A Water Cup Competition?!

Why don't we have these here? So cool!

Really interesting, Steve, thanks for posting!  

This is the first video before the one above.

Hahaha Steve, i posted the same video yesterday, but with a screaming header.
These kind of waterworks should be done in every country, we'd be on our way to paradise.
Ok we in the West don't have these vibrant young people anymore on the land, but we got bulldozers and diggers.
Here in France, it's record droughts that happen all the time. It used to be nearly impossible to get permission to build a dam, recently the bureaucrats decided to make it even more difficult to retain water on a small scale in a very authoritarian way. I guess some technocrats high up decide something and it is what us peasants have to do. Sure i get it, the major cities want and need water. But i don't understand why they are willing to let us starve of it. Climate change is here and they're clamping down on the little guy.
Most winter the water just flows into the stream, into the river, past the big city into the ocean. That is how the tax funded technocratic system has set it up and that's how they are going to let it be. Climate change or not. No water for the country site, just drought and poverty. Subsidy for the big industrial agriculturalist who are tied by loans. Maybe we'll have to become as poor as those Indian farmers before they change laws.
Anyway be nice and just stop being mad at the bad guys.

Yeah Hugo, I agree, if every country did this, the results could be amazing!

Combine these watersystems with Willie Smits, how-to-restore-a-rainforest techniques, and we'll be restoring the bio diversity, harvesting more rainwater and cooling the planet while feeding big countries organic healthy food forever. It would eradicate the need for destructive behavior and buy the human race the time to investigate in true clean energy harvesting techniques, what inner peace that would provide?
Big words, but do we have a choice? Why concentrate on destructive techniques? Everything we have been doing has led to the biggest failure imaginable, the destruction of our own biosphere.
The choice is ours, the information is here for everybody to see.
Willie Smits, for if someone wants to restore a rainforest or two...

 

Steve Thorn wrote:

Why don't we have these here? So cool!  

My short answer is that North American Environmentalists are focused on "protecting natural environments from human interference" rather than seeing it as "cooperation between man and nature".

The competition in India has been sponsored by a NGO - and it has firmly focused on team-work and equity, which are in short supply in a divided America. Many Canadian and US citizens have never been taught the skills for co-operative decision making such as some other cultures  (Inuit and Japanese as examples) are known for. It is a slower process, and takes actual skill to do well and I know I don't have those skills. India has a much stronger extended family based culture with its pros and cons, but in this situation, they got it to work for them.

So I think the first thing we need to do is start building cooperative community spirit and human-scale industry! That said, I'm *really* wondering what this concept would look like on small, urban properties and if I could get my Municipal Council interested. I'm sure there'd be a few local businesses who might provide at least a token prize. I will think it over! We need to take ideas like this and re-invent them to work in our situation.

It didn't seem obvious, but is there a third video in the series?

There is a new video of India's water revolution focusing on another area where the poorest marginalized tribe have been lifted out of poverty by handdug ponds high up feeding fields through seepage year round.

That last video is interesting but parts of it were pretty sketchy. AI-generated and riddled with all sorts of stuff that does not exist (like Joshua trees in Washington). Beavers are great at healing landscapes where there is already water and the species of trees they eat, but if you put them somewhere these things aren't in place, they will die.

That biggest beaver dam in the world is real, though. I think it has been photographed from space.

Phil Stevens wrote: That biggest beaver dam in the world is real, though. I think it has been photographed from space.

Yes, that's in a rather inaccessible part of an already minimally accessible Canadian National Park - Wood Buffalo.
I've seen photos and it is totally amazing.

I concur that without trees and water already accessible, the beavers will move on if not die. There are people making "beaver analogue dams" that are really effective at starting the repair process on streams that have been damaged by the lack of Beaver People maintaining them.

There used to be huge marshy area in much of the northern countries in North America and Europe, but they were usually drained for farmland. Hopefully we can go back to more like the chinampas system or similar as a way of maintaining the usefulness of marshland, but still be able to grow crops.

I take from that video up top that there's some kind of competition between the villages to create water-catchment/seepage systems and one of them wins a prize. The prize is fine, I guess, but the really great thing is that even the losers presumably have improved their lot. It's a neat structure.

I really like this idea.  I’d like to see it applied to other conservation areas as well.  So often, competition leads to sub optimal outcomes.  

I was impressed by the way that once their water was sorted, the villages had the means to deal with other issues. Great initiative and it was a wonderful rabbit hole to go down the other evening.