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The United States can boast the finest water and wastewater systems in the world, but it cannot sustain this extensive infrastructure unless steps are taken to counter its natural wear-down due to age. The resulting task is to initiate and manage a modern, methodical, and sustainable asset renewal process, called asset management. This report fully explores the processes involved in asset management: Define expectations and assess the condition, Estimate the remaining useful life, Manage the wear-out process, and continually Improve the plan. Written for: water utility managers, governing boards , community stakeholders, and others interested in the subject. The United States can boast the finest water and wastewater systems in the world, but it cannot sustain this extensive infrastructure unless steps are taken to counter its natural wear-down due to age. The resulting task is to initiate and manage a modern, methodical, and sustainable asset renewal process, called asset management. This report fully explores the processes involved in asset management: Define expectations and assess the condition, Estimate the remaining useful life, Manage the wear-out process, and continually Improve the plan. Written for: water utility managers, governing boards , community stakeholders, and others interested in the subject.
CD-ROM contains: a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Car Talk."
From the time when humans first learned to harness fire, cultivate crops, and domesticate livestock, they have altered their environment as a means of survival. In the modern era, however, natural resources have been devoured and defiled in the wake of a consumerism that goes beyond mere subsistence. In this volume, an international group of environmental historians documents the significant ways in which humans have impacted their surroundings throughout history. John McNeill introduces the collection with an overarching account of the history of human environmental impact. Other contributors explore the use and abuse of the earth's land in the development of agriculture, commercial forestry, and in the battle against desertification in arid and semi-arid regions. Cities, which first appeared some 5,500 years ago, have posed their own unique environmental challenges, including dilemmas of solid waste disposal, sewerage, disease, pollution, and sustainable food and water supplies. The rise of nation-states brought environmental legislation, which often meant "selling off" natural resources through eminent domain. Perhaps the most damaging environmental event in history resulted from a "perfect storm" of effects: cheap fossil fuels (especially petroleum) and the rapid rise of personal incomes during the 1950s brought an exponential increase in energy consumption and unforseen levels of greenhouse gasses to the earth's atmosphere. By the 1970s, the deterioration of air, land, and water due to industrialization, population growth, and consumerism led to the birth of the environmental and ecological movements. Overall, the volume points to the ability and responsibility of humans to reverse the course of detrimental trends and to achieve environmental sustainability for existing and future populations.
AS ALEX PRUD’HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France, they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud’homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect is Prud’homme’s vivid and engaging inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first century. The questions he sought to answer were urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our water infrastructure—both the pipes that bring us freshwater and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we create new sources for our water supply through scientific innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like oil—and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the twenty-first century be fought over water? Like Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect is a masterwork of investigation and dramatic narrative. With striking instincts for a revelatory story, Prud’homme introduces readers to an array of colorful, obsessive, brilliant—and sometimes shadowy—characters through whom these issues come alive. Prud’homme traversed the country, and he takes readers into the heart of the daily dramas that will determine the future of this essential resource—from the alleged murder of a water scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud’homme will change the way we think about the water we drink. Informative and provocative, The Ripple Effect is a major achievement.
Since the mid-1990s, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced an acceleration of economic growth that has produced rising incomes and faster human development. However, this growth contrasts with the continent's experience between 1975 and 1995, when it largely missed out on two decades of economic progress. This disparity between Africa's current experience and its history raises questions about the continent's development. Is there a turnaround in Africa s economy? Will growth persist? 'Africa at a Turning Point?' is a collection of essays that analyzes three interrelated aspects of Africa's recent revival. The first set of essays examines Africa's recent growth in the context of its history of growth accelerations and collapses. It seeks to answer such questions as, is Africa at a turning point? Are the economic fundamentals finally pointing toward more sustainable growth? The second set of essays looks at donor flows, which play a large role in Africa's growth. These essays focus on such issues as the management and delivery of increased aid, and the history and volatility of donor flows to Africa. The third set of essays considers the recent impact of one persistent threat to sustained growth in Africa: commodity price shocks, particularly those resulting from fluctuations in oil prices.
This book presents three distinct pillars for analysis, design, and planning: urban water cycle and variability as the state of water being; landscape architecture as the medium for built-by-design; and total systems as the planning approach. The increasing demand for water and urban and industrial expansions have caused myriad environmental, social, economic, and political predicaments. More frequent and severe floods and droughts have changed the resiliency and ability of water infrastructure systems to operate and provide services to the public. These concerns and issues have also changed the way we plan and manage our water resources. Focusing on urban challenges and contexts, the book provides foundational information regarding water science and engineering while also examining topics relating to urban stormwater, water supply, and wastewater infrastructures. It also addresses critical emerging issues such as simulation and economic modeling, flood resiliency, environmental visualization, satellite data applications, and digital data model (DEM) advancements. Features: Explores various theoretical, practical, and real-world applications of system analysis, design, and planning of urban water infrastructures Discusses hydrology, hydraulics, and basic laws of water flow movement through natural and constructed environments Describes a wide range of novel topics ranging from water assets, water economics, systems analysis, risk, reliability, and disaster management Examines the details of hydrologic and hydrodynamic modeling and simulation of conceptual and data-driven models Delineates flood resiliency, environmental visualization, pattern recognition, and machine learning attributes Explores a compilation of tools and emerging techniques that elevate the reader to a higher plateau in water and environmental systems management Water Systems Analysis, Design, and Planning: Urban Infrastructure serves as a useful resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in the areas of water resources and systems analysis, as well as practicing engineers and landscape professionals.
This text discusses the current basis of economic growth, concluding that it is is failing to deliver, and is actually harming our prospects for future security. Further arguments propose a possible long-term strategy for economic revival - eco-restructuring. This strategy involves a shifting away from production of goods to production of services, closing material cycles and eliminating reliance on non-renewable resources.