building a dozen additional dams and reservoirs on Kibbutz Hatzerim gained a territorial foothold in Israel’s Negev Desert
and kicked off a global revolution in agriculture when it partnered with water
the river. This, in turn, has raised the ire of Alabama and Florida, which claim that Georgia is
engineer Simcha Blass in 1965 to develop and mass-produce drip irrigation.
stealing the river for itself. Farmers in southern Georgia are siding with Alabama and Florida Netafim, the kibbutz’s irrigation business, now controls a large portion of the
drip market, with $400 million in sales last year. Manager Naty Barak checks
against Atlanta, as their irrigation allotment falls. Depending on the outcome of the many
the kibbutz drip lines, which feed corn, cotton and tomato crops in an area that
receives less than 8 inches of rain annually. Alexandra Boulat

Armed members of the rebel group MEND (Movement for
Emancipation of the Niger Delta) have destroyed oil facilities and forced the
closure of a significant percentage of the area’s oil operations. They have
turned to violence to protest the pollution of their country’s waterways
and alleged degradation of the natural environment by foreign multinational
corporations. On May 1, 2007 MEND caused Chevron to shut down
some oil production when it reportedly attacked the company’s Oloibiri
floating production, storage and offloading vessel off southern Bayelsa state.
Michael Kamber

lawsuits and negotiations over water in the U.S. southeast, new residents of Atlanta may one day more economical — and perhaps temper the water disputes — as the supply of water continues
soon turn on the tap to find it empty, southern Georgia farmlands could become permanently to diminish and the price of water inexorably rises.
parched, or economic growth in Florida and Alabama could be significantly stunted.
Other solutions that could minimize the inevitable water wars require viewing water in a
While the global water crisis is growing ever more dangerous, there are nonetheless a few different light — that is, as a shared resource that demands global cooperation to manage
potential winners — namely, those nations or individuals who have a surfeit of the precious correctly. To that end, international funding agencies like the World Bank should use their
commodity or who develop new ways to produce and distribute it. With a population of only 30 financial leverage to direct that water development projects be initiated solely under regional
million and vast amounts of territory containing more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, umbrellas, jointly controlled by all of the nations in the area. And water mediation groups, such as
Canada stands to become the leader of an OPEC-like cartel as water takes its place next to oil Green Cross International, founded by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, should
as a depleted essential resource. To ship this water from Canada, as well as places like Russia, be backed by a United Nations mandate to fulfill the charter of, as GCI describes it, “preventing
Greenland and the northern reaches of China, barges with massive liquid-holding bladders and and resolving conflicts arising from environmental degradation.”
streamlined piping systems for bulk water transfers are already on the drawing boards, while new,
None of this will be easy. Ultimately, conflict is less difficult than cooperation. But we really have
less expensive and more efficient desalination techniques to make saltwater fresh are close to
no choice: The way we respond to the water crisis will determine whether we survive.
completion. All of these inventions and new ones beyond our imagination will become more and
– Jeffrey Rothfeder

140 Blue Planet Run Water: The New Oil 141

There is less potable water per capita in the Gaza Strip than almost
anywhere else on Earth. Gaza inhabitants must make do with less than 22 gallons
per day, while the average American or Canadian uses almost four times as much.
Palestinian parents send their children to gather bottles of drinking water from the
nearest source: mini-desalination plants, such as this one in Khan Yunis. The small
stations treat Gaza’s groundwater, which has grown increasingly polluted due to
overpumping and contamination by sewage and pesticides. Alexandra Boulat

Holy Water
In the resource-scarce Middle East, water is a constant source
of economic and political tension. In Israel and Palestinian territories
the struggle over water involves not only economic and distribution
issues but central political, legal and territorial claims as well. Water,
essential to all parties, has emerged as a powerful bargaining chip and
a politicized commodity.

Since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank in
1967, land adjoining the Lower Jordan River has been declared a “closed
military zone.”

Water needs of both Israelis and of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the
occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are
rising, and current extraction levels are unsustainable.

Access to clean and consistent sources of water is imperative to meet
the present needs and future demands of both parties. Palestinians claim
the Israeli policy of restricted water allocation has exacerbated health
and nutrition problems and has adversely affected agricultural output and
domestic, commercial and industrial development.

The continuation of current extraction rates poses hydrological and
ecological challenges for Israel and Palestinian territories. Current water
use in Israel and in Israeli settlements inside the West Bank, coupled with
the increasing Palestinian population, exceeds the replenishment rate.

As a shared resource, water could actually provide the impetus for
cooperation toward renewed peace negotiations. Because Israeli and
Palestinian water needs are so interdependent, joint water management
and cooperation have great potential to serve as a stepping-stone to
bring both societies together.

— Maher Bitar , The Foundation for Middle East Peace


The security fence around the West Bank has isolated
many Palestinian villages from the wells they rely on for drinking and
irrigation water. Israel controls 90 percent of the freshwater supply
in the region, including the Jordan River and the large groundwater
aquifer under the West Bank. Israel recognized Palestinians’ right to
West Bank water in the 1995 Oslo Accords, but Palestinians say their
use is limited to insufficient amounts or is altogether prohibited.

For hundreds of years rural communities have been collecting rainwater
where it falls: in the fields, in open tanks and in open wells. Now rainwater harvesting is
commonplace in water-stressed cities as well. In Jerusalem, water tanks take their place
among rooftop antennae. For many residents, these tanks are the only water source
during the summer months when public service is frequently interrupted by shortages.


By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress. By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

A Palestinian bedouin complains about the sewage flowing into a stream
running through the West Bank region of Salfeet from the settlement of Ariel. The
herder claims the wells feeding this valley of olive trees have been contaminated and
that the stream is no longer fit for his goats. Alexandra Boulat

Giving 3-year-old Ibrahim a bath in Mawasi, Gaza Strip, is not a simple task for
his mother, Naime Derbas. Piped water can be cut off for days due to electricity shortages
throughout the Gaza Strip. Tap water is also highly saline, a result of seawater intrusion caused by
the overpumping of its coastal aquifer. Here, Ibrahim’s bath is a mix of tap and potable water.
Alexandra Boulat

KYoto, japan Cum veraestrud ercilit aum ip eu facipis sectem exer irilla am delessectet
lum nulluptat, quat, con vent iustrud digna faccummy nit aliquam conullam, quisciduis et venim
dit aliquis eugiam dolutpat nit commodiat ad tat utpat. Dui Unt etumsan henit inci blan henibh eu
feuisim inci et praesenit lut loboreet ercin uuis dolobor tissed do Katya Able


Agriculture uses 70 percent of all fresh water — three times as much as industry and seven times as much as residential. There are more than 3,800 multilateral declarations on water: 286 are treaties, referring to more than 200 international river basins.

Workers in the Indian state of Maharashtra bring in the cotton crop.
Worldwide, cotton growing is a $12 billion industry. Its current production of 20
million tons is expected to more than double by 2050. Cotton requires arid growing
climates and enormous amounts of water — up to 1 million gallons for every acre
or 2,000 gallons for every cotton T-shirt. Johann Rousselot, Oeil Public

A young girl harvests cotton in the Harran Plain near Sanliurfa in
Turkey. The Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates River stores enough water to
allow farmers to irrigate the water-intensive crop in this desert landscape.
Cotton farming in the region is subsidized by a $32 billion project that
will eventually result in 22 dams and 19 electrical power stations on the
Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Aggressive river development in Turkey has led
to protests from Syria and Iraq, which also rely on the rivers as primary
water sources. Dieter Telemans, Panos Pictures


Residents of a New Delhi slum wrestle for control of a water hose
from a government water tanker truck. Across India, water networks are in
such disrepair that cities cannot provide water from a public tap for more than
a few hours a day. Even worse, although most of the 1 billion people worldwide
without access to safe drinking water live in rural areas, urban populations of the
developing world are expected to double by 2030, as 60 million people move into
cities every year. Ruth Fremson, The New York Times, Redux

Chen Wenming, his wife, Yang Meitang, and their son,
Fernando and Gladys Vega stand behind a collection Qingyang, are taking advantage of China’s bottled water boom. They
of their kitchen water containers with their children Katy, Alex and started their own water business, making deliveries by scooter, after
Andres in their Quito, Ecuador home. The Vegas use up to 180 moving from the countryside to Shanghai eight years ago. Bottled
gallons of water daily, well below the national average of 100 gallons water consumption in China has more than doubled in recent years
per person. The middle-class family conserves water to save money, because people only limit tap water use for cooking and bathing. The
showering every other day, using the washing machine twice a week family sells five-gallon jugs — enough for a family of three for about
and watering the garden only on the weekends. Ivan Kashinsky two weeks. Mads Nissen

Jurgen Wernick and Catherina Bosch live in an
Abdala Suliman’s family gathers outside their home in ecovillage in Currumbin Valley in Queensland, Australia. Because
Kafr ad Dik in the West Bank: 92-year-old Issam Amin, and Amin, their house has no piped water supply, they rely on about 7,000
Mohamed, Ouar and Maen. Every day, for $2, they buy 250 gallons gallons of rainwater that runs off their roof into tanks every year.
of water from an Israeli-owned well 3 miles from their village. More The retired couple uses about 30 gallons a day, which would leave
than 10,000 of their fellow villagers also depend on the same supply, them dry during the year — especially during Australia’s frequent
which leads to a daily scramble. Once the Israeli well owners have droughts — if they didn’t also recycle water for use in washing their
sold 75,000 gallons, they close up shop for the day. clothes, watering the garden and filling the toilets.
Alexandra Boulat Michael Amendolia

Afghanistan was already a nation in trouble before the
Tim and Alissandra Sweep and their children David, United States started bombing in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The
Kara, Erin and Jonathon use around 450 gallons per day in their country was suffering its worst drought in 30 years, and the Taliban
Henderson, Nevada home, about average for a U.S. household. had disbanded many women-led hygiene education programs.
Three bathrooms and daily showers give them a level of sanitation Kabul’s 3.4 million residents have no public sewage system and piped
unknown to half the world. They also have a backyard pool that uses city water reaches only 18 percent of the people. Mile-long walks to
about 25,000 gallons, enough water to supply a person with the fetch drinking water are common. Here family members gather on a
U.N. minimum daily water requirement for 12 years. rooftop to socialize and share what supplies they have.
Tiffany Brown Fardin Waezi


Conservation worker Marco Negovschi takes a break at a Baker, Nevada
cafe. Residents are fighting attempts by the city of Las Vegas to build a pipeline for
its booming population, which is expected to outgrow the supplies of the Colorado
River water by 2013. Local farmers and ranchers worry that the pipeline would leave
no water for them. Tiffany Brown

Water and Wealth
Farmers have irrigated the fields around Presidio, Texas, on the
banks of the Rio Grande River, for more than 400 years.

But not much longer. Presidio’s farmers are deserting their fields as the
Rio Grande, one of North America’s greatest rivers, has gone dry in
this part of Texas as upstream farmers drain off water for their own
cotton, corn and alfalfa fields. The Rio Grande is now essentially two
rivers, divided by 200 miles of dry riverbed.

It has been said that the real history of the West is the story of who
controls the water, from the Colorado to the Columbia, the Missouri
to the Sacramento. Today, populations continue to surge, fresh water
becomes scarcer, and control is lost in a morass of competing interests
among federal and local agencies, farmers, fishermen, Native American
tribes and environmental groups.

There are reasons for optimism. Total U.S. water consumption was
lower in 2000 than it was in 1980, despite the addition of 55 million
new citizens. Per capita water consumption was lower in 2000 than it
was a half-century before.

But in the West, even that isn’t enough. Here, any solution must
also deal with the ownership and distribution of water. Clever
entrepreneurs are buying up vast tracts of the West for their water
“capital.” Will they bring greater efficiency to the distribution of the
region’s limited supply of fresh water — or just become the latest
players in the endless power struggle?

One thing is certain: The long, tragic history of water and wealth in the
American West has yet to see its final chapter.

