The Thirst Project

Here's a video from a friend I met at the DoSomething.org Boot Camp in New York City who's also in the fight to provide safe drinking water to others. His name is Seth Maxwell. Seth was a 19-year-old acting student in Los Angeles when a brief meeting with a friend who’d just returned from Africa changed the course of his life forever. Upon learning that almost one billion people lack access to clean water and that water-borne illnesses account for more than 80% of all global disease, he gave up acting to focus on water education. The Thirst Project is a movement of young people who are raising awareness around and bringing solutions to the global water crisis. Combining outreach and water well implementation, The Thirst Project has completed 392 freshwater development projects across the globe and reached 200,000 American students with its eye-opening educational programs.

Environment Italians Get With the Program, Start Drinking Tap Water

Great news coming out of the country that drinks more delicious bottled water than any other in the world: Venice is finally encouraging its residents to take from the tap and stop clogging the city with bottles.

This piece in The New York Times says that Italians drink 40 gallons of bottled water per person, per year. (We Americans drink a not-so-paltry 29.) That's a lot of bottles, plastic or glass, to have to get rid of by foot, since Venice doesn't have roads. So the mayor launched a campaign (see the hilarious poster) to get people to start drinking tap water, which, it turns out, is very delicious.

To boost the campaign, the mayor's office even leaked the juicy fact that "Venice's tap water comes from deep underground in the same region as one of Italy's most popular bottled waters, San Benedetto."

Anyway, this is great, even if the self-congratulatory tone folks use when they tell you they drink tap water is kind of annoying at times, whatever it takes to get the rest of the bottled-water-drinking world up to speed is good news.

This is article was featured in Good Magazine.

Water Down: The Embarassing Lack of Clean Water Access in the World

Good Magazine released this new interesting infographic recently on the lack of clean water access in the world.