Ganga, the holiest of holy rivers in the Indian sub-continent is also one of the most polluted rivers in the region. Last year, after much lobbying, Ganga was declared the National River of India owing to its religious as well as environmental significance. However, just that could never have been enough for cleaning a river on which millions of Rupees have already been spent.

Now, the Union Environment Minister of India Mr. Jairam Ramesh, who had previously unveiled the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA), has put the NBRBA on a “mission mode” to clean the river by 2020. And his indicator for success is not clear blue waters but the return of the Gangetic dolphins that were once sighted in the river in plenty!

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Croatia and Hungary signed an agreement yesterday to protect a major biodiversity area that crosses borders along three rivers. The agreement is being called a “Trans-Boundary UNESCO Biosphere Reserve” and has resulted in the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) awarding the two countries with a “Leaders for a Living Planet” award.

The reserve will preserve several endangered species, among other environmental jewels. There is also the possibility of the reserve expanding several times over into neighboring countries in the future.

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Given the bears in the area, my son and I had quite the adventure: he made a “bear stick” to defend ourselves on the rare chance we might encounter one. After dinner, we wandered down to Overlook Park, featuring the River Spirit sculpture, before continuing along the riverfront on yet another trail to the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway Visitors Center – spotting a bald eagle soaring overhead along the way.  Ecopreneurial enterprises filled up many of the storefronts we peaked into downtown.

Getting around town without touching a car is completely possible in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, rightfully earning its moniker, “the city of trails.” While some places aspire to be something they’re clearly not, nor ever have been, St. Croix Falls is a place that features what they have in abundance: their network of walking, jogging, biking and hiking trails – and nature.

In St. Croix Falls’ historic downtown area, you can park the car and spend the rest of the time on foot or bike as you discover a segment of the 1,000-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail or the more than 10 miles of hiking trails in the Interstate State Park. Thanks to the spectacular St. Croix River, stunning coulees and “dalles” (ancient rock outcroppings), the community has emerged from its extractive history as a logging town and fur trading post to one of the premier places in the Midwest for the enjoyment of the outdoors, on foot, bike or in a kayak on the river.

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work of art that attracts thousands of pedestrians, families, bicyclists and nature lovers, every year on the summer solstice the beautifully designed structure also functions as an accurate sundial.

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Pete Seeger has been an incredibly important inspiration not only in my life, but also for countless others throughout the entire planet. He has accomplished so much and continues to be an unbelievably hopeful, powerful and influential activist and musician.

Democracy Now covers Seeger’s 90th birthday party concert in New York that benefited Clearwater, the environmental nonprofit that Pete and Toshi Seeger founded in 1969; the organization’s mission is to protect the Hudson River and to inspire the next generation of environmental leaders and activists. There is also a growing movement to nominate Pete Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize, something that I wholeheartedly endorse.

Britain’s largest water company has been fined £125,000 ($180,000), after polluting London’s River Wandle to such an extent that it wiped out twenty years of painstaking conservation work in a single day.

The shocking incident occurred in 2007, when Chlorine escaped from a Thames Water sewage treatment works, killing most of the fish along a 3 mile stretch of one of the city’s most iconic urban rivers. Local residents tried to save some of the distressed fish by transferring them from the river into buckets of clean water, but they were too late. One man rescued a large number of eels, but found they were bleeding from the gills and they all later died.

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A high profile Congressional committee investigation has revealed that, since 2006, the outgoing Bush administration has dropped or stalled enforcement actions on more than 500 cases of severe water pollution.

According to the Committee chairmen, the situation is now so bad that, “the federal government’s Clean Water Act enforcement program has been decimated over the past two years, imperiling the health and safety of the nation’s waters.”

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Most scientists are now in agreement that global warming is happening, and that, in the not too distant future, we may all have to get used to living in a world of mass species exctinctions, population explosion, resource scarcity and rising oceans. The question on many people’s lips is, how will mankind adapt to this drastically different future world?

One possible solution to this dilemma has come from a collective of New York based artists, who have proposed a mass shift towards a waterborne, nomadic existence. In May 2009, the team will launch a new work called Waterpod, a floating eco-habitat designed to support a fully sustainable community (more pics after the jump).

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(Picture: Encroachments on Yamuna Flood Plains.)

A couple of years back, when I was in Delhi, the city seemed abuzz with the activity for developing nearly a new township–a tall apartment building, a walking path along the water, and state of the art stadiums–on the bank of Yamuna. With the deadline of 2010 Commonwealth Games that the city had set for itself, such complete transformation would need much activity. Actually, I should say hyper-activity. The end-result seemed very attractive: I started dreaming of the Italian and French Rivieras.