— Michael Malone


In Nebraska, workers are on the bus by 5 a.m., heading for their
jobs in the cornfields. Farming near the Platte River, the site of America’s
largest aquifer, involves many laborers and large amounts of irrigation, putting
agricultural water needs in competition with wildlife and recreational uses.
Since the mid-1940s, water has been taken from the aquifer three times
faster than the rate of recharge, sinking the water table by as much as 5 feet
per year in places. Brian Lehmann

Six years ago Hal Holder and two dozen other farmers in Rocky Ford, Colorado, sold
their water rights to Aurora, a fast-growing Denver suburb, kicking off a controversy that hasn’t
quieted. Through a program funded by Aurora, Holder is restoring his property to natural
grassland. Instead of farming onions, Holder now runs a few head of cattle and offers hunting for
quail and pheasant on his property. Other farmers in the area believe the move to sell and ship
water was shortsighted and will ultimately hurt the region. Sergio Ballivian


Without enough water to satisfy the needs of recreational,
agricultural and industrial users, legal battles will frame the future of water
use in the United States. Here, attorney Thomas Oliver argues for Spear T
Ranch in the Nebraska Supreme Court. The case, which was originally filed
in 2002 by the ranch near Bridgeport, accuses groundwater irrigators of
depleting area streams. Brian Lehmann

Walter and Marie Killidrew, who own a ranch near
T. Boone Pickens’s Texas property, are not interested in selling
their water rights to him. They are concerned his plan to pump
underground water and sell it to users in other parts of the state
would dry up their ranch. Ilkka Uimonen, Magnum

Oil tycoon turned water baron,
T. Boone Pickens is making water a hot
commodity. He has bought 200,000 acres
in Roberts County, Texas, with the idea
of selling the water that lies beneath it.
The payoff could be huge: His $75 million
investment in land could bring a $1 billion
return when he sells the water for $1,000
an acre-foot or more to Texas towns.
Fred Prouser, Reuters, Corbis

If T. Boone Pickens has his way, water will become a cash crop. He is trying to
secure the water rights of properties near his ranch and then sell as many as 65 billion gallons a
year to thirsty Texas cities. Ilkka Uimonen, Magnum


By some estimates, more than 50 percent of commercial and residential irrigation water use goes to waste due to evaporation, runoff or overwatering. Landscaping with native plants adapted to the local climate can reduce outdoor water use by up to seven times and can cost 50 percent less to maintain.

A landscaper at the Red Rock Country Club in Las Vegas removes sod in favor
of native desert landscaping. With a booming population and tight water supplies, Las
Vegas is squeezing water savings from all sectors, recouping 20 billion gallons per year
through recycling and rebate programs. Some of the biggest gains come through tearing
out turf on the links. According to WorldWatch Institute, golf courses consume 2.5
billion gallons of water worldwide every day, enough to support 500 million people at
the U.N.’s five-gallon daily minimum. Jim Wilson, The New York Times, Redux

Joseph Cooper is replacing his small backyard lawn with artificial turf, and he’s getting paid
for doing it. Since 1999, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has offered $2 per square foot to
customers to replace their lawns with water-efficient landscaping. Seventy-six million square feet
of grass have been removed, saving 5 billion gallons of water per year. Tiffany Brown

Family members water the grave of Martin Rodriguez, who died of cancer in March
2007 at the age of 42. Families at Mount Carmel Cemetery in El Paso, Texas are able to keep up
landscaping thanks to a municipal water recycling program. “Graywater” is also used to irrigate
parks, schools, roadside medians and industrial plants. The efforts help the county’s utility cut its
annual withdrawals from underground aquifers and the nearby Rio Grande by 1 billion gallons.
Samantha Appleton


As Florida booms, developments continue their steady march on the
Everglades. Here, airboaters run alongside cars on Interstate 595 in West Broward.
Florida’s population increased 13 percent from 2000 to 2006, making it the third-
fastest growing state in the nation. On average, more than 900 people move into the
state every day. Andrew Kaufmann

Poisoning Paradise
The Florida Everglades are America’s youngest natural wonder.
Born just 5,000 years ago — a blink in geologic time — the nation’s
largest swamp is in fact a vast, slow-moving, 50-mile-wide freshwater
river that defines the environment of the entire Florida peninsula. It
is also the home to more than 300 species of animals, including birds,
foxes, bears and panthers, many of which are unique to the region.

Despite being opened to settlers beginning with the federal Swamp Act
of 1850, the vast and forbidding Everglades resisted development until
the early 20th century, a half-century after the rest of the state had
begun to experience explosive growth. Only then was it determined
that the Everglades must be tamed, that the great river needed to
be harnessed along its path to the sea to provide water to farms and
protect against floods.

Severe drought conditions in Everglades National Park have forced alligators
like this 8-footer to seek one of the last remaining puddles of water. Much of the fresh
water that was naturally purified by the Everglades now flows directly into the sea,
threatening America’s largest coral reef. Tim Chapman, Liaison, Getty Images


In response, in what was considered at the time to be one of the great
civil engineering projects of the era, the State of Florida and the Army
Corps of Engineers built dams, levees and channels throughout the
region — ultimately shunting 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water from the
Everglades south to the ocean each day.

The results, as we can only appreciate now, have been devastating.
Draining the Everglades has resulted in catastrophe for the wetlands
and its animal and plant life. The channeled water, once pure, has
become a dumping ground for fertilizers and pollutants as it makes its
way to the coastal waterway — and once there has begun to kill an
As Florida booms, developments continue their steady march on the
Everglades. Here, airboaters run alongside cars on Interstate 595 in West Broward. equally fragile natural wonder: the Florida Coral Reef.
Florida’s population increased 13 percent from 2000 to 2006, making it the third-
fastest growing state in the nation. On average, more than 900 people move into the Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that fast-growing southern Florida
state every day. Andrew Kaufmann today regularly suffers from a shortage of fresh water for irrigation and
drinking — even as those billions of gallons of once-pure water flow
Efforts to restore the Everglades are documented in “Water’s Journey,” a film that follows the path of water from Orlando to the Florida Keys.
In the course of filming the documentary, Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve park biologist Mike Owen, systems biologist Tom Morris and executive
past.
producer, director and cinematographer Wes Skiles look for a rare Ghost Orchid in the southern part of the Everglades. Jill Heinerth
Only recently has the region begun to awaken to the magnitude of
this natural disaster. And the only cure appears to be for the Corps of
Engineers to go back and undo almost everything it has done, freeing
the Everglades to cleanse itself, refill the great aquifer that lies beneath
it, and once again find its own equilibrium.

But, as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan underscores,
tearing down all of those dams and leveling every levee will be a
Herculean task, one requiring billions of dollars in federal and state
monies. And so far it remains just a plan: Little funding yet to be set
aside for the work.

Saving the Everglades is perhaps the greatest freshwater challenge
facing the United States. So far, we are failing the test.

— Michael Malone

Former florida Governor Jeb Bush announces a plan to restore Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater lake in the heart of the
Everglades. But the Sierra Club questions the governor’s environmental record: “In 2003, the sugar industry successfully petitioned Bush to pass a
new law amending the Everglades Forever Act. This anti-Everglades amendment delayed the cleanup of sugar’s phosphorous pollution by 10 years.
Despite massive protests by environmental groups and newspaper editorials of protest, Governor Bush signed the bill into law.” Jill Heinerth

Children play on an abandoned water storage tank in Vuma Village
in South Africa. Nowadays the village has free access to clean water via an
innovative PlayPump system that uses the rotation of a merry-go-round to
extract underground water. Samantha Reinders

Here is the shocker: We already know how to purify water. We don’t yet know how to cure cancer,
and we don’t yet know how to create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. But we absolutely do know how to purify
water. The question then is: If we know how to purify water, why are more than 1 billion people around
our planet suffering from the lack of clean water?

I believe it is a failure of imagination. In particular, we have become so enamored with Big Solutions that
we have almost forgotten the power of small ones.

Despite having the tools at hand, we are currently losing the battle for universal fresh drinking water —
and the world knows it. Thanks to television, the Internet and most of all, cell phones, even the poorest
people now know their condition differs from that of others, they know what advances are possible,
and they will not be patient for change. Even the hardest heart must appreciate that a billion sick, thirsty,
desperate people are the most fertile ground imaginable for war, epidemics, mass refugee migrations and
terror. Their thirst is ours. Their problem is ours.

The developing world is littered with press releases and grandiose statements heralding
top-heavy one-size-fits-all water projects that came and went, at great expense, while
providing little benefit to the people who most need clean water. In some cases,
these projects required parts or supplies that were not readily available. Others
required skills that were not available locally. In still other cases, the projects required ongoing financial
incentives for their operators that, again, were not available.

The second half of the 20th century launched countless huge development projects aimed at solving
the planet’s problems on a grand scale, including the lack of water for millions of people. Many failed
outright; others were delayed or mismanaged and were magnets for corruption. These development
efforts lost the voice, the impetus and the reason of the individual.

Many people around the world are beginning to realize that different problems require different
solutions. One great advantage of small-scale projects is that they can be tailored to address specific
situations. People do not want solutions that merely keep them alive; they want solutions that make
their lives, and the lives of their children, better.

Many solutions will have to be effective against a wide range of contaminants, including dangerous
industrial compounds, beyond just the usual problems of sewage and salt. And safe water will only make
a difference if it is affordable. The sad fact is that the poor often pay far more than the rich do for water.
This is not only unfortunate and unfair, but also dangerously unhealthy. People use less water when it is
more expensive, and when people use less water, their health suffers. And these are the same people
who cannot afford medical care.

168 Blue Planet Run

The El Paso, Texas, water utility gives customers a $50
I’ll say it again: We already know how to purify water. We’ve known how for millennia — Sanskrit writings from 2000 rebate when they get rid of their old, water-hogging toilets. New models
B.C. record the following advice: “Impure water should be purified by being boiled over a fire, or being heated in the sun, can save up to 5 gallons per flush. Through incentives, water recycling and
strict conservation ordinances, El Paso residents have reduced their average
or by dipping a heated iron into it, or it may be purified by filtration through sand and coarse gravel and then allowed to
personal daily usage by 60 percent, from 230 gallons to 136 gallons.
cool.” Add a few technological wrinkles, and that’s essentially what we still do today. Samantha Appleton

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a new generation of enterprises, commercial and social, led by extraordinary
individuals who have found real solutions to seemingly intractable global problems. Bankers such as Nobel Prize winner
Mohammad Yunus are fighting extreme poverty by providing loans to people with no credit. Economists such as “The
Mystery of Capital” author Hernando de Soto are working with governments to provide even the poorest individuals
with formal titles to their land. And businesspeople such as GrameenPhone founder Iqbal Quadir are providing small
entrepreneurs with productivity tools (in his case, cell phones) that allow individuals to serve their communities while
making attractive profits.

The success of these pioneers is infectious. Individuals around the world are becoming increasingly aware that they can
make a difference. There will always be a place for Big Solutions, but they should only be the last resort, when they can
prove a greater chance of success than smaller, more adaptive strategies.

Real success only comes with real risk — and real risk means the ever-present possibility of failure. We desperately need
to try dramatically new approaches to the challenge of safe water — and many of those approaches will fail. But if we are
determined (and lucky), a few of these new solutions will work. This is what inventors and entrepreneurs do. They accept
failure as part of the process, they learn from their mistakes, and they keep trying until they find a solution.

What will the solution to making the world’s water safe again look like? I have my own ideas, but I am just one inventor
among what should be millions. My hunch is that the answer (or answers) will not be the expected one, or come from
even the expected source. It may not be a sophisticated device emerging from a well-equipped lab in the developed
world, but an astonishingly elegant solution discovered by some new, young entrepreneur or scientist in Rio, Dharavi or
Kibera. Or, it may come from you.

