Sometimes I have found myself oddly agreeing with radical anti-environmentalists. One place that happened was in a discussion on sewage. A woman who opposed all environmental protections had stood up and yelled that “we” should all figure out a way to stop dumping our sewage in the Sound first. I told her I’d love to have her help us figure that out and would gladly support that idea. I have felt that the real solution to our problems with Puget Sound is not “dilution”, but to stop using the Salish Sea as our toilet bowl. Maybe the efforts of the Gates Foundation to bring sanitation to the third world with new toilets that don’t need water, can eventually lead to us finding a way out of this 19th century habit of pouring our waste into our rivers and waterways.
Crazy? Well people thought that we could never see an end to nuclear war, or DDT. Nuclear war was avoided and DDT is no longer used in the US. Eagle populations returned. So, if we can put a funny looking rover on Mars, we can do this folks. We need to. Here’s a salute to Bill Gates for thinking out of the box, and doing something to help us get out off the toilet. Pun intended.
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New strategy promotes adoption of safe, affordable sanitation in the developing world
KIGALI, Rwanda — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced the launch of a strategy to help bring safe, clean sanitation services to millions of poor people in the developing world.
In a keynote address at the 2011 AfricaSan Conference in Kigali, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program, called on donors, governments, the private sector, and NGOs to address the urgent challenge, which affects nearly 40 percent of the world’s population. Flush toilets are unavailable to the vast majority in the developing world, and billions of people lack a safe, reliable toilet or latrine. More than a billion people defecate in the open.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/press-releases/Pages/safe-affordable-sanitation-110719.aspx
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