Echoing the darkness - Water wells after the borewell revolution

As a child, they could not keep me from wells 
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. 
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells 
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. 


~ Seamus Heaney

I vividly remember the first time a bore well was dug on our fields. It involved a manual dig to locate water and then began the long and back-breaking effort to create the deep shaft, all the time praying that the initial promise of water at the site held.

Dehydrating the Ganga?

The July 19 issue of Tehelka carries a piece on the damming activity in the upper reaches of the Ganga. An excerpt: India has 4,500 large dams. Until recently, the pristine stretch between Uttarkashi and Gangotri boasted of only one: Maneri Bhali Phase I. But a series of consecutive hydro-electric projects are now in different stages of construction on this 125-kilometre stretch. Five major ones threaten the normal existence of the Bhagirathi, as the majestic Ganga here is called. If they go through as planned, it is feared the Ganga may completely disappear from large stretches, leaving the riverbed limp and dry. More here

In Denmark, an island turns to wind

Just when the worst was being said about biofuels, here's a form of energy that will turn heads. And maybe more. Consider this excerpt from The New Yorker story: For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually. Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using. More here