Freed to think small, to make mistakes and to take real risks, we will find the solution to the challenge of safe water. Of
that I am certain.
— Dean Kamen

The New York-based Acumen Fund, headed by Jacqueline
Novogratz, is helping farmers lift themselves out of poverty by providing
funding to IDE-India. IDE, or International Development Enterprises, recruits
machine shops to manufacture low-cost drip irrigation systems. Indian
farmers have bought 200,000 of the systems and report that their annual
return on investment ranges from 40 percent to 64 percent. The KB-Drip
system kits are sold through a network of village dealers for $1.30 a pound, of
which 36 cents is the seller’s markup. This for-profit approach is transforming
the lives of farmers in rural areas throughout the developing world.
Atul Loke

174 Blue Planet Run A Billion Slingshots 175

The energy generated by the children playing on this merry-go-round in
the village of Vuma, South Africa, pumps water from an underground borehole up
to a storage tank. Billboards on the tank carry public-service messages on two sides;
the other two have advertisements that help pay for maintenance of the PlayPump
system. Besides being fun — and a source of healthy exercise — the kids are proud
to be providing a valuable community service. Samantha Reinders

Distilling Laughter
In Africa, water for basic drinking needs is often available
beneath people’s feet; they just aren’t able to reach it.
Instead, every year women and childen spend more than
40 billion hours (yes, billion) walking great distances to
fetch water, devoting much of their days to this arduous
and time-wasting daily ritual. To address this tragic waste
of human potential, teams of entreprenuers and global aid
groups have been focusing on human-powered pumps to
transform a labor-intensive chore into child’s play.

Two innovative approaches recently won funding from the
World Bank’s Development Marketplace Awards.

PlayPump International’s water pump started a decade ago
in South Africa and is already in more than 700 villages.
The pump is powered by the energy of children as they
play on a merry-go-round. As they spin, water is drawn
from below ground into a nearby storage tank. The Case
Foundation, headed by Steve and Jean Case, is leading a
global campaign to provide PlayPumps to 4000 villages by
2010, which will provide clean water to 10 million people.
One of the most striking aspects of the PlayPump concept is
that it was created in Africa by Africans for Africans.

The second device getting worldwide attention is The
Elephant Pump, a modern adaption to an ancient Chinese


By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress. By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

Before the PlayPump was installed in Vuma Village, women and
children had to walk long distances to get the water they needed for the day,
spending hours lugging heavy buckets on their heads. Because of the weight
and frequent injuries, only water for essential purposes was fetched; water
for gardening was out of the question. Today the pump system enables the
community to irrigate and maintain a small vegetable garden. Here Violet
Baloyi tends to her marog, a type of spinach. Samantha Reinders

water-raising device. The Elephant Pump draws water
through a pipe using plastic washers attached to a rope.
Again, eager children do most of the work by peddling
a stationary bicycle. Pump Aid, the British organization
behind the devive, has installed thousands of the pumps,
mostly in Zimbabwe. The pump costs a fraction of
traditional piston-powered pumps thanks to the
cooperation of local manufacturers.

Even when it’s dry and dusty in Vuma Village, the PlayPump brings water up from
underground, and there’s plenty to go around. The whole operation takes only a few hours
to install and costs around $14,000. The idea has proved so inventive, so cost-efficient and
so much fun for the kids that the World Bank honored it as one of its best new grassroots
ideas. Samantha Reinders


According to U.N. estimates, 443 million school days are lost to waterborne diseases each year. The number of girls attending school rises 15 percent in the developing world when adequate sanitation is available.

Children in developing countries often are afraid of using
rudimentary toilets like outhouses because the facilities are dark and smelly
and because the youngsters fear falling into the hole. At Saint Joseph School
in Tholurpatti village in India, approximately 235 children up to the age of 6
use child-friendly toilets while enjoying colorful drawings on the walls and
a sense of cleanliness. At first, mothers went with their children and taught
them the basic ideas of toilet use and hygiene (including washing hands with
soap). WaterAid provided the funding for these toilets. Tomas Munita

Less than half of Asia’s population has access to adequate sanitation, by far the lowest
percentage in the world. In rural areas only 1 in 3 have access. Here children at the Kasichetty
Municipal Middle School in Tiruchirappalli, India, learn the importance of hygiene in preventing
illness. Simple lessons in hand washing and the installation of public toilets are transforming the
lives of India’s rural children. Tomas Munita

Children get their own area to use in community toilets that are nicknamed
“television toilets” because some of them do, in fact, have TVs in them. The privately run centers
have become tourist attractions in places like Cheetah Camp, one of Mumbai’s biggest slums.
A World Bank loan gets the project started, but locals decide how big the toilet will be and what
amenities it will have. Three hundred toilets have been built where there previously had been
open defecation, and people are getting used to living without the stink. Atul Loke


Water-related diseases caused by unsafe water and inadequate sanitation are responsible for 80 percent of all sickness in the developing world. Access to clean water gives sub-Saharan Africa's 25 million HIV/AIDS patients a fighting chance to extend their life expectancy.

Two boys in southern Sudan use straw-shaped guinea worm
filters supplied by the Carter Center to protect themselves from the
larvae responsible for guinea worm disease. This parasitic disease is painful
and debilitating, and its effects reach far beyond a single victim, crippling
agricultural production and reducing school attendance. The Carter Center
has distributed millions of these straws in recent years, reducing infestations
by 70 percent. Michael Freeman, Aurora Photos

Procter & Gamble’s water purification product, PUR, filters water of debris, viruses,
bacteria, protozoa and arsenic. Sold in individual sachets, PUR costs around 10 cents to treat
the drinking water for a family of five for one day and reduces the incidence of diarrhea in young
children by around 50 percent. Stephen Digges

There are a thousand people living in Guanyinjiao Village in Wenzhou City, China,
and until the summer of 2007 they only had one source of water: a local reservoir that delivered
untreated water. Many of the families had come to distrust that water, however, and they blamed it
for an increasing number of illnesses. The Dow Chemical Company has donated a water treatment
center that is capable of removing a variety of contaminants. It uses membrane technology, a
system that allows pure water to pass through strands of polymer fibers but traps pollutants.
Jianxue Shi


On average, 33 percent of Florida's wastewater injection facilities leak into the state's aquifer. To reduce the impact of residential water use, new installation of low-flow toilets, showerheads and faucets became federal law in the United States in 1992.

Roy Barghout (right) is a research supervisor at Caroma, an
Australian company developing improved low-flow toilets. Caroma’s toilets
use only three-quarters of a gallon of water to flush, compared to standard
low-flow toilets that use more than a gallon and a half. Michael Amendolia

On mountains an hour or so outside Mexico
City, Imelda Carreon Valdozino looks at the water flow-
ing past her on the sides of the dormant volcano in the
Tlalmanalco region and wonders what she will find today.
Several times a month, this "Guardian of the Volcanoes"
takes a group of students with her as she tests the water
for the presence of toxins. Urbanization has brought more
people and more industry to the area, intensifying the de-
mand for clean water. Still, there are few treatment facilities
in the region, and wastewater runoff is returned to rivers
and streams untreated. Then, it sinks through the perme-
able volcanic soil and threatens to spoil the aquifer beneath
Mexico City. The "Guardians" measure pollution and con-
front the polluters in an effort to safeguard the rivers and
streams. Janet Jarman


By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

Brand Aid
Thirty-eight-year-old creative director David Droga of Australia has spent his career
creating advertising campaigns for the world’s top brands. But ask him about the
campaign he takes the most pride in these days, and he’ll point to the Tap Project,
created to help UNICEF provide clean drinking water to children.

The Tap Project was sparked when Esquire magazine editors challenged Droga to
create a brand out of nothing that could also be “a positive change agent.” Inspiration
struck when Droga received a complimentary glass
of tap water at a restaurant. He gave his team at his
company the task of creating a brand for something
that is distributed everywhere but that no one owns,
something that would cost nothing to produce or
package, and something that could generate a lot of
money for UNICEF at almost no cost to the donors.

The campaign’s initial target was the citizens of
Manhattan. All New Yorkers had to do was add a
dollar to their dinner checks. One dollar. Enough to
provide clean, safe water for 40 children for a day.

Three hundred of New York’s finest restaurants
signed on, and the city’s most prominent magazines
published Tap essays by top authors. Students created and hung Tap posters around the
city. Dozens of public figures, including actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, became Tap representatives. All of New York embraced the project.
Suddenly tap water became a brand. Millions of dollars were generated for UNICEF
at zero cost.

UNICEF plans to roll out the Tap Project in more than 30 cities in North America
on World Water Day in 2008. In 2009 TAP will launch in more than 100 cities
around the world.

“This single idea will literally save millions of children’s lives,” says UNICEF’s Steve Miller.

Rick Smolan

Women and girls in the developing world often spend the majority of their day collecting water and carrying containers weighing up to 45 pounds almost 4 miles. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1 billion people gained access to clean water over the last decade.

Alice Malemela, 15, of Mothapo Village in South Africa pulls a Q Drum
on her way to the community water tap. The innovative plastic drum serves as a
rolling water bucket and stores up to 20 gallons when full. Samantha Reinders

South African architect Piet Hendrikse
has put his civil engineering career on hold to begin an-
other in social entrepreneurship. With the help of his
brother Hans, he designed and self-funded the Q Drum
water-fetching container. Now, he hopes to find a mate-
rial that will make it both durable and affordable. Although
the design has been highly regarded, and the social ben-
efits are clear, the Q Drum's current $30 production cost
prevents the product from being used more widely. "Our
initial marketing drive was [targeted] to aid organizations,
but we have come to the realization that if the distribu-
tion of our product is exclusively dependent on charity, the
project will not be sustainable." Hendrikse remains opti-
mistic that successful field testing will inspire international
funding to overcome manufacturing limitations and make it
affordable to the people of rural Africa who need it most.
Samantha Reinders


FogQuest, a nonprofit Canadian charity, is dedicated to installing water projects serving rural communities in developing
countries. Fog collectors make use of natural atmospheric sources of water: As fog blows through the nets, it condenses and is
channeled into reservoirs, providing villages with free water. Here a team installs fog catchers in Nepal. Tony Makepeace

Out of Thick Air
Some parts of the developing world receive as little as .04 inches of
rainfall per year. In such places, there are no rivers or lakes, people
cannot collect enough rainwater to drink, and long-distance transport
of water is prohibitively expensive.

Building on a technology developed in the coastal desert of Chile by
a team of Chileans and Canadians, the fog catcher system is ideally
situated for arid or seasonally arid locations where conventional water
supplies are not available.

Fog catchers utilize dense fog — low-hanging clouds — to produce
large amounts of water for rural inhabitants in the most arid parts of
our planet. The perfect environment for a fog catcher installation is at
high elevations where the fog is driven by wind moving over hills.

The fog collectors are made of inexpensive, durable plastic mesh, with
fibers woven to maximize passive fog drop interception and to allow
for rapid drainage of the collected water. Because the mesh can be
supported by local material such as wood, the cost of the collector is
low and little maintenance is required. The light, compact nature of the
mesh makes it easy to ship and carry, thus facilitating the placement of
collectors in poor and isolated communities.

Through these collector systems, clean water is provided to remote
communities that lack rivers, lakes and springs and the financial
wherewithal to purchase water elsewhere.

FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit organization that installs fog catchers
around the world, says that in its first year of operation in the Chilean
village of Chungungo, the system provided between 4,000 and 26,000
gallons of water a day. The village no longer had to import water by
truck and had enough to begin growing gardens and fruit trees.


When clouds touch the Earth in the form of fog, material stretched across hillsides captures the moisture, providing a natural source
of fresh, clean water. Tony Makepeace

Various fabric configurations are
tested to see which collect water most effectively.
Manufacturers use the science of biomimicry to
design nets resembling naturally occurring patterns.
For instance, a British firm is manufacturing a model
inspired by a Namibian beetle that can capture 10
times more water than any previous version.
Fogquest reports that in its first year of operation, the system provided between 4,000 and 26,000 gallons of water a day in some villages.
Tony Makepeace
Villagers no longer had to import water by truck and had enough to begin growing gardens and fruit trees.
Tony Makepeace

A quarter of the world's glaciers, which provide drinking water to more than 1 billion people, could be gone by 2050 due to global warming. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made donation commitments of $60 million for water projects in 2006.