At the heart of this vision (that I was dreaming up for Yamuna’s development) was a deep, rich and salubrious river–a river healthy enough to support varied marine life. Marine flora and fauna would not only help keep the waters clean but would also make the river (and rides on it) more attractive. The vision called for navigation on the river–like boat tours on the Seine or the Amstel rivers among other–to make the area more touristy and attractive. At a distance from denser areas, abandoned stretches of Yamuna could be developed as a marina or even a boat house park, to offer a very different lifestyle to Delhiites. It called for promenades along the length of the river: promenades sheltered by pretty trees; promenades traced alongside by seasonal flowerbeds; promenades that enabled a healthier lifestyle. The promenades would bifurcate to lead people into shopping and eating areas: after all, these are integral parts of any fun activity for Indians (as borne out by the burgeoning chowpatti culture of India). And while at it, I thought why not make the most of such intense development work and expenditure by providing ultra-luxe apartments with beautiful water-views that might help the public budget recoup some of the money.

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A Delhi resident gathers plastic bags from the polluted Yamuna River.

As I read Laurence Wylie, I am reminded of the perennial dilemma of Delhi’s Yamuna River’s. In Village in the Vaucluse, Wylie shows the futility of teaching moral lessons that conflict with regional customs and practices. For instance, children in the narrative are taught to be “the friends and protectors of the little birds.” However, in that region, a favorite food is roasted little birds and a favorite boast is eating 50-60 little birds in one go. Simply put, lessons that contradict local customs are a waste of time.

I find a similar, fundamental contradiction inherent in Delhi’s Yamuna River clean-up. There is no denying that the flourishing river of forty years ago is more like a dirty “nallah,” or sewer, nowadays. That said, I do not subscribe to any of the political mud-slinging that tries to lay blame for this. The deterioration has been a long term, multi-source problem and no one party–political or religious, individual or group, industrial or residential–can be held entirely responsible for it.

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The force will oversee 373,000 sq km of Amazon rainforest and patrol rivers to combat illegal logging and the unauthorised clearing of forest. Peru’s Environment Minister Antonio Brack said that until now the issue, “a problem of organized crime, morality and oversight,” has not been adequately addressed due to a severely understaffed police force running to just 240 men.

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But with water inflows over the past two years at an all-time low, the Murray-Darling Basin is dying.

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Researchers turn to international cooperation to save Asia’s 7′th longest river.

Urbanization, growing slums, intensive farming, damming, and warring political ideologies are just a few of the hurdles that researchers from Helsinki University of Technology will need to overcome to protect the Mekong River, one of the most important water sources in Southeast Asia.

Luckily, they have a plan. To save the river, researchers have developed what they are calling the ‘3E principle’: the idea that “waters should be used to provide economic well-being to the people, without compromising social equity and environmental sustainability.”

Putting this principle into practice means working closely with each of the countries that benefits from the Mekong River (China and Tibet, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) to safeguard the river’s life-giving water.

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It All Depends On Who You Ask

Las Vegas Water Offical Warns Radioactive Levels Rising

Sunday’s news was a bit disconcerting, when I read a small story at Tri-State Online.  Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority was quoted as saying measurable quantities of uranium are showing up in Colorado River water, something difficult and expensive to remove before passing it on to consumers in Las Vegas.

She blames upstream uranium mining, especially in the Moab, Utah area, so I decided to take a look and see what’s happening up there.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no operating uranium mines in or near Moab, UT, or anywhere in the state of Utah.  So, I felt Ms. Mulroy was referring to the uranium mill tailings just outside Moab, where they’ve been for decades after the failure of the Atlas Minerals Corporation mill.

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But the river which made the rise of this metropolis possible endured an incredible amount of abuse as the city grew up around it. For most of the last 200 years, the river was treated essentially as an open sewer, where household and industrial waste was dumped with abandon. (One particularly rancid part of the river earned the nickname “Bubbly Creek” because of methane buildup due to decomposing animal remains dumped by the Chicago stockyards, famously depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.) The contamination led to many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other diseases in the 1800s because the sewage flowed out into Lake Michigan, the source of the city’s drinking water. In 1900, a massive engineering project succeeded in using locks to reverse the flow of the river so that the pollution was sent southwest through the newly completed Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal and into the Missippi River watershed, away from Lake Michigan. When Chicagoans weren’t trying to ignore the stench of the river or actively abusing it, they seriously messed with the natural hydrology. Not much respect.

This human disrespect for the Chicago River continued up through the 1980s, when the river was often still clogged with garbage. But beginning in the 1990s, things started turning around for this urban waterway. Pollution levels started to drop (due in no small part to enforcement of Clear Water Act legislation) and people began to notice that the river, no longer smelly and unsightly, could actually be an enhancement to city life, a corridor of somewhat natural green space in an urban setting. People began using the river for recreational activities that put them in closer contact with the water, such as canoeing and kayaking, in addition to the larger pleasure boats and sightseeing ferries. New buildings along the river are now built so that people can walk along the shore and appreciate this natural asset, rather than being sited facing away from the river, as much architecture did in the 20th century.

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