I don't advocate sending us back to pre-industrial times as a solution to modern society's environmental impacts. Moving towards a sustainable lifestyle requires incremental steps - we can't instantly do away with cars and other technologies that rely on fossil fuels. But efforts to wean ourselves off environmentally damaging practices can certainly benefit from technologies that were developed thousands of years ago, like provencal wells, solar chimneys, passive solar designs for buildings, and underground clay pots for irrigation. Another example is using nets to collect water from fog, as in Peru, where a net can collect hundreds of litres a day.
As far back as 2,000 years ago, desert villages and other rain-starved communities around the world may have started harvesting fog that collected as water and dripped from trees, said Robert Schemenauer, executive director of FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit organization that helps communities set up simple collection devices.
This is a great demonstration of adaptation to climate change. Lima gets rainfall of only 1.5 cm a year, and relies for water on meltwaters from glaciers in the Andes - and those glaciers are shrinking, causing scientists to caution that this water supply one day will be no more. What better replacement than fog harvesting, which taps a resource that otherwise goes to waste, and benefits those who need it most: communities on the hills surrounding Lima, where it would be expensive to bring piped municipal water.
Like many other strategies, this cannot be applied on a large scale, but that shouldn't stop us finding local solutions to big challenges. And clean water supply is a huge one.
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