Glaciers that provide Europe with drinking water (and ski slopes) have lost more
than half their volume in the last century. Workers at the Pitztal Glacier ski resort in Austria are
doing something to slow the melting. On a sunny day, they attach a fleece-like blanket to the top
of the slope, push it over the lip and roll it down over the glacier’s flank. The synthetic material
protects the snow from the sun’s rays and helps slow the melting in summer months.
Melissa Farlow

At 11,000 feet on Austria’s Pitztal Glacier, 15 acres of cutting-edge insulation is draped onto
sheer slopes — at a cost of $85,000 — to keep them from melting. Glaciers in the Alps are losing
1 percent of their mass every year and may disappear by the end of the century. Less ice and snow
cover means less runoff to feed Europe’s major rivers and a loss to the region’s ecosystem as well
as to its economy. Glacier wrapping is now being tried in Germany and Switzerland.
Melissa Farlow


Cities around the world, from Shanghai to Mexico City, are sinking by as much as 30 feet as a result of the overpumping of the aquifers beneath them. Micro-loans from the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank in Bangladesh have helped well over half of its recipients gain access to safe drinking water.

Manimala, a researcher with an Indian health and sanitation
organization called Gramalaya, collects data in the village of Mettupatti,
noting the number of people and the location of toilets, wells and water
taps. The information will be used to help determine where new sanitation
facilities will be built. Many people in India’s rural villages must use open
defecation troughs, which contribute to the spread of disease.
Tomas Munita

Children try out the new tap that dispenses water from a PlayPump in Pudhupalli,
replacing the old hand pump right next to it. Pudhupalli is the first rural village in India to remove
all open sewers. Tomas Munita


In Brazil, 113,000 cisterns have already been installed to collect rainwater for almost 700,000 people, part of a larger effort to install 1 million.

Laxman Singh has dedicated his life to reviving traditional rainwater
harvesting systems in parched villages in western India. Under Laxman's
leadership, villagers have built new reservoirs and irrigated their fields. The
results of this work are everywhere. In the village of Laporiya, harvests of
wheat, lentils and vegetables have tripled, and the water table has risen by
45 feet. Janet Jarman
Women tap water from a central well in Laporiya, a
remote village in the drought-prone state of Rajasthan, India.
Since 1991, levels in the wells have risen from 60 feet below
ground to just 15 feet. The gains have come thanks to the
revival of traditional rainwater capture techniques: Villagers
have rebuilt collection ponds, repaired masonry storage tanks
and created earthen percolation reservoirs that help recharge
groundwater. Laporiya has been recognized as the only village
in the district that did not require aid in the form of water
tankers. Janet Jarman

Global freshwater consumption rose sixfold in the 20th century, more than twice the rate of population growth. 715 trillion gallons of gray water are now reclaimed and reused in industry and irrigation around the world every year.

At an estimated cost of $35 billion, Libya is building one of the most extensive water systems
in the history of the world. The project is expected to carry water from the vast aquifiers under the
Sahara to the Mediterranean coastal region, where 90 percent of the population lives. Libya is already
mining 35 billion cubic feet of water annually and will reap 1,400 billion cubic feet each year — which
scientists worry could empty the aquifers in as little as 40 years. Libyan head of state Moammar
Gadhafi calls the project the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Reza, Webistan

A worker checks the water gauge at the Tuas Seawater Desalination Plant in Singapore.
Using reverse-osmosis advanced filter technology, the plant treats approximately 30 million gallons
of water per day, about 10 percent of Singapore's daily consumption. The largest of its kind in
Asia, the plant was constructed in 2005 to reduce Singapore's dependence on imported water
from Malaysia. Roslan Rahman, AFP, Getty Images

Dwindling freshwater resources threaten the key ingredient in Coca Cola’s
business, so water conservation has become key to the company’s bottom line. Coke has built
high-tech bottling facilities like this one in Denver. As bottles and cans pass through the system
above, they’re rinsed by air, not water. While conventional bottling facilities use nearly 3 liters of
water for every liter of soda, plants like this one can cut water waste in half.
Joanna B. Pinneo


A new water prize to encourage entrepreneurs to focus on the
global water crisis is being created by Andrew Benedek (right), founder of
Zenon Membrane Solutions, who invented a membrane filtration system
considered to be one of the biggest breakthroughs in water treatment since
the development of sand filtration and chlorine disinfection a century ago;
and Monique Barbut, CEO of the Global Environment Facility, director of a
$3 billion fund helping poor countries deal with climate change. In June 2007
they met in Paris to solicit support from Jean-Louis Chaussade, CEO of Suez
Environment, who heads the world's largest private water company.
Gerard Uferas

Tigist Tadesse has a dream of providing tap water and sanitation to everyone in her village of Ginchi, Ethiopia. In addition to her
responsibilities as a shopkeeper and mother of three, Tigist researches and publicizes water-related statistics about her village. Her efforts have led to
the construction of 20 community toilets and more than 100 taps around her neighborhood since 2005. Guy Calaf

ASHOKA FELLOW Marta Echavarria has established water markets that assign price tags to the environmental benefits of healthy
watersheds. This measurable value allows all parties — farmers, environmentalists, water companies, electric companies and governments — to
better understand the value of water. Marta’s multi-tiered strategy establishes private funds for watershed management and coordinates watershed
conservation plans between upstream and downstream users. Piloted in Colombia, Marta’s model continues to spread and have success in
communities throughout Latin America. Ivan Kashinsky

In the world's poorest communities, people spend 5 to 10 times more for water than those in the developed, a sum that can represent more than 20% of their incomes. Small-scale water technologies such as drip irrigation and treadle pumps are providing an estimated $100 billion in economic value to the developing world.

Jagganath Mule, a farmer in the Sindhi Kalegoan village in
southwest India, has dramatically increased the yield of his vegetable crop
thanks to a low-cost drip irrigation system based on “pepsees.” The system
was invented by an Indian farmer who had a side business selling frozen
Popsicles. One day he realized that he could wind long, uncut rolls of durable
Popsicle wrappers along the rows of his crops and then pump water into
them. The holes in the perforations between each Popsicle wrapper acted as
distribution points for the water in the tube. Atul Loke

The seeds in this photograph were grown using the “pepsees” drip irrigation
system. Sometimes the original tubes made of clear plastic allowed algae to grow and contaminate
the water. The manufacturer, delighted that its product had a vast secondary market, is now
producing a line of black wrappers to solve the problem. Atul Loke


Only 5 percent, or $4 billion, of all international aid from developed countries goes to water and sanitation projects. For about what people in the U.S. spend on bottled water every year ($10 billion), the world could halve the number of people without access to clean water by 2015.

Bottles of water fetch $20 each in the name of charity. A
group called Charity: Water uses every dime of the purchase price
to dig freshwater wells in Uganda, Malawi, Central African Republic,
Ethiopia and Liberia. Scott Harrison

Bottled water has a deservedly bad reputation
these days. So how is it that 32-year-old Scott Harrison,
a former party promoter turned water evangelist, can sell
tens of thousands of bottles of his own Charity: Water
brand for $20 a pop? Simple. He tells his customers that
they aren't buying bottled water; they're building wells in
Africa. A small coterie of black-tie twenty-somethings have
raised over a million dollars. Photographs taken by Harrison,
an accomplished photojournalist, are part of the draw at
high-profile fund-raising events ranging from the Sundance
Film festival to exhibits in New York City’s Union Square.
Using Internet technology, volunteers with cameras and
images overlayed on Google Maps, Harrison brings home
storiesoftransformedcommunitiestoenabledonorstoseethe
benefits their donations. Rick Smolan

One fifth of the world’s population and a third of the Earth’s land surface (15 million square miles) is threatened by global desertification. Desalination plants are the artificial rivers of the Middle East, accounting for nearly 40 percent of municipal water supplies in the region.

Spain’s push to develop its arid southern coast for tourism has
required it to tap the Mediterranean Sea for fresh water. The country’s 700
desalination plants produce 800 million gallons yearly. Worldwide, more than
12,000 desalination plants produce more than 4.4 trillion gallons.
Georg Fischer, Bilderberg, Aurora Photos

Workers install one of the 9,000 filters at the $256 million desalination plant in Yuma,
Arizona, which removes salty runoff from U.S. farms on the Colorado River. The plant, 70 miles
from the sea, came online in 2007, in the middle of an eight-year drought in the West. Water from
the plant goes to Mexico under treaty obligations, and it is 40 times more expensive than water
obtained from other natural sources. Jim Richardson, National Geographic, Getty Images

A technician draws a water sample from a reverse-osmosis filter at the Heemskerk
desalination plant in the Netherlands. Reverse-osmosis technology uses semi-permeable
membranes to remove salt and pollutants from water. Already in household purification systems,
reverse-osmosis technology is taking over the desalination industry, replacing plants that use heat
to distill water. Marc Steinmetz, Aurora Photos

To keep pace with the growing demand for food, it is estimated that about 15 percent more fresh water will have to be withdrawn for agricultural purposes by 2030. More than 10,000 nongovernmental organizations around the world are helping to address the world's water crisis.

Deborah and Ann Njenga water their farm in Juja, Kenya. Ann’s
KickStart water pump has taken her beyond subsistence farming and opened
up new business opportunities, including an exotic flower nursery, a tilapia
fish farm and the occasional car wash. Stephen Digges

Stephen Ngiri demonstrates KickStart’s low-tech micro-irrigation solution for rural
farmers in Kenya. The pedal-powered water pump has enabled Stephen and his family to increase
tomato output by five times and employ an additional eight workers during harvest season.
Stephen Digges

Nick Moon and Martin Fisher came up with the concept of the KickStart pump
in Kenya during the early 1990s after observing that aid projects tended to wither once the aid
workers returned home. Their concept was to create an affordable and easy-to-manufacture
device that would empower landowners to become “farmerpreneurs.” KickStart water pumps are
produced locally and sold to farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Mali. These human-powered pumps
enable farmers to plant three or four crops a year, increasing incomes as much as tenfold.
Michael Collopy


In 2003, Peter Agre won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of
aquaporins, membrane proteins that prevent pollutants from entering cells.
By arranging water molecules into single lines, these pathways ensure that only
pure water is allowed to pass through them. Cells are smart; they have learned
that one of the most important things a cell needs is pure water.

Humans are smart too, but desperation leads people to drink water they know
is polluted when the alternative is no water at all. The 1.1 billion people who
live in poverty and lack access to clean water are forced to
take what is available, even when that water contains heavy
metals, solvents, bacteria, protozoa, viruses or parasites. They
drink it even if it means risking paralysis from polio, deformity from
Schistosoma, or death from cholera or typhoid. Children are the most vulnerable
because most of the poor people in the world are children.

Today, in late 2007, the human race is at a critical juncture. If you look at the
science that describes what is happening on Earth today and aren’t pessimistic,
you don’t have the correct data. Yet, around the world, in every country and city
and culture, there are compelling, coherent, self-organized congregations involving
tens of millions of people dedicating themselves to change. What we are seeing
everywhere around the globe are ordinary and not-so-ordinary individuals willing
to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some
semblance of grace, justice and beauty to this world. Every person who works on
behalf of humanity has a unique story.

