Water Rights

In Chile, where water rights are private property and not a public resource, agricultural producers and mining companies siphon off rivers and tap scarce water supplies. Drinking water is trucked into Quillagua because the river that fed this oasis town is contaminated and all but dried up. Photo: Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Who owns the water? In chile it depends on who buys it...the rights that is. In several portions of the country one Spanish company, Endesa, owns 80% (NY Times: Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water).

Other countries, such as Australia and here in the Southwest US, water rights are said to be handled with more environmentally and conflict resolutions...

In my backyard, water is a commodity. My house has water rights...a value, that I could sell. And the lawsuits can be found.

"The historic water users and the large water interests of Taos Valley are now involved in what is known as the Abeyta Lawsuit. Included in this lawsuit are: Taos Pueblo, Taos Valley Acequia Association, the Town of Taos, and several mutual domestic water consumer districts. If our water existed in abundance, then the judge could have told everyone to drill deeper long ago. The long term implications for both surface and ground water use are so contentious that this lawsuit has been in court for more than 40 years.

Sources:
Taos Horse Fly: Taos County Water Supplies
Taos Pueblo

Reading:
Cadillac Desert by M. Reisner
Blue Covenant by M. Barlow
Rivers of Empire by D. Worster
Blue Gold by M. Barlow
Water Wars by D. Ward
Whoes Water Is It? by Douglas Jehl
Water Wars by Vandana Shiva
Every Drop for Sale by Jeffrey Rothfeder

Urban Food Chain

Urban farming. I have been seeing many more of these images lately. This urgent need for good food, close food and cheep food - especially in urban poor neighborhoods. These new models explore farming as architecture.

How does this concept work within the local/neighborhood/community? And what other sort of programming works within the field of farming? What are the schedules of the crops in relation to the local inhabitants, day v. night, seasonal? What sort of local wildlife (birds/pidgins/rats!) can become included/avoided within the activities of urban farming? How is energy created, used, processed, transfered (sun, light, electric, gas, oil?) Educational, social and cultural values?

How is it accessed, transportation? pick up? delivery?

Image by SOA Architects, from NYTimes article

Can the car help end global poverty?

There is this great blog written about in the New York Times recently, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? It focuses on Jan Chipchase, this anthropolgist / corporate researcher crossing the globe taking pictures and asking questions about cell phones. Its basically market research for his employer, Nokia. Lucky for us, he shares a lot of that energy and fascination on his blog (http://www.janchipchase.com/).

I guess what I am interested in is how we might re-discover the automobile within our living environment. While not as tech-y as the cell phone, and as dated as it might be, it is something so visible, yet we are failing to see how it really operates, could operate and how it might want to operate.

By looking at the different conditions that it is placed within, the ways it interacts with people, space, time and culture, can we not begin to see again how the automobile operates within the built environment? And globally? how does this make mass marketing limited by socio-cultural boundaries?

so my question would be, Can the automobile help end global poverty? or have we given up on that...

(photo from janchipchase.com website)