Earth's Water Crisis

Thanks to the hard work of Susan Shillinglaw, VTS now has available free streaming video of each of the speakers at the recent Mollegen forum on Earth's Water Crisis. To access the videos, click here. Then select the video that you would like to watch from the list on the left. The speakers (shown in the photo above) were Fred Pearce, Peter Kreitler, Frank Griswold, and my former student, Martha Franks.

British author Fred Pearce spoke on the topic of his recent best-seller, When the Rivers Run Dry. He pointed to several factors precipitating the crisis, including global climate change, huge demands on the world’s rivers, with humans taking up to four times more water from them than we did a generation ago, and irrigated farming which utilizes “two-thirds of all the water abstracted from our rivers and underground reserves” to produce “high-yield” super crops of rice and wheat.

To read the full text of Pearce's remarks, click here (PDF file). To see summaries of the other talks and find links to their full texts, click here.