Protecting Water In Kansas, Panel Discussion

Protecting Water In Kansas, Panel Discussion

Friday, 2 February 2018, 6:00pm-9:00pm

Douglas County Fair Grounds, Dreher Building, 2110 Harper St., Lawrence KS 66046

The Sustainability Action 2018 Annual Meeting will host a panel discussion on “Protecting Water in Kansas: Quality and Availability”, with a local, regional, and state focus.  The panel will consist of water activists who are leaders in their own organizations, and who draw upon varying perspectives for protecting our valuable waters.  Our intent is to educate, inspire, bring additional people into the movement, collaborate, and mobilize to action.  The following representatives from these groups will be the panelists:

Dawn Buehler – Friends of the Kaw: Kansas Riverkeeper 
Elaine Giessel – Kansas Sierra Club  
Thad Holcombe – Water Advocacy Team   
Rachel Jefferson – Historic Northeast Midtown Association    
Karin Pagel-Meiners – Wakarusa Group – Kansas Sierra Club  
Jessica Skyfield – Kansas Water  
Eric Kirkendall, moderator – Sustainability Action Network   

Water is our most precious good, enabling and cleansing all life.  Only 2.5% of Earth’s water is fresh – present in lakes, streams, aquifers, and the atmosphere.  It is an all-encompassing concern, spanning the aspects of water quality, quantity, privatization, sea level rise, wars, and more.  Water availability is threatened by drought, desertification, pollution, urbanization, overconsumption, and privatization.  Water quality is threatened by our industrial society in several ways, from injection wells and fracking, to nitrate fertilizer and pesticide runoff, and pharmaceuticals and other toxins.

 

water globe

Most of the pollution and overconsumption can be traced to industrial activities such as fossil fuel extraction, petrochemical plants, power generation, urban lawn chemicals, and industrial agriculture.  The cumulative result of all this is that our streams have become open sewers, aquatic ecosystems are compromised, aquifers are contaminated or threatened, crop failures are more common for both irrigating and subsistence farmers, cost of water treatment is rising, algae blooms trigger ocean dead zones, and there is a drinking water crisis in numerous cities nationwide.

 

lead in water

The evening will begin with a pot luck dinner at 6:00pm sharp (arrive a little early with your dish).  At 7:00pm the kitchen will close, and we will welcome everyone and give an overview of water issues concerning our local communities.  Then after introductions, each of the panelists will describe the state of water as they see it, and how their organization is working to protect our waters for the common good.  In the second hour, we want to explore how all of us can best work together as a team to define and spark action that will lead to substantive change.  Each of the panelists and their organizations have distinctive approaches to these issues, and any potential actions will be more effective if we combine our efforts.  We hope you will join us.

Water & Air Pollution Kills 9 Million a Year, and Costs $4.6 Trillion

Water & Air Pollution Kills 9 Million a Year, and Costs $4.6 Trillion

More than war and violence – more than smoking, hunger, or natural disasters – more than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.  More people are prematurely killed worldwide each year from polluted air and water, at least 9 million, than the total number of people who die every year from these other major killers.  This data comes from an extensive study by the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health that was released on 19 October 2017.  The study found that one in six premature deaths, or 17 percent of the world population, are attributable to toxic exposure to environmental pollutants, and that the financial cost is about US$4.6 trillion, or about 6.2 percent of the global economy.

Lead author of the report, and Dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, Philip Landrigan, said “Pollution is a massive problem that people aren’t seeing because they’re looking at scattered bits of it”.  The figure of 9 million pollution-related deaths is considered a low estimate by Commission researchers, who are projecting that the impacts will be better quantified with new assessment methods and new research.

As one might expect, “The vast majority of pollution-related deaths — 92 percent — occur in low- or middle-income countries, where policy makers are chiefly concerned with developing their economies”, according to the report.  The continents of Asia and Africa have the worst incidence of toxin-induced premature deaths, and India tops the list with one out of every four premature deaths, or some 2.5 million, caused by pollution.  And in the wealthier countries that have curbed much of the early occurrences of industrial pollution, it’s the lower class poor communities that still suffer from negligent corporate emissions and lax enforcement – the so-called environmental justice communities.  As the article states, “According to the NAACP’s research, the percentage of African Americans in the fenceline zones near chemical plants is 75 percent greater than for the country overall; for Latinos, 60 percent”.  Learn more at – Pollution Kills an Estimated 9 Million People Every Year.

CleanAirNow

CleanAirNow

Sustainability Action Network is proud to introduce , CleanAirNow

CleanAirNow is dedicated to improving air quality in Kansas City and the surrounding region, particularly in communities suffering the greatest health burden, and to preventing and mitigating disease caused by air pollution.

CleanAirNow is a community-based and community-driven equitable partnership of community groups, educational, research, environmental, health, other organizations, and individual members.

Learn more and join at: http://cankc.org/

Ogallala Aquifer Threatened by User Depletion

Ogallala Aquifer Threatened by User Depletion

The Ogallala Aquifer (technically the High Plains Aquifer) underlies an area in eight states, of approximately 174,000 sq mi, being one of the world’s largest aquifers.  30,800 square miles of that is in western and central Kansas, 900 sq mi in Colorado, 20,600 sq mi in Texas, and it is under virtually all of the state of Nebraska.  The aquifer stores as much water volume as Lake Huron (2.9 billion acre-feet).  It provides 30 percent of the United States’ irrigation, contributing to an astounding 20 percent of the country’s entire agricultural output.  The Ogallala water accumulated slowly over tens of thousands of years, and aquifer recharge occurs very slowly because of scant rainfall on the high plains.  In most of the aquifer, except for Nebraska, the irrigation use by high water-demand crops like corn is far greater than the recharge rate.  In Colorado alone, farmers pumped water out of 4,000 wells, sucking out as much as 500 gallons per minute per well.


In western Kansas, farmers are drawing down their region’s groundwater at more than six times the natural rate of recharge.  Kansas State University researchers found that 30 percent of the region’s groundwater has been tapped out.  As underground water levels drop, pumping from a greater depth becomes more and more expensive, to the point of unprofitability.  The advent of center-pivot irrigation systems in the 1960’s allowed people to irrigate uneven terrain, which opened up large new areas for water thirsty crops like corn.  That led, in turn, to large feedlots and packing plants.  The combination of corn for cattle feed, and corn for government subsidized ethanol production has driven a tripling of the price of corn since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.  This price bubble will burst when the Ogalla Aquifer drops so deep that pumping costs will become prohibitive.  By then, the midwest will have become the Great American Desert.  Learn more at – The real reason Kansas is running out of water, and Why These 8 States Could Soon Form the ‘Great American Desert’.