Recognized as one of the US’s 100 best gold courses (Golf Digest), the ‘Sanctuary’ will once again host the 5th annual Water For People Golf Classic on August 19, 2009. Situated in Sedalia, Colorado, and adjacent to over 12, 000 acres of protected open space, the Sanctuary was carefully designed and “placed” within one of the most fragile and beautiful ecosystems in the State, if not the entire country.

The  private course offers stunning 180 degree vistas of Pike’s Peak (southward) and Long’s Peak (northward) and is home to some of the tallest pines in the State. To preserve its core beauty and “balance with Nature”, the Sanctuary permits only 9,000 rounds of golf annually, and the majority of these are for charity fund-raising tournaments.

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Various news outlets are covering the story, and here are some excerpts from articles where you can find more information about this breaking news:

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Several San Francisco, California hotels promoted World Water Day - March 22 in collaboration with Blue Planet Run Foundation this past weekend. The book, Blue Planet Run: The Race To Provide Safe Drinking Water To The World, was placed in luxury suites as a gift to guests staying over the weekend.

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Besides the comical slant of the titles, it is surprising that biogas is often presented as something amazing & unknown although it has been around for hundreds of years, is used in tens of millions of rural household and is a significant contributor to Europe’s renewable energy production.

Biogas - Amazing Natural Technology

The fermentation of organic material such as biomass, manure, sewage, farm waste, municipal waste, green waste and energy crops in the absence of air produces biogas. The same anaerobic fermentation produces swamp, marsh and landfill methane.

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Prime Minister of India inaugurating the Third South Asian Conference on Sanitation

“Sanitation has a strong connection not only with personal hygiene but also with human dignity and well-being, public health, nutrition and even education. Mahatma Gandhi had once said “Sanitation is more important than independence”. He made cleanliness and sanitation an integral part of the Gandhian way of living. His dream was total sanitation for all.”

With these words, the Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh inaugurated the third South Asia Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN) in New Delhi. The Conference holds a special significance because the year 2008 has been declared as the International Year of Sanitation. Themed on Sanitation for Dignity and Health, the conference is being attended by participants from over eight South-Asian countries. Startling reports indicate the PM’s constituency to have the least number of toilets within India!

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Check out the sign I saw.

Not to be rude, but do men from Peru know where to pee in a bathroom?

After snapping my photo and pondering if Peruvian men truly need that much guidance, I left the bathroom and mentioned what I had seen to my wife and mother-in-law.

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In another few years - in 2025 to be precise - the number could swell to 3 billion driving back gains in the fight against poverty and under-development, otherwise known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

For many people around the world, safe drinking water is a scarce resource and out of necessity, they resort to what’s available - polluted water.

But contaminated water isn’t just dirty—it’s deadly. Some 1.8 million people die every year of diseases like cholera, caused by poor sanitation. Tens of millions of others are seriously sickened by a host of water-related ailments—many of which are easily preventable.

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These facts may surprise you:

1.1 billion people live without clean drinking water.*

There are over 116,000 human-made chemicals that are finding their way into public
water supply systems.*

Water is a $400 billion dollar global industry; the third largest behind electricity and oil.*

Flow, a new film about the implications of the world water crisis, can help you wrap your head around those dismaying figures. The film, which opens tomorrow, investigates the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with a careful attention to politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Stories are told about how water has changed people’s lives and health, communities’ economies, and corporations’ bottom line. Throughout the film, we are asked to ponder “How did a handful of corporations steal our water?” and “Can anyone really own water?” For centuries water has been called “blue gold,” and after this film you will understand why.

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A fleet of scientists, business leaders, and policy makers have convened at the 2008 World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden for the past week to exchange views on the world water crisis and promote initiatives to build a clean and healthy world.

Organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, the conference this year focuses on sanitation and hygiene issues related to water, which compliments the United Nations’ 2008 International Year of Sanitation theme.

“Sanitation is one of the biggest scandals of all times,” Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who heads the UN Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, was quoted in an article by news agency Agence France-Presse. “It’s something that we have to put on our radar screen. Some 7,500 people die every day due to this lack of sanitation,” he added.

According to the UN, 2.6 billion people around the world lack access to adequate sanitation, while half the world’s population lacks access to clean water. Consequently, citizens in underdeveloped countries experience premature deaths, illness, a degradation of living quarters and damage to the environment and local economies at alarming rates. Combined with the effects of global warming and the world water crisis, this creates cause for alarm.

A goal of World Water Week is to encourage the 2,500 international conference attendees to strategize ways to advance best practices, scientific understanding, and policy making processes related to water, health, poverty, and the environment.

Using preventive medicine, building sustainable cities, changing human behaviors, and comprehending sanitation’s link to global warming are other items highlighted during the week.

Another honorable mention for WWW is its commitment to arranging an environmentally responsible conference; using less bottled water, promoting carbon off-setting, recycling, providing organic and fair trade food, and supporting eco-hotels are all part of the conference’s plan to bring the issues home.

More information on conference topics:
WWW press releases

Photo: Stockholm International Water Institute

The above was an opening line from an email communication sent out this week from Geneva, Switzerland by David Trouba, communications officer of WSSCC to mark events around the World Environment Day on 5 June, and the Euro 2008 football tournament.

We are told that each year, more than 200 million tons of human waste go uncollected and untreated around the world, fouling the environment and exposing millions of people to disease and squalor.

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To celebrate or not; there is nothing so peculiar on World Water Day 2008, other than another statistical entry for talking shop on water issues, at least. To many of the world’s poorest, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, water is costlier than oil, more precious than oil and yet less available than clean air.

For it does not make sense that most wars and regional conflicts in the developing world today are fought on the ever illusive dream of Water for All, an Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for world’s governments by 2015.

At the 2000 UN Summit, nearly all the world’s Heads of States and Governments solemnly committed themselves to the attainment of the Goal of halving, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. It is, however, increasingly evident that, among the regions of the world, Africa, and in particular sub-Saharan Africa, is falling further behind in meeting this MDG.

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I live in a part of the world where the rich-poor extremes can be as depressing as they are embarrassing. Water, in its scarcity, coupled with inexistent or poor sanitation does not help things and being a woman can sometimes be even more burdensome. Given, this affects the basic necessities of a woman like personal hygiene.

Pubertal girls in rural communities miss going to school for a few days each month during their menstrual circle because they use inferior materials like old rags and newspapers for their menstrual flow and many feminine organizations have come to the help of these hapless girls by providing free sanitary pads.

But the provision of disposable supplies can create unforeseen burden on some communities where solid waste disposal consists of burning the garbage. Since many disposable feminine hygiene products contain plastic, incineration potentially creates an environmental and health hazard, according to Deanna Duke, the founder of Goods4Girls.

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I want to be more than frank: for the many times I have found myself on the countryside (my other home as an African), I have always known that it was time to lower my personal sanitation-compatibility level from maybe 6 out of 10, to just 1, if such a scale exists.

Don’t even ask me if the term sanitation-compatibility exists because I really do not know! For I am yet to see a single flush toilet in the whole of my district! But there is nothing to shout about the fact that sub-Saharan Africa is the world leader in open-field or bush defecation, if you may. Why sub-Saharan Africa?

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