I have been concerned about potable water for years. Lately Costco has been pushing a reverse osmosis system. "Exclusive online offer." I tried to 'review it' and educate people about the reverse osmosis and its water wasting process. Costco would not publish the review. Twice I tried, even with 4 stars. I am always trying to tell people what a waste bottle water is, with 6 pints to wash the bottle and one pint inside. If people don't like the taste of tap water a charcoal filter works fine. Penn and teller had a good episode about bottled water and how people loved water from a garden hose if it came in a bottle and was expensive. Luckily colleges are starting to ban bottled water from campus. Then we have the oceans of plastic and all the damage it does to the fish and Albatross. I'll keep trying to educate, thanks for putting it in print, people might believe you more than me.
At least you showed me there is a use for the empty water bottles, if the sit in the sun for a day.

Here are some other ideas about generating water that I would like to implement. We can fix this problem, and digging wells isn't the only way.

This is more about targeted education and simple systems than advanced technology.

1. First we do a re-design of the Dew Farming methods used in South America and Sumer. I know its arid over there but it also has very humid regions. The Mylar type material is cheap to lay across landscapes every evening and can roll up during the day. 1-5 gallon per family per day if you do it right.

2. Build small urine stills that use the sun to vaporize into water. Like the water cones: http://www.watercone.com/product.html

3. Glass-trough solar distillation. Pour your dirty water in and the sun boils it to vapor that collects on the glass and drains into a bucket. Drink the next day. Repeat cycle.

4. Electricity, as much as heat, will neutralize any single celled organism on the planet. This keeps escaping people who work in the water industry for some reason. Filters are expensive and hard to distribute.

If you take a single kid in a village, have him peddle a bike with a small DC dynamo (like the kind in Army Radios) pour your dirty water over a thin steel plate exposed to the sun (UV), ZAPPP!, neutralize all pathogens in the water instantly. Any pathogen that survive have been stripped of the outer chemical receptors so it can't replicate or attach to the host.

OR take a bucket, stick two steel probes in, peddle bike 30 seconds, remove probes. Pour water through 4 layers of cotton and you should be good to go.

5. Plasma Water Distillation W/ Built in Power Plant. Basic design completed for power plant. Plasma Distiller is simple and will generate over 2600F. for 24/7 water production. The distiller itself will need to be custom designed for Africa to make it portable. Can be ready by early spring with a bit of design engineering and project funding. No problem.

Hope that helps!

-Bill

I hope many Jews will drop your magazine off of thier subscribtion list, including myself, after Water issue.

I was looking at your Water issue sitting in the dentist's office and really wanted to take it with me, but refrained. There was a page that showed a new way of purifying water by putting it in small plastic water bottles and lying it in the sun on corrugated metal small structures. Having lived in developing countries, I found this amazing, and wanted to share it with others. But I couldn't find the article on the NG website. Could you send me the link and other info on this method of killing bacteria and viruses in water? Thanks in advance,
Laura Smit, Columbia, MD 21045

Laura--that story will appear at blogs.ngm.com this week.

Get your facts right. Why is only Israel put in a negative light in your Water issue especially in the photos. This isn't the first time Israel has been portrayed so negitively. It might be a good idea to get your new Fresh Water Fellow to Israel so she can do more balanced research.

