A report by Peter H.
Gleick estimates that if no action
is taken to address unmet basic human needs for water, as many as 135 million
people will die from water-related diseases by 2020. Rainwater harvesting
is viewed by many, as a partial solution to the problems posed by water
scarcity: droughts and desertification, erosion from runoff, over-reliance on
depleted aquifers, and the costs of new irrigation, diversion, and water
treatment facilities.
Can rainwater be
made safe to drink? Yes. How safe? As safe as your well or tap water. How do
you make it safe for indoor use? By filtering and purifying it. Contaminants in
water may include algae, air pollution, bird excrement, and leaves, sand, and
dust. Local wells have dealt with these problems for decades. Installation of filtration
and purification equipment can remove these contaminants at home as well.
The initial aim of this blog was to attract interest by other teams and collectives to engage in an organized inquiry of how to develop a set of practical solutions material for developing or enhancing an autonomous community anywhere in the world. But goals sometimes are either set too high to achieve, or take too long to materialize. In such cases people who may initially share them may loose interest. The system has altered our internal clocks to work in the rhythms of industrial machinery. This has been partly our experience here, which we would like to share without the specifics of who, where, when. Some of us have grown to cleanse our internal clocks and are more patient in watching change take place in human terms, not in capitalistic industrial rhythms. Some have not been able to do so and are impatient and try to force things. While doing so what they are forcing are their ideas on other people who are unable to share them or are unable to commit to a process where those ideas can collide, blend, and evolve into a collective product.
Randy Schekman, centre, at a Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm.
Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process
and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken, according to a Nobel
prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.
Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine
this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab
would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature,
Cell and Science.
Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury"
journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields
of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was
exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but
professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.
MALVINAS ARGENTINAS, Córdoba, Argentina , Dec 2 2013 (IPS) -
The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s
central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the
weed-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood.
But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to
build a seed plant.
The creator of glyphosate, whose
trademark is Roundup, and one of the world’s leading producers of
genetically modified seeds, Monsanto is building one of its biggest
plants to process transgenic corn seed in Malvinas Argentinas, this poor
community of 15,000 people 17 km east of the capital of the province of
Córdoba.
(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as
prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the
intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or
communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is
only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently
contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it
demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated
world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision,
when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of
dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy,
Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and
awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And
although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company,
he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely
confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature
of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the
sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped
and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go
without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy
and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved
present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the
anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in
many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the
history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does
well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western
radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose
imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.
Good public information doesn't come easy these days and many utilize it for profit and often find a way to eliminate it from public eye. Quite often this happens with information published with public money funding academic studies for which industry later purchases the rights and patents. For this reason when we find good information we copy it and preserve it before it vanishes.
Sewage systems and clean water access has for centuries been the largest by far source of health improvement to urban populations. Medicine is quite overstated as a significant component of health, not coming even close to clean water and safe sewage systems, food, shelter, and working conditions.
This web site is aimed at giving support for the publication PC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design and it accompanying Windows based design program. Links are also given to publications on this and other low cost sewerage systems NOW AVAILABLE IN SPANISH AND IN PORTUGUESE AND IN FRENCH (as of 19 Jan 2011) see the download page
IntroductionPC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design was published by the School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, UK, in January 2001. It is a manual and windows based design program for use in the design of the simplified sewerage system. It was published with the aim of promoting the use of simplified sewerage throughout the developing world. To quote the preface of the manual:
"Simplified sewerage is an important sanitation option in peri-urban areas of developing countries, especially as it is often the only technically feasible solution in these high-density areas. It is a sanitation technology widely known in Latin America, but it is much less well known in Africa and Asia. It is the purpose of this Manual to disseminate this technology more widely in the developing world, so that it can be used in peri-urban sanitation programmes and project to improve the health of poor communities. However, simplified sewerage is not just for peri-urban areas - it can be successfully and appropriately used in middle-and upper-income areas as well.We hope that this Manual serves its purpose of making simplified sewerage better known throughout the developing world, and that the PC-based design program contained herein facilitates the hydraulic design calculations."
How To Get The Manual and ProgramThe manual and program are both available to be downloaded from this site.
The manual in .pdf format can be viewed or downloaded here and
Details of how to download the design program can be found here.
Prof. D Mara School of Civil Engineering University of Leeds Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT UK
Note that there is a limited supply of printed manuals and CDs.Simplified Sewerage DescriptionSimplified sewerage is an off-site sanitation technology that removes all wastewater from the household environment. Conceptually it is the same as conventional sewerage, but with conscious efforts made to eliminate unnecessarily conservative design features and to match design standards to the local situation.
