The Water Underground Tour 2007 Comes to Germantown Community Farm

here was the invite

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html

You are cordially invited to a work party/skillshare/presentation as our west coast friends come and help us fix our hurtin’ greywater system and share a bunch of stories and knowledge from their work as water activists.

This is part of their tour to promote their recently published book:
Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground by Soft Skull Press

Friday Night June 8th Potluck Dinner with...
* A slideshow featuring anti-dam struggles, ecological sanitation, and river restoration projects
* A discussion of local restoration work
• A showing of Demise of Dam Nation, a compilation of cinematic dam failures and catastrophes

From Boliva to South Africa, local single-issue water fights have exploded into demands for new water commons. The Water Underground Tour 2007 presents a water philosophy roadshow and resistance forum that will kindle this spirit in North America. A grassroots network of strategic and material exchange, which recognizes watersheds as social and ecological responsibility units, can decolonialize the concept of appropriate technology and demonstrate the potential of an international water culture.

Then the Next Morning....
Saturday June 9th we’ll have a
Work Party/Skillshare and Rebuild Our House Greywater System

Come join us at our home:
Germantown Community Farm
4872 state route 9G germantown, ny 12526
Please RSVP at gtowncommunityfarm@riseup.net or call 518-537-6139

It was a great weekend...


















More Info on Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground

“The politics of water—as this brilliant anthology makes clear—are the politics of human survival.
Read this, and believe me, you'll never flush with the same equanimity again,” notes author Mike Davis

The Greywater Guerrillas began in 1999 as an amateur plumbing and
ecological design collective, founded by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Laura
Allen. Dozens of low-tech water-recycling installations, and years of
designing and touring, yielded the Guerrilla Greywater Girls' Guide to
Water, an 80 page DIY zine and introduction to water politics. The
Guerrillas designed the first small-scale urban greywater systems to
incorporate greywater diversion, biological sewage treatment via wetlands,
wildlife habitat creation, and backyard food forests. The Guerrillas
expanded their vision of radical water activism as they met and talked
with river restoration, ecological sanitation, anti-privatization, and
anti-dam movements around the globe. It was time for another book: one
that synthesized a radical history of water with DIY sustainable
technologies.

Dam Nation is a people's history of water—and the water grid. Tracing the
rise of mega-dams and their spread across five continents, the book also
chronicles the inevitable popular opposition to this philosophy of
appropriation and control. Blocking the neoliberal makeover of our world,
beleaguered commoners fight to reclaim the earth's arteries, lakes, and
seas. Their struggles, strategies, and successes form the backbone of
Dam Nation. The authors weave together a detailed accounting of the
fallout from a century of river blockages and diversions with mulitlayered
analysis of water movements around the world.. Dam Nation blows open the
scarcity myth to show how democratic management and local control of water
resources can provide water for everyone and make the rivers we've killed
live again.

Both radical history of water and DIY guide to sustainable technologies,
Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground combines an analysis of
water's history with the active fight for its future. Bringing together
hundreds of national and international projects, organizations, and
strategies, Dam Nation investigates political economy an d environmental
impact of water consumption. It also gives readers easy, cheap, and
thought-provoking ways to join the 'water underground' themselves. The
book illustrates:

* How corrupt water policy led to bloody battles during the settlement
of the American West
* How a Michigan town being drained by the Nestle Corporation is
fighting to block water privatization nationwide
* How to reuse household water to create lush gardens
* How to build a composting toilet and a pedal-powered washing machine
* How to cultivate a pond filled with edible plants and
mosquito-eating fish
* How residents jump started municipal eco-projects in such diverse
locales as Tijuana, Mexico City, Zimbabwe and Arcata, California
* How a 'protest village' in Thailand and a neighborhood association
in Louisiana both beat back dam and canal expansion with grassroots
organizing
* How a coalition of Native American tribes organized cross
culturally, leading Scottish shareholders to stand up for tribal
salmon rights
• And much more


About the authors:
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a Bay Area based writer, teacher, restorationist,
and agitator.In 1996, he left his native Los Angeles to study traditional
agriculture and water harvesting in the Rio Grande basin, then continued
permaculture pursuits in filled-in marshes edging the San Francisco Bay.
His books include Urban Wilds: Gardener's Stories of the Struggle for Land
and Justice (water/under/ground, 2001), the kids' book Sink or Swim: A
History of Sausal Creek (water/under/ground, 2004) and the infamous The
Guerrilla Graywater Girls' Guide to Water zine (with Laura Allen). His
water conservation projects have been featured in The Utne Reader and The
San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times.

July Oskar Cole learned to swim in the TVA lakes of Eastern Kentucky and
Tennessee, and to identify wild plants in the forests of the Cumberland
Plateau. He learned most of the rest in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest:
philosophy and astronomy in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, alternative
building and "charco" style greywater practices in the Rio Grande bosque,
and in the Basin and Range territory more things than can be listed. In
the San Francisco Bay Area, he keeps bees, designs and installs greywater
treatment wetlands, and sells books. He co-edited Dam Nation: Dispatches
from the Water Underground, and has also been published in ColorLines
magazine and the 2006 Best Gay Erotica anthology.