My friend Jin Zidell is a perfect example of this global movement. The seed for
his Blue Planet Run Foundation was planted in 2002 in a small Indian café called
Avatar’s located in Sausalito, California. Avatar’s is legendary in our homely
industrial neighborhood for taking the idea of service to a new level. People line
up for hours on Thanksgiving when owner Ashok and his family provide free
meals to all patrons as a way to honor his late brother-in-law. On that day, turkey-
pumpkin enchiladas, seared vegetables and cumin-laden soups stream out from
 More than sixty days into the Blue Planet Run, Lansing Brewer the kitchen until late into the night.
crosses the Bixby Creek Arch Bridge, on a foggy cliff-side stretch of
California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Lansing, who celebrated his sixtieth
birthday before the run began, is the team’s senior participant, and a constant
source of inspiration to the younger runners. Chris Emerick
Blue Planet Run 213

 Taeko Terauchi-Loutitt runs along the Donau River in Vienna,
Austria on June 18, 2007. Born in Tochigi, Japan, Taeko started running 16
years ago. Her selfless decision to run around the world had an unexpected
personal benefit when she fell in love with fellow runner Canadian Jason
Louttit during the three month relay race. Chris Emerick

Jin Zidell asked if we could meet because he wanted to do something to make a
difference in a world that appeared to be spinning out of control. Like Ashok, Jin had
lost a loved one, his wife, and had spent a long and profound period in mourning. To
those of us who were his friends, his heartache seemed bottomless and immeasurable.
But on that day we met for lunch, Jin seemed different. He wanted to do something
to honor Linda. What struck me as we spoke was the scope of Jin’s dreams. His eyes
were as big as his love for Linda. His grief had become resolve.

When Jin asked me to suggest a way he could make a real difference I suggested that
he do something that was measurable, something that could change an individual’s life
in a single day, that he focus on a global problem that could be solved in a decade,
an endeavor that could actually push the needle with respect to improving peoples’
lives and the environment. He looked at me puzzled and asked, what would that be?
I knew of only one thing: water. Ninety minutes later, he left determined to find a way
to provide safe drinking water to 200 million people for the rest of their lives by 2027.
Since that day, Jin has never looked back.

Five years later the Blue Planet Run Foundation has three major initiatives under way.
The first is the Peer Water Exchange, which aims to enjoin thousands of
non-governmental organizations to find, fund and share the best water projects around
the world. The second is the extraordinary photography book you are holding in
your hands, designed to bring home Jin’s belief that that pure water is a right, not a
commodity.

The third initiative of the Blue Planet Run Foundation is the circumnavigation of the
globe by runners, symbolizing a circle in our hearts and minds, a closing of the loop
of love, care and responsibility that people share for each other. From June 1 through
September 4, 2007, a team of 22 dedicated runners set aside their own lives for 95
days to carry a message to the entire planet that undrinkable water is unthinkable in
today’s world. If the Blue Planet Run Foundation can change the world to ensure that
no child will ever be harmed by the water he or she drinks, then it will be one of the
great miracles of the 21st century. And Jin’s dedication to the memory of the person he
loved most will have changed the world.

— Paul Hawken

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

The movements begins with a
step, followed by millions more.
From June 1 through September 4, 2007, a
team of 22 athletes engaged in an extraordinary
circumnavigation of the globe, running 15,200
miles, across 16 countries and 4 continents, 24
hours a day for 95 days to raise awareness about
the global water crisis.

1. Jin Zidell, Founder and Chairman,
Blue Planet Run Foundation
2. Jason Gross, 30, Washington, DC
3. Will Dobbie, 25, Seattle, WA
4. Mary Chervenak, 39, Anderson, SC
5. Dot Helling, 57, Yokohama, Japan
6. Richard Johnson, 30, Pittsburgh, PA 1 15 16 17 18

7. Brynn Harrington, 29, Milwaukee, WI
8. Rudy van Prooyen, 57, Den Haag, Netherlands
9. Laurel Dudley, 26, Dorset, VT

6

7

19 20 21

5 4

22 23
10. Laura Furtado, 43, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
3 2 11. Simon Isaacs, 26, Boston, MA
12. Shiri Leventhal, 23, Cleveland, OH
13. David Christof, 27, Prague, Czech Republic
14. Melissa Moon, 37, Wellington, New Zealand
15. Victor Lara Ricco, 33, Guatemala City, Guatemala
16. Paul Rogan, 37, Haltwhistle, Northumberland, England
17. Jason Loutitt, 33, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
18. Taeko Terauchi, 34, Tochigi, Japan
19. Sunila Jayaraj, 29, Kolar, IN
20. Emmanuel Kibet, 29, Moiben, Kenya
21. Lansing Brewer, 60, Winston-Salem, NC
22. Sean Harrington, 30, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
23. Heiko Weiner, 44, Suhl, Germany

William Coupon

TOP ROW: New York City, NY Rick Smolan BOTTOM ROW, left to right: New York City, NY Rick Smolan / New York City, NY Rick Smolan / New York City, NY Misha Erwitt / Bloomington, IL Alex Garcia
New York City, NY Rick Smolan

Delivering the Message Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan and Canada.

For centuries, news and warnings from distant lands were spread from village to village, and from country Each runner pledged to run 10 miles a day, and they alternated duties between 1,500 exchange points
to country, by messengers traveling great distances through treacherous and often untamed landscapes. on their way around the globe. At each point, they took a moment to face each other and recite their
Once the bearer arrived, the details would be recited or sung in chants and melodies. Moments later, message, which included an ancient Iroquois prayer:
another runner would be dispatched to the next village carrying the news to every corner of the land.
We give thanks to all the Waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength.
That ancient tradition was restored on June 1, 2007, as 20 runners representing 13 nationalities departed Water is life. We know its power in many forms — waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans.
the United Nations in New York on an extraordinary 95-day, nonstop relay race. The message: More than With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of water. Now our minds are one.
1 billion people lack access to water they need for everyday life, and the rest of us can and should help
“Runners have always been the messengers,” said Simon Isaacs as he ran across the flat, dusty Mongolian
alleviate the problem.
steppe past a slightly bewildered nomadic herdsman. It was his 27th birthday and he was celebrating by
The Blue Planet Run would be the first of its kind to circumnavigate the globe, spanning 15,200 miles and running 27 miles, a full marathon plus one for good measure. For Issacs, who had been working in Rwanda
16 countries including the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, on a water management project the previous summer, the run was an honor he didn’t take lightly.
218 Blue Planet Run Blue Planet Run 219

 Kenyan-born Emanuel Kibet runs above the deepest lake in
the world, Russia’s Lake Baikal, which contains a fifth of Earth’s fresh water.
Kibet, who is one of 7 children, worked as a farmer, butcher and firefighter
before starting his running career six years ago. He says he hopes his run
will “help alleviate human suffering.” Chris Emerick

TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Kemerovo, Russia Chris Emerick / Midland, MI Chris Emerick / Beijing, China Mark Leong, Redux Pictures / Gobi Desert, Mongolia Chris Emerick BOTTOM ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Zhangbei,
China Mark Leong, Redux Pictures / Chicago, IL Chris Emerick

David Christof, a student counselor at Miami University in Ohio, spent his summer vacation spreading the Once Zidell had secured sponsorship for the run from Dow, he focused on recruiting a team of inspired
message. On Day 17, Christof’s team rearranged its schedule so he could take the lead on a homecoming runners and negotiating permission for them to run through 16 nations around the northern hemisphere.
run into his native Czechoslovakia across Prague’s historic Charles Bridge. “With goodwill,” said Christof,
In mid-2006, Zidell enlisted his neighbor, Matt Kursh, a serial entrepreneur who had sold companies
“monumental achievements are possible.”
to Apple Computer and Microsoft, as a casual advisor on the Foundation’s internet strategy. It didn’t
The Blue Planet Run is part of industrialist-turned-environmental-philanthropist Jin Zidell’s larger plan take Kursh long to become a passionate supporter of the Foundation’s efforts, or to realize that the
to generate sufficient resources to provide fresh water to 200 million people over the next 20 years. Foundation could use some management help. So, in October 2006, Kursh asked Zidell to stop by
The first step was finding a like-minded corporate sponsor to fund the run. He met his match in Andrew his house, and then volunteered to serve as CEO of the Foundation. Zidell accepted the offer on the
Liveris, chairman and CEO of the Dow Chemical Company, who shared the same vision. spot, and announced it to his team that afternoon. Kursh immediately set about creating a management
framework that would allow the massive global task to operate smoothly and efficiently.
“Today, 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. To put that in context, that number is
approximately equal to the entire population of the world at the time our company was founded in 1897,” Olympic Torch Run veteran Dill Driscoll and his event production team at ignition took on the
Liveris said. “Our partnership with the Blue Planet Run Foundation is a signature investment in awareness overwhelming task of planning the route and logistics across four continents, as well as moving 22 runners
and education of this key issue facing the global community.” and 30 staff 160 miles each day. Day and night, they remained the runners’ faithful guides and cheerleaders.


 Vermont Attorney, Dot Helling, 57, has run more
than 100 marathons in her career, but her run along the Great
Wall of China during one of the more exotic legs of the 15,200
mile race was by far the highlight. “The Chinese were fascinated
by my Blue Planet Run team outfit and my muscles — they made
me feel like a celebrity. In fact, some thought I was there to train
for the Olympics.” Chris Emerick

TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Kemerovo, Russia Chris Emerick / Paris, France Nicholas Tavernier / Kansk, Russia Chris Emerick / Paris, France Nicholas Tavernier / Kansas City, MO Chris Emerick
Beijing, China Chris Emerick / Orsa, Belarus Chris Emerick

The runners were divided into five teams of four runners. Each team was expected to run a 40-mile leg utilized. The exteriors were decorated with Web site addresses directing people to donate money for the
during its six-hour shift. Despite every precaution, however, not everything went smoothly. One of the water crisis — but the windows were reserved for several pairs of legs stretching out between stints. The
alternate athletes broke his ankle on his first day while running through Belgium. In Russia, the Silver Team hot showers in these rolling locker rooms came in the form of disposable wipes.
careened across a highway when its van’s front axle broke. Shortly thereafter, in Mongolia, the team’s next
But adversity only seemed to strengthen the will of the runners. The oldest runner, 60-year-old Lansing
van was hit by a drunken driver. And in China, Suniyla Jayaraj had to battle his way through one of the
Brewer, a retired teacher from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had to be ordered by team doctor John
worst traffic jams encountered on the trip to reach the exchange point at the Great Wall.
Pershing to stop running more than his daily 10 miles. Years before, Brewer had developed a water quality
Will Dobbie, who had spent the previous summer researching water problems at Kenya’s Lake Victoria, education program for his students, and now, on his first trip out of North America, it was his time to live
found himself battling stomach problems day after day while running through Russia and China. And he out that message.
wasn’t alone: At one point the teams were forced to temporarily swap members just to keep pace while
Long-distance running is rarely considered a team sport, but a distance of 15,200 miles can only be
the sick recovered.
accomplished as a team. On paper, the Blue Team seemed a most unlikely partnership: Paul Rogan was a
The reality of the Blue Planet Run also looked, felt and smelled far less romantic to the runners after gardener and running coach from Scotland; Heiko Weiner, an inorganic chemistry researcher from East
weeks of constant travel, cramped by months’ worth of gear and provisions. Even the sides of vans were Germany; Rudy van Prooyen, a chemist and a veteran of the Dutch Special Forces; and Laurel Dudley an


TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Zhangbei, China Mark Leong, Redux Pictures / Port Huron, MI Chris Emerick / Pittsburg, CA Catherine Karnow BOTTOM ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Chicago, IL Alex Garcia
Marin, CA Catherine Karnow / Port Huron, MI Chris Emerick / Irkutsk, Russia Chris Emerick

ecotourism guide from Hawaii. They met for the first time at the training camp in Lake Placid just one “It’s about the four of us making it back to New York together and going the distance,” was Rogan’s
week before the run started in New York. explanation for why he took pride in running the extra miles for his team that day. Weiner later
commented, after jumping out of the van to run with Rogan for the last few miles, “It’s never that bad if
While working their way across the Mongolian steppe in the afternoon heat, the Blue Team was on the
what you’re doing is important enough.”
verge of collapse. Van Prooyen was suffering from a groin injury from bouncing around in the van on the
rough Siberian roads. And the meniscus ligament Weiner had torn in his right knee while running the For every one of the runners, there was that single moment when the purpose of the Blue Planet Run —
Boston Marathon was flaring up again. and their own commitment to it — became transcendently clear.