Since 1958, MASHAV – the Center for International Cooperation of the Foreign Ministry of Israel, has trained almost 200,000 course participants from approximately 140 countries and has developed dozens of demonstration projects worldwide in fields of Israeli expertise including water resource management.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority have made joint decisions about water issues
through the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Commission since 1994.
Palestinians’ consumption of fresh water in the West Bank grew dramatically between 1967
and 2008.
• Overall consumption in the West Bank rose 300%, from 60 mcm* to 180 mcm per year.
• Consumption per person grew almost 20%, from 86 mcm to 100 mcm per year.
The gap between Israeli and Palestinian water usage is closing.
While Palestinians in the West Bank are consuming more fresh water, Israelis are
consuming less and less because of conservation, recycling, and desalination.
• Israelis used 422 mcm more water per person than the Palestinians in 1967; this gap fell 600% by
2008 when Israelis consumed 70 mcm more per person that the Palestinians did.
• The water from the Mountain Aquifer flows naturally into Israel. Before 1967, Israel used almost 100%
of the water. Today, Israel uses only 83% of it.
• Israel’s per capita consumption of fresh water dropped 300% from 508 mcm in 1967 to 170 mcm in
2008, while West Bank per capita use rose 20% in the same period.
Israel has been giving water to Palestinians, over and above the supplement agreed on
during the Oslo Accords.
• Israel has given the West Bank 70 mcm per year, three times more than the agreed amount of 23.6
mcm per year. Israel also pumps 5 mcm into Gaza annually.
Israel does not use water from the West Bank or Gaza.
• Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not use Palestinian water. They are connected to Israel’s water
system, not to the Palestinian Authority’s water system.
• Israel uses the same aquifers for its water today that it used before 1967, with the exception of the
eastern aquifer, which provides only marginal amounts of water to the West Bank.
• Israel does not impede the flow of water to Gaza from the Gaza aquifer. The aquifer water flows from
east to west. Gaza’s access to this water is unaffected by how the water fIsrael improved the water systems in the West Bank and Gaza after 1967.
• When Israel introduced modern irrigation into the West Bank, subsistence farming transformed into a
profitable commercial industry. As a result, the area under cultivation increased by 160%; agricultural
output soared 12-fold from 1967 to 1989.
• The number of West Bank towns connected to a running water system jumped nine-fold, from 50 to
260 between 1967 and 1991.
• Israel built two desalination plants in Gaza. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it gave the entire
water system it had developed for Israeli settlements to the Palestinians, including 25 wells, storage
reservoirs, and a well-developed transmission system.
Palestinians can improve their water resources by implementing approved, donor-funded
programs for desalination and water treatment plants designed to increase water supply.
• The Palestinian Water Authority has implemented 26 water projects approved by the Joint Water
Commission, and 56 more projects have also been approved but have not been implemented.
Strict regulations on drilling wells are required to prevent deterioration of water resources.
The same regulations apply to both Palestinians and Israelis.
• The Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Commission approved the drilling of 92 new wells in the West Bank
between 1994 and 2008.
Israeli administration and water policies in Gaza and the West Bank contributed to the
growth of the Palestinian population between 1967 and 1995.
• The Palestinians became one of the world’s fastest-growing populations under Israeli administration,
growing from 942,000 in 1967 to 1,973,000 in 1995.
Sources:
Israel Water Authority, “The Issue of Water between Israelis and Palestinians,” March 2009 at
www.mfa.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/71BC5337-F7C7-47B7-A8C7-98F971CCA463/0/IsraelPalestiniansWaterIssues.
pdf ; Daniel Hillel, Rivers of Eden, 1994; Martin Sherman, The Politics of Water in the Middle East,
1999; “UN Conference on Trade and Development, Population and Demographic Developments in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip Until 1990,” 1994; Bennett Zimmerman et al, “The Million Person Gap: The Arab
Population in the West Bank and Gaza,” 2006.lowing further north, in Israel,
is used.

You can learn more by joining
"Teaching the National Geographic and Annenberg Space about Israel and Water on Facebook"

Those statistics are pretty startling. I heard alot about problems that are going to occur for humanity with global climate changing. However this is an issue i haven't read too much about. It's obviously also tied in with the over population of the earth. The impact it will have on the food supplies of the world is also going to be massive. Thank you so much for bringing this issue to my attention.

I read the especial issue about water (April 2010) and I liked the article about Sacred Waters and the picture of the medicine-fish - it was very creative. I do think that Jews, Palestinian, Americans, Brazilians (I including myself) and the whole world still need to learn much more about how to preserve this precious resource, doesn't matter the nationality - it's just one world.I know it will take a long time till people could understand the real meaning of this, but as soon as we get there, any place without clean water will be everybody's concern because it will be "our place, our house." I also you'd like to tell you that I'm going to use the text you written in the Editor's note column in one of my students' tests - it will be to start the discussion about the topic. Information is one of the tools we can use to make this new generation aware about this real problem. Thanks!