We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, July 26, 2014

The Colorado River Basin Has Lost Enough Water To Fill Lake Mead Twice Over

Click here to access article by Jeff Spross from ClimateProgress.
That’s the word from a new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, who used satellite data to do a first-ever quantifiable measure of how much groundwater people in the American west and southwest have used up in the current spate of droughts.