Dudley took the team’s first handoff and ran an extra two miles, hoping to relieve pressure from her For Emmanuel Kibet, a professional marathoner from central Kenya, that moment came on the shores
ailing teammates. “I’ve worked on a lot of volunteer projects and leadership programs before, but nothing of Lake Baikal, the oldest, deepest and largest body of fresh water on the planet. Kibet was one of seven
comes close to the intensity of this one,” she explained while stopping only a few seconds to hydrate. children growing up in a family whose water source was a nearby well that often served up only muddy
water. Perhaps this was one of the reasons he stunned his teammates by suddenly leaping into the
Weiner struggled to complete one of his most difficult 10-mile legs. But the ailing van Prooyen had to be
remarkably clear, frigid lake.
coaxed back into the van by Dr. Pershing after gamely completing eight of his 10 miles.


TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Paris, France Nicholas Tavernier / Moscow, Russia Chris Emerick / Osra, Belarus Chris Emerick / St. Louis, MO Chris Emerick

For Richard Johnson, his favorite memory was Day 37, July Fourth, when tens of thousands of music But even veteran runners reached moments when almost the only thing keeping them going was their
fans were attending Live Earth concerts. Johnson, an accomplished musician who has played with Herbie role as messengers about a growing world crisis. Vermont lawyer and ultramarathoner Dot Helling had
Hancock and Wynton Marsalis, found himself running through Omsk, Russia — dreaming of being at a such a moment on a long uphill climb in Siberia, escorted by a police car driven by a local officer. “It just
concert, but soldiering on. makes me even more determined,” she said through gritted teeth from an agonizing side-ache, “to get the
message out about how bad and solvable the water crisis is if only more people knew about it.”
Mary Chernak, a chemist and project manager at Dow Chemical, and admittedly only a recreational
runner, was constantly grateful just to be on the run. For Victor Lara Ricco, what kept him going was the memory of the time he carried armloads of water
bottles and delivered them to a remote Guatemalan village during a previous water crisis.
“I’m the last person who should be here with all these phenomenal runners and extraordinary people, not
to mention being here in the middle of Mongolia.” she whispered in amazement while watching the sun For husband and wife team Brinn and Sean Harrington of California, it was the recognition that many
rise after completing a night run. “This is my Olympic Games and my one shot to be on the world stage others around the world were experiencing far worse that kept them motivated at the most trying
to do something extraordinary. When else am I ever going to be able to put my professional and married moments. “Whenever I feel like I’m struggling or I’ve had enough of this,” said Brinn, “I think of somebody
life on hold for three months to focus on something so important to so many other peoples’ lives?” having to haul their water 10 miles a day.”


 Supporters, journalists, friends and family
welcome the Blue Planet Run team as they cross the finish line
at precisely 12 noon on September 4, 2007 at the South Street
Seaport in lower Manhattan. Rick Smolan

TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Niagara Falls, Canada Chris Emerick / Chicago, IL Alex Garcia / New York City, NY Rick Smolan / New York City, NY Rick Smolan / New York City, NY Rick Smolan
New York City, NY Rick Smolan / New York City, NY Rick Smolan / New York City, NY Rick Smolan

Melissa Moon, a national champion runner from New Zealand, put her racing career on hold for the Equally indelible in all the runners’ minds was the glorious final stretch — Day 95, September 4, 2007 —
run. “I first heard about it while I was competing in Nigeria — where, as a professional athlete, I felt very when they crossed the finish line in front of a cheering crowd at lower Manhattan’s South Street Seaport.
privileged and selfish. I was preoccupied with getting enough clean water for my training while many of the Surrounded by friends, family and well-wishers, the 22 runners assembled on stage and basked in the first
people living there were looking for enough clean water just to survive.” moment in more than three months in which they were all standing still. Each took their turn receiving a
water drop-shaped award from mentor and father figure Zidell.
The three-month commitment to make a difference in other peoples’ lives took on an extra
“life-changing” dimension for Canadian Jason Louttit and Taeko Terauchi from Japan. After thanking the runners one last time, Zidell told the crowd that the impressive dedication and
commitment of these extraordinary men and women demonstrated what human beings can do when
Accomplished runners in their respective countries but utter strangers at the start of the race, the
they let their better natures take over. Then he smiled and announced that the second Blue Planet Run
two began dating in Prague on Day 17, with a little matchmaking help from Brazilian teammate Laura
was already scheduled for 2009.
Furtado. On Day 34, while making the continental transition from Europe to Asia, they announced their
engagement. When the run passed through Japan on Day 61, they received Terauchi’s parents’ permission The message — Water is Life — has been delivered to the world. Now it is our turn to act.
to marry, which they did in Blue Planet Run style: running past Niagara Falls on Day 89.
— M i ke cerre


Acknowledgements
This book was produced and directed ASSIGNMENT RESEARCH LEGAL COUNSEL Special Thanks Rodney Smith Rachel Baum Phil Disher Kayzi Healy
by Against All Odds Productions Mike Cerre Nate Garhart Monica Almeda Pia Frankenberg Joey Baum Vicki Rokhlin Chris Bedford
Research Director Coblentz, Patch,
Jessica Brackman Jerry Held Walter Pirone Fulvio Bartolucci
PROJECT STAFF Matthew Reed Bruemmer
Duffy & Bass, LLP
Sergey Brinn Foundation
Rick Smolan Peter Friess Extended Family John Pershing Marco Di Martino
Project Director Lee Cerre literary agent Google The Tech
Polly Green and Chris Emerick, Kevin Kuchar Doug Grimes
Jennifer Erwitt Erica Gies Carol Mann Russell Brown Chandi Hematala Flair Films
the carol mann agency Adobe Ben Wedro Dmitry Rudich
Project Director Robert A. Grove Andrea Lovitt Gordon Mortensen
Bruce Chizen Chris Eberlein
Katya Able Matt Jenkins and Mortensen Design, Kaplow
OFFICE ADMINISTRATION Adobe Roz Hamar
Chief Operating Officer Graphic Design and Identity Ellen Hanson Communications, Inc
Norm Levin Ally Merkley David E. Cohen Kathleen Hazelton-Leech
Office Manager Cindy Stern Gene Roberts Liz Kaplow
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Joanne Shen Gene and Gayle Driskell The Durham Family Creative Direction President and CEO
Nancy Merkley and Copywriting John Zernia
Michael Rylander Topher White The Lester Family
Office Coordinator Amy Erwitt Julie Zink Evan Jacobs
Brett Wilkison Fine Design CFO
INFOGRAPHIC DESIGN Katie Stricker David Erwitt Web Design Mark Tweet
Blue Planet Run David Herrick
Nigel Holmes Ellen Erwitt Foundation Will Bruder and Ben Nesbeitt Rick Barton
EDITORIAL AND CAPTIONS General Manager
ACCOUNTING & FINANCE Elliott Erwitt (Will Bruder + Partners)
Michael Malone Jin Zidell Steve Copps Tina Haskin
Robert Powers Inflatable Arch and Stage Design
ESSAY WRITERS Editorial Director Founder and Chairman Executive Vice President
calegari & Morris Erik Erwitt Janell Stewart
Robert Redford Matt Kursh Nick Goldsmith
John Curley Certified Public Accountants’ Misha Erwitt (FTL Studio) Leah Schmerl
Actor and Environmentalist CEO Andy Blake
Contributing Editor Inflatable Arch and Stage Design
Heidi Link Sasha Erwitt Melinda Templeton-Duffy
Fred Pearce Heather Jones Mark Steele Laura Freel
calegari & Morris Jonah Becker
“When the Rivers Run Dry” Scott Gaidano Creative Director Joanne Amorese
Copy Editor Certified Public Accountants’ One and Co. Design Daniel Knizhnik
Diane Ackerman Drive Savers
Will Crain Eugene Blumberg Leyla Wefalle Baton Design Rae Graham
“A Natural History of the Senses” Executive Director Matt Swanburg
Proofreader Blumberg & Associates Sam and Kate Holmes Adrian Lurssen, Chris Livingston
Bill McKibben Rajesh Shah “The Message” Author John Hutto
Linda Seabright George Jardine Lindsey Coyle
“The End of Nature” DESIGN PRODUCTION bookkeeper Adobe
Michael Niman and David Hutto
Robert Palmer Alysha Crouse
Jeffrey Rothfeder Diane Dempsey Murray James and Zem Joaquin Nonprofit Business Solutions Will Cockfield
CMO
“Every Drop for Sale” Designer Back Office Services
JUNIOR ADVISoRS Danielle Arceneaux
Jon Kamen David Overmyer Rob Dunn
Dean Kamen Brad Zucroff Phoebe Smolan Radical Media Beth and George Gage Laurie Adler
CFO
Inventor Insulin Pump and 4-color printing guru Gage and Gage Productions Jason Gross
Segway Human Transporter Jesse Smolan Lucienne and Richard Matthews Annette Fay Ryan Wallace
Peter Truskier Sapient Willie Smith
Michael Malone workflow consultant Alexandra Able Marissa Mayer Ajaya Agrawalla Blair Decembrele
“The Microprocessor: A Biography” Google Mark Parnes and the Paige Harris
Scott Erwert Zachary Able Mitch Stein Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Laura Byrne
Michael Specter Charles Melcher Kimmy Awad
Sophia Able and Rosati staff
“The Last Drop” (The New Yorker) Hulda Nelson Jill Youse Laura Thomas
Doug and Tereza Menuez Marcello Sessa
Mason Rylander George Jones Shannon Eis
Paul Hawken Bill Shore Vanessa Shipp Kate Smithurst
“Blessed Unrest” Annabelle Rylander Jon O’Hara
Will Harlan Ignition Sheri Lapidus
SENIOR ADVISoRS Dean and Ann Ornish Drew Brannon
Mike Cerre Sydney Pruss Bryce Avallone Mark Driscoll Hilary Munson
Emmy Award-Winning Marvin Smolan Gabriella Piccioni Chairman Karen Steinbuechler
Broadcast Journalist Evan Pruss Irina Balytsky Linda Michalisin
Phillip Moffitt Natasha and Jeff Pruss Susan Driscoll TJ Rigdon
Earth Balance Institute
Reed Smolan Laura Shelman
CEO Joseph Brubaker
PHOTOGRAPHY Lily Smolan Pamela Reed Youth Board
Kathryn Arnold Mike Hersom Alyson Young
Mike Davis Diane Rylander Chris Koch Palace Press Staff
Earth Balance Institute Savannah Smith Executive Vice President
Photography Director Coordinator Piotr Kaszkur
Megan Smith Raoul Goff
Stephen Petranek Sam Worrin Lauri Chotiner Publisher
Deborah Pang Davis Former Editor-in-Chief, Google Megan Knight Kevin Dudley
Photography Director Discover Magazine Max Worrin Erin Packer Peter Beren & Michael Madden
Leslie Smolan Kristin Mayer Mike Cohen
Margot Duane Danielle Kursh John Stewart Executive Directors
Carl Ganter Sandy Smolan Connie Ge
Photography Liaison Circle of Blue
John LoBrutto Mikayla Butchart
Jory Kursh Andi McWhorter
Meg McVey Gloria Smolan Katie Kopel Alessandro Giorgio Assistant Managing Editor
Cabell Brand Violet O’Hara Ricky McWhorter
Photo Editor Derrick Story Daniel Weidlein
Center for International Fabio Umilta’ Iain Morris
Michelle Molloy Poverty & Resource Studies O’Reilly media Robert Howell Art Director
Sponsors Sabine Kunz Barbara Stoklossa
Photo editor, Newsweek Pete Hogg Kara Swisher Kelly Kozlowski
Kelly Hartzell Melissa White
Digital Pond The Blue Planet Run Foundation All Things Digital Luke Joyce Design Production Supervisor
Evan Nisselson www.BluePlanetRun.org Steve Williams
digital railroad Dennis Walker Anna Sergeeva Fabio Buccafusco
Bill Drayton Lina S. Palma
Data Recovery by Drivesavers Edoardo Cogo
Michele Stephenson Ashoka CameraBits Allie Johnson Ingmar Lent Production Manager
www.drivesavers.com
Photo editor, time Arthur Langhaus Patricia Breed
Daniel Haarburger Francesco Pocchi Noah Potkin
www.travelmuse.com
Brian Storm kls associates
Anne Wojcicki George Couperthwait Press Supervisor
Chytanya Kompala Kayleigh West
MediaStorm Joe Callaway Camera Bits Passport Capital Jennifer Jordan
KLS associates makers of PhotoMechanic Erin Silk Edward Barker
Rusty Blazenhoff www.camerabits.com Richard Wurman Max Helton
Daphne Kis The Understanding Business Caroline Melhado Ross Dawson
Jeff Hansen FileMaker Julia Emmons
www.filemaker.com James Able Ayana Otteman Justin Relf
Business advisor Millie Daniels
Sheri Sarver Ben Kuelthau Francis Ryder
Barry Reder Sue Bozgoz
Joyce Deep


Donors The Blue Planet Run Foundation offers its deepest thanks to its supporters around the world.

Abby Bronson Bruce & Karen Asher Deborah Clar Helmut Albrecht Joseph Hartman Linda Parman Michael Pollastri Rebecca Lanning Stephanie Brown
Abimibola Shabi Bruce Byers Deborah Holton Hemlata Bhatt Joseph J. Ulitto Linda Sadunas Michael Rabin Rebecca Leigh Stephanie Swanson
Adam Brodheim Bruce Carlyon Deborah Mckeeman Hendrik Tuinstra Joseph Santiago Linda Tinoly Michael Seise Rebecca Moore Stephanie Zuro
Adam Kawasawa Bruce Hodgdon Deborah Ward Henry and Donna Isaacs Josie Savo Lindsay Billings Michael Sellnow Reed Harrison Stephen B. Martin
Adam Skolnick Bruce Raabe Debra Kalmakav Henry Van De Werken Joyce Wahl Lindsey Coyle Michael Silberman Remco Bos Stephen Cambridge
Adele Cohen Bryan Stamp Debra Koehn Hillary Weisman Joycelin Tui Lindsey Harik Michael Staloch Rene Pagan Stephen Corby
Adlai Majer Bryce Avallone Debra Stanley Hklepser Joycelyn Gray Linsey Cherveny Michael Wyman Rich Scott Steve Burns
Adrian Sedlin Byron Miller Debra Steines Holly Brennan-Cook Juan Mendoza Lisa Draper Michele Wilson Rich Wells Steve R. Burns
Aimee Murphy Caitlin Thomas Denise Cederquist Holly Crill Judith Adel Lisa Larson Micheline Leclair Richard Barshay Steve Werner
Ajaya Agrawalla Cameron Haley Denise Paleothodoros Holly Roenicke Judith Asher Lisa M Kingsbury Michelle Baxter Richard Feldman Steven Corn
Akemi Adams Candelario G Olvera Denise Pollock Holly Strelow Judith Dressel Lisa Shaw Michelle Dirk Richard Helling Steven Henderson
Al and Norma Mae Exner Cara Mattleman Denise Silk Houston H. Carr Judith Forbes Lisa Sutherland Michelle E Demarco Richard Holly Steven Holli
Alain Gravel Carla Thomas Deniz Demirors Howard Beck Judith Ghezzi Lissette Roca Michelle J. Reynolds Richard Hudson Steven Hough
Albert Liu Carlos Gonzalez Dennis Carney Huck Patterson Judith Minar Lois Ruszala Michelle M. Foco Richard Jares Steven Lamy
Alex Grennan Carlos Ryerson Dennis Lane Ian Cornell Judy Raymond Loraine Stillman Michelle Plachta Richard Lacroix Steven Lee
Alex Makai Carmen Gonzalez Devon Hull Ilana K. Schwartz Judy Timmons Loren Faire Michelle Tsai Richard Peak Steven Ogunro
Alexander Fuqua Carol Bauer Diana Burton Ingrid Wolf Judy White Loren Sohn Michelle Williamson Richard Saunders Steven Reddick
Alexander Ting Carol Baum Diane Biber Irene Hale Juliana Jones Lorenzo Cresci Michelle Wolcott Richard Stringfield Steven Strand
Alexei Perez Carol Kasle Diane Boardman Irene Ng Juliana Serafin Loretta Melhado Miinkay Yu Richard Wion Steven Wells
Alfred Arias Carol Moen Diane Glaser Irma B. Munz Julie Fasone Holder Lori Orchow Haney Mike Hayes Richard Womack Stuart Mccracken
Alfred Castillo Jr Carol Wean Diane K Flynn Jack Berdasco Julie Ferron Lori Poliski Mike Kaufman Richard-Sheena Stuart S. Sherburne
Alice Perry Carol Yeoman Diane Mcnally Jack Hudson Julie Scelfo Lorrie Deutscher Mike Mcguire Larson-Whittaker Sudhir Parekh
Alisa Warshay Caroline Clabaugh Diane Miller Jackie Mooney Julie Thyne Lucas Howell Mike Moses Rick Clark Sulejman Lolovic
Alison Delmage Caroline Logue Diane Plowdrey Jacqueline Hartley Julie Woodard Lucylle M. Bisese Mike Reilley Rita Berman Susan Berry
Alison Nadle Carolyn Agnew Dianne Allport Jacqueline Hunt Julius Russell Luis Ize Luldow Mike Zalar Rob & Jan Goodwin Susan Brennan
Alla Bronskaya Carolyn Braden Dianne Dahl Jacqueline Rawcliffe Jung Wor Chin Luisa Casella Millie Beskers-Croth Robbyn Prange Susan Davis
Allan Wolff Carolyn C. anderson Dick De Jong James Carter Justin Deane Luping Liu Minoru Kobayashi Robert Abadie Susan Fraser
Allison Bembe Carolyn Hammis Dick Nagaki James Chambers Kaloyan Mihaylov Lynda Blake Mitch Allen Robert and Mary Brown Susan Greenhalgh
Alondra Trevino Carrie Baker Stahler Don Fysh James Chervenak Kara Dreste Lynn Hebert Mitch Binnarr Robert and Renee Foster Susan Oetzel
Amanda Broniszewski Cate Cetrulo Donald Kane James Fung Kara Zastrow Lynn Karaim Mitch Stein Robert Bowman Susan Schroeder
Amanda Hauf Catherine Brubaker Donna Bartlett James Haskell Karen Beaumont Lynn Newport Molly Currey Robert Denby Susan Van Doren
Amanda Tucker Catherine Gouvin Donna Crill James Hill Karen C. Boudreau Lynn Stansbury Molly J. Lavoie Robert G. Currey Susan Wolfe
Amber Elizabeth Gray Catherine Maxey Donna Hutchins James K Werner Karen Cary Lynne Hamilton Molly Lynch Robert Geisler Suzann Bugosh
Ami Marcus Cathy Hale Donna Lavins James Mandell Karen Elacqua M Kathleen O’Connor Molly Selley Robert Herbert Suzanne Gaulocher
Ami Minteer Celena Barrera Donna Radka James Nevins Karen Gallagher Macall Polay Monica R Tanney Robert Johnson Suzanne Lewis
Amy Altman-Browning Celia Bressack Doone Watson James Parker Karen King Mahmood Jawaid Monica Tanney Robert Kane Swadha Sharma
Amy Cissell Chad Lecompte Dorothy Helling James Richards Karen Knuepfer Malka Van Prooyen Morley Mcbride Robert Kiefer Sweta Somasi
Amy Dick Chantal Kane Dorothy Noble James Williams Karen Madigan Manhattan Woods Mrs P Ludgate Robert Koehler Sylvester Ceci
Amy Ferree Charla Cloudt Dorothy Tolfree Jamie Bartsch Karen Simon Golf Club Mukund Patel Robert Lafferty Sylvia Saperstein
Amy Howard Charles anderson Douglas Bollam Jamie Linna Kari Vigerstol Manuel Ybarra Jr Muriel Glasgow Robert Mcmurry T. Charles Powell
Amy Hui Charles Hudler Douglas Brown Jane A Keen Karin Slough Marcel Venckeleer Nanci Gelb Robert N. Miller Tami Fohl
Amy Kennedy Charles Patterson Douglas Parker Jane Coyle Karla Cutting Marcella Rolnick Nancy E Hall Robert Palmer Tanis Gray
Amy Lamberti Charles Young Dow Midland, Mi Jane Denardo Karlene K. Bergold Margaret J Keen Nancy J Cossler Robert Patzke Tanja Albright
Amy Luce Charlie Darr Dow Sarnia, Ca Jane Gross Kate Eovino Margaret P. Bellin Nancy L. Kalef Robert Patzke Taya Kohnen
Amy Rezmer Cheryl Hayes Drake Zimmerman Jane Hoeltzel Katherine Galvan Margaret R Walker Nancy Leader-Cramer Robert Quigley Tekla Israelson
Amy Smith Cheryl Waldbaum Duane Romer Jane Kellogg Katherine Mcdonald Margaret Wilson Nancy Schrock Robert Six Teresa Baratz
Ana Marino Chetan Kamdar Durga Menon Jane Norton Katherine Rings Margot Vahrenwald Natalie Levings Robert Steiner Teresa Collins
andres & Kyle De Lasa Christelle Loupforest E. Whitney Westgate Janell Jones Katherine Schwartz Maria Lamberti Nathan Bluestein Robert Stephens Teresa Farrar
andres Edwards Christian Anfosso Eamonn F. Grant Janell Stewart Kathleen Di Paola Maria Legaux Navid Ahrarian Robert Thompson Terese Woll
andres Suarez Christina Krawczyk-Miller Edith Rogers Janet Dick Kathleen Schroeder Marianne Adezio Navid Ahrarian Robert Valle Terrence Finneran
andrew Cox Christina Mckibbon Edward P. Sullivan Janet F Cornell Kathryn Clarke Marianne Jackson Nicholas Gron Robert W. Petersen Terrence Linseman
andrew Hyte Christine Heath Eido Shimano Janet F. Cornell Kathy Baczko Marie Quinn Nick & Rachel Tomczek Robert Watson Thaddeus Siermann
andrew Skinner Christine Ingram Eileen Baral Janet Ross Kathy Hally Marie Vincent Nicola Ephgrave Roberta Hardin Theresa Ciccolella
andy Beam Christney Mcglashan Elaine Katz Janet Tuma Kathy Shirk Marilyn Arnold Palley Nicole Giannone Robin A Opitz Theresa Fletcher
andy Elliott Christoph Kleimeier Elise Harrington Janice Cupples Kathy Stevens Marilyn Feldman Nicole Myers Robin Wall Thomas Cuthbert
Angel Hardy Christopher Cullen Elizabeth Frey Janice Hawrelak Katie Sims Marilyn Romine Nicole Polsky Rodney Coleman Thomas Doerr
Angelina Yap Christopher Etchells Elizabeth Grandy Janice Wilkins Katrin Grosse Marilyn S. Stein Nicole Romanik Rodney Hood Thomas Emilson
Anil Rao Christopher Grams Elizabeth Haines Janis E Smith Kelly Wright Marilyn Waite Nicole Stuart Roger Gast Thomas G. Arminio
Ann Bernstein Christopher James Elizabeth Kanne Jansma Ken Schultz Marisa Leigner Nolan Treadway Roger Hendrick Thomas Macewan
Ann Chotiner Christopher Menzies Elizabeth Moore Janyse Jones Kenan Stevick Mark Adams Nora Seilheimer Roger Light Thomas Manning
Ann Shelly Christopher Millard Elizabeth Osley Jason Dananay Kenneth andrews Mark Cummins Norah Prombo Rogier Van Vliet Thomas Moran
Anna Forrester Christopher Mudd Elizabeth Wagner Jason Fujioka Kenneth Burdett Mark Davis-Cote Octavis Cabey Ronald L Holtman Jr Thomas Nash
Anna Gillespie Christopher Short Ellen Balk Jason Jackson Kenneth Chin Mark Emonds Olaitan Olaniran Ronald Leblanc Thomas Rosset
Anne and Vincent Mai Christopher Wakefield Emily Diznoff Jason Kaminski Kenneth Dinkin Mark Frears Omar Amanat Rose Rodriguez Thomas Small
Anne Green Cindy Goetz Eric Edelson Jason Oxman Kenneth F. Donadio Mark Gregoreski Owen Klicker Rose S. Singer Thomas Stuart
Anne Haines Cindy Griffith Eric Stangland Jason Rita Kent Munro Mark Henning Pamela Eng Roseland Rotary Timiza Wagner
Anne Kann Cindy Kohut Eric Tilenius Javier Reyes Kermit Cook Mark Hofmaier Pamela Jeanie Barton International Timothy Gayfer
Anne Kelly-Rowley Cindy Rohoman Erica Martling Jay Bienstock Kerry Steach Mark Lander Pamela Stapleton Rosemary F. French Timothy J Horst
Anne Van Prooyen Cindy Stern Erik Green Jay Chervenak Kevin Johnson Mark Lin Pamela Stirn Rosie E Ragsdale Tina Adwar
Anne Wallin Claudia Caine Erika Allison Jean Mccormick Kevin Kuchar Mark Mcadon Pat Maaten Rudolf Jentsch Tina Braband Cross
Anne-Catherine Nagel Claudia Caine Erin Kelly Jean Yamamoto Kevin Kumler Mark R Davidson Patrice Callaghan Rudy Rawcliffe Todd D. Elliott
Annemarie Helms Claudia Cummings Erin Packer Jeanne Bartow Kevin Murray Mark Sherkow Patricia King Rudy Van Prooyen Tom, Jan, Nick, Blake
Anthony Targan Cleo Bolen Ernest Frank Jeanne Doyle Kevin Nasman Mark Steele Patricia Rogan Russell Chavey Artushin
Antonette Delauro Clifton Miskell Ethel Peterson Jeff Hippler Kevin Noble Mark Tichon Patricia Villalobos Ruth A Simon Toni Mcewan
Antonio Valero Solanellas Clinton Schroeder Eva Mcglynn Jeff Reich Kevin Peil Mark Wentley Patrick Angoujard Ruth Anne Mcquillin Torin Reed
Ariane Dhaene Coen De Cock Evelia Sosa Jeffrey A. Jones Kim Goble Mark Wonsil Patrick Doyle Ruth Miller Tracy Napp
Arlene Rexford Corey Boles Faranak Amirsalari Jeffrey Rottman Kim Miller-Leonard Marlene Rifkin Patrick East Sahil Shah Tracy Perry
Arnold Zidell Courtney Lehnhard Frank Buschky Jeffrey Sullivan Kimberly Brown Marlo Meylan-Neitzel Patrick Regier Sally Hardenberg Trey Lambert
Arthur Nudelman Craig Mosley Frank Massaro Jeffry Biggs Kimberly Mcvey Marsha Kotalac Patti Rocks Sally Mccabe Tricia Fisher
Ashley Forrester Craig Pfeifer Fraser Crow Jenna Felice Kimberly Obrien Martha Edens Pattie Fraser Sandra Fambrough Ulf Schoell
Ashley Houston Curt Theriault Fred Cook Jennifer Chabus Kimberly Richmond Martha Motley Patty Keck Sandra L. Spiessl Vaishali Chadha
Ashok Patrawala Cynthia Burt Fred Fielding Jennifer Corlew Kimberly Rose Martine Stolk Paul and Hope Tormey Sandra Morgan Vallari Shah
Audrey Albrecht Cynthia Clayton Fred Friedman Jennifer Deshazer Kiran Baikerikar Marty Landry Paul Banks Sandra Vann Van Houwenhove Koen
Audrey Fay D C Mclaughlin Jr Gabriel Wyzga Jennifer Gremmels Kirstin Hinchcliff Marvin Lundwall Paul Jones Sandy Langevin Vanessa Decarbo
Ava West D Haddon Foster Ii Gaiatech Inc Jennifer Koelliker Krista Laursen Mary Chervenak Paul Melzer Sara Colglazier Vavrik Nicole
Barbara J. Morgan D J Crake Gail Dooley Jennifer Linden Kristin Crain Mary Clifford Paul N. Farnham Sara Hoffman Venkat Shankaramurthy
Barbara Jones Dale Elley-Bristow Gary & Carol Fradkin Jennifer Thiel Kristine Buckley Mary Cooper Paul Nietvelt Sara Klamo Vicki Hopper
Barbara Leff Dale Hummelle Gary Rudnick Jeremy Curran Kristine Nelson Mary Dodge Paul Sledd Sarah Granzo Victor & Linda
Barbara Mcarthur Dale Kiel George andreadakis Jessica Garcia Kyle Spencer Mary H Wark Paula Cameron Sarah Sprister Atiemo-Obeng
Barbara Migl Daniel Borsutzky George Burch Jessica Novitsky Kylee Wackerle Mary Jo Piper Paula Westaway Sarah Weber Victor M Castaneda
Barbara Monteilh Daniel Haarburger George Butterfield Jesslyn Terburgh Lakehills United Mary Just Skinner Peggy Glenn Sarah Wilkinson Victoria Blooston
Barbara Pontello Daniel Naimey George Couperthwait Jill Doiron Methodist Church Mary R. Long Peter Cranford Scott Farrell Victoria Rokhlin
Barbara Rice Daniel O’Brien George E. Springston Jimmy Tanner Larayne Hesse Mary Rokyta Peter Deal Scott Hatfield Vinod Shah
Barry Grossman Daniel Wolf George L Sherman Joan Donham Larry Elvebak Mary Selley Peter Jolles Scott Hodukavich Virginia Okinga
Barry Richards Daniela Messingschlager George Welch Joan Seville Lasette Barrow Mary Virginia Stieb-Hales Peter Molinaro Scott Miller Virginia Panter
Becky Mcniven Danielle Drayer Georgeanne Bohn Joanna Monahan Laura Edwards Mary Williams Peter Shelton Scott Ruplinger Virginia Swisher
Belen Carmichael Daphne Patterson Georgia E Welles Joanne Siegla Laura Elsenboss Maryann Amato Peter Skinner Scott Yetter Vivian Otteman
Ben Chance Darin Qualls Georgia Krueger Joanne Varallo Laura Farrington Marylouise Hawken Peyman Saidizand Sean Harrington Walter Foster Iii
Ben Pijcke Daryl Barker Gerald Lachapelle Joannie Halas Laura Medalie Matt Kursh Phil Howard Shailesh Moghe Wanda Baker
Benjamin Matuska David Barton Germaine Dewolfe Endres Jodi Morse Laura Tagliani Matt Leland Philip Moss Shannon Gregg Warren F. Kitzmiller
Bernd Bredehoeft David Boeckman Gina Adduci John A. Stenstrom Laura Voisinet Matt Whitcomb Philip Salminen Shannon Griefer Wayne E. Campbell
Bernice Hopkins David Christof Gina Gibbs-Foster John and Elaine Broderick Lauren Mcdonnell Matthew Fellows Philip Thompson Shannon Stephens Wendy Love
Beryt Oliver David Collins Glen Johnson John and Karen Lafayette Lauri Chotiner Matthew Morgan Philippe Knaub Shannon Waxman Wendy Nienhuis
Besh Barcega David Curry Glen Orr John Cleveland Laurie Adler Matthew Stein Phillip Suderman Shari Hardinger Wendy Wert
Beth Wendling David Douglas Gm Orourke John Davis Laurie Anne and Maureen Miksztal Phyllis A Slott Sharon Barnes Wes & Dayana Simons
Betty Mitchell David E. Dassey Gonzalo Antezana John Emrick Charles Arrigoni Maureen Peak Phyllis and Steve Napoli Sharon Guilford Wes Heinlein
Betty Schaeffer David Freshour Grace A. Mcdonough John Gorte Laurie Colon Maurice Sperry Phyllis Durante Sharon Jeffery Whitney Bayne
Bill Kizorek David Herrick Grace Ward John Hamilton Laurie Leeper Max Ruegger Phyllis Weiss Shawn Koss Whitney High School
Bill M. Rudolphsen David Holcomb Greg Abel John Harris Laurie Schopick Maxine Russell Polly Leach-Lychee Sheila and Dean Williams Associated Student Body
Billy Bardin David James Stewart Gregory and Ana Freiwald John Kayser Lauryl Sumner Maydelis Torres Pradeep Nagaraju Shelley Souza Wilda Kalbach
Billy E Gray David K Willis Gregory Grocholski John Lent Lawrence Zhu Mayya Kawar R. Richard Williams Shelley-Ann Layne Will Harlan
Birgit Lacey David K. Herlihy Gregory H Butler John Lohman Leah Schmerl Meghan Roman Rabbi Marketmaker Shelli Gonshorowski Willem Van Prooijen
Bitter To Sweet Waters David Kepler Gulshan John Mclaren Leandro Garza Meghan Smithe Rachael Burs Sheri D’Hansel William Ayscue
Blake Robertson David Klanecky Haley Lowry John Ng Leanne Slater Melanie Pickering Rachael Wert Sherilyn Hill William Gaskill
Bonnie Dominguez David Krzyzaniak Hans Hummel John P. Gause Lee Biggs Melissa Algaze Rachel Johnson Sheryl H. Moore William Goldman
Brad Veitch David M. Pincus Hans-Joachi Lunk Phd John Peterson Lee Buckman Melissa Pratt Rachel Morrow Shiri Leventhal William Kaufmann
Brandon Wall David Manthey Harold Davidson John R Lightbody Leeanne Dejournett Melissa Rutten Rafael Cayuela Shishir Shah William Mccarthy
Brandy Caron David Parker Harry A Proctor John Stewart Leila Rahbar Melvin Pincus Raghav Ram Sidney L. Saltzstein William Polk
Breanne Lundin David Seal Harry W Murray John Theile Lesley Rushmer Michael A. Puglisi Rajit Pahwa Sierra Standish William Seibert
Brendan Connor David Sutherin Hayley Deluca Jon Bernhard Lesley Watz Michael A. Puglisi Ralph E. Wooden Sifiso Ngwenya William Valade
Brian Collins David Tetreault Heather Hawkins Jon Love Leslie Hatfield Michael Bristow Randall Hayes Simon Upfill-Brown Winfrid Mirau
Brian Foreman David W Stowe Heather Lynn Hillers Jon Rochlis Liane Alitowski Michael Hadley Randy Fischback Siu Len Sanchez Winterport Pizza
Brian Hayes Davida Hagan Heather Norbeck Jonathan Pugh Linda Brady Michael J. Fedor Rashmi Caton Sonia Blum Woods Mona
Brian Lee Dawn C Meyerriecks Heather Patrick Jordan Tremblay Linda Cano Rodriguez Michael Johnson Ravinder Oswal Oswal Sonia Mayoral Woon Lam Wong
Brian Lotfi Dawn M Hart Hee Kong Jorge Oti Linda Fry Michael Klee Raymond Hoefer South Bend Rotary Wubbe Prins
Brian Zurek Deanna Kursh Heidi L Ravenscraft Jorge Rubalcaba Linda Higgins Michael Krans Raymond Robertson International Yiwen Fung
Brianna Reynaud Deb Weiss Heidi Mattingly Jose Beuses Linda Kingman Michael Kuntz Raymond Schuette Stacey Carrier Yongjun Lei
Bridget Hockemeyer Debora Golding Heiko Weiner Jose H Gonzalez Linda Lichon Michael Niman Rebecca Davis Stacey Schroeder-Bacsi Yoshiko Tsukuda
Brie Sloan Deborah Brink Helen Kastner Joseph Capehart Linda Moore Michael Olken Rebecca Durkin Stephane Costeux Yuk Man Tam

DBA Verde - Blue Planet Run

More Related Content

What's hot (19)

Viewers also liked (8)

Similar to DBA Verde - Blue Planet Run (20)

More from La Red DBAccess (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

DBA Verde - Blue Planet Run