On Wednesday our friend Pablo from IMDEC took us on a powerful tour of the municipio of El Salto where he lives. We revisited La Huizachera and voyaged southeast away from the city, tracking the Canal Ahogado’s path to where it feeds into the Rio Santiago. Then we followed the Rio Santiago through the largest industrial corridor in Guadalajara, stopping to explore the El Salto/Juanacatlan waterfalls, and finished our trip along the Rio Santiago in rural Juanacatlan. It was a difficult journey.
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This past weekend we visited the community of Temacapulin, a small pueblo nestled in between cliffs and hills in the highlands of Jalisco. The emotions that washed over us as we drove in at dusk, realizing the whole town could be submerged under water in a few years, were surreal and intense.
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Yes, this week we enjoyed a full social calendar of meeting and greeting a gaggle of wonderful people. It’s been a true pleasure. First off, we’ve gotten to know the fine people of IMDEC. The experience and collective knowledge of their staff is impressive and the familial atmosphere of their workspace is rather inviting.
IMDEC began as a popular education organization, with theoretical roots in the work of Paulo Frere. They have since expanded their scope of expertise to include sustainable development and human rights advocacy. In two weeks we’ll help them document a Latin American wide popular education conference, marking their 45th year anniversary as an organization.
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We finally sat down and hammered out the official mission for Adapting to Scarcity. It’s been guiding us since the beginning – it just took us some time to put into words.
Our mission is to empower and connect communities adapting to water scarcity. By providing technical infrastructure to leverage social media, we facilitate participatory, grassroots organizing within and between local communities on a global scale.
Our mission is to empower and connect communities adapting to water scarcity. With digital and internet-based social media tools, we aim to help these communities share their knowledge and experiences. We believe that this global grassroots information sharing will help strengthen and build movements adapting to water scarcity worldwide. [Updated 21 November, 2009]
Furthermore, we’ve laid out our objectives for the next 6-9 months in Gudalajara, Mexico:
1. Make a documentary for IMDEC (Instituto Mexicano para el Desarrollo Comunitario) to strengthen the local movements struggling to adapt to water scarcity. Using 6 (or more!) FlipVideo cameras as well as a high definition video camera, the documentary will be filmed in part by participants in these local movements as well as ourselves. Topics to be covered/goals include:
- Popular education efforts by IMDEC (eg environmental education and photography project by children)
- Efforts by IMDEC to facilitate the organizing capacity of local communities
- Raise awareness about contamination levels in the local watershed
- Rio Santiago, which flows through the greater Guadalajara area, is one of the most polluted rivers in the world
- All of Guadalajara’s untreated effluent (human and industrial) flows into this river.
- Factories, under the protection of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), are dumping their waste into the river.
- Raise awareness about and share solutions and alternatives
2. Create a web-based media library to connect local movements adapting to water scarcity around the world and to facilitate global knowledge sharing.
- The initial media for the site will be generated by those participating in filming the documentary as well as footage from our friends in GroundwaterUp project in New Delhi, India
- People from around the world will be able to easily upload, edit and share their own media clips through the site using already existing, open source software/technology
- Users and communities will be able to organize locally and globally through the site (specifics TBD)
- Ideally, media uploaded to the site will focus on strategies, solutions and failures movements worldwide. This will help prevent communities from reinventing the wheel and allow relevant solutions to be implemented where they’re needed most.
As an organization with the intent of serving local communities, we expect these objectives to be as dynamic as the communities we’ll be working with in and around Guadalajara. And of course, we are open to your thoughts, comments and questions!
We’re blogging for climate change today as part of Blog Action Day and are one of 9,913 blogs in 151 countries with 13,102,696 readers.
The inspiration for the name of our project Adapting to Scarcity came from a conference on climate change I attended a few years ago. One of the speakers described how important it is to begin adaptively managing our resources, for example as the water cycle is altered and vegetation zones move north with climate change.
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Our dear friend Becca is in Hyderabad right now, and her experiences inspired our last post on rainwater harvesting and flooding. The Hindu daily newspaper quoted the recent flood as the worst flood in a hundred years. Becca took this picture yesterday from Mennupadu, which is en route to the city of Kurnool from Hyderabad. Kurnool was hit very hard hit by the floods. Visit Becca’s website to check out a list of articles on the floods and check out all the good things she’s doing in the world.
The final rains of the rainy season fell today in Guadalajara, according to our friends here. We captured the sounds and sights from our apartment. The picture is of Arthur leaning out the window to record the rain, thunder, bird calls, noisy buses and church bells intermingling. In documentaries, it’s always good to have background noise and transition shots, so we began collecting that footage today. It felt great to embark on the documentation process visually and aurally.
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Tags: audio recording, Fred Pearce, Gujarat, Hyderabad, monsoon, rain, rainwater harvesting, Rajsamadhiya, tanka, video library, When the River Runs Dry
Equipment, Literature | sarah | 
10 October 2009 0:12 | 
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Yesterday we visited Lake Chapala, the biggest lake in Mexico and the third largest lake in Latin America. Lake Chapala is an integral part of the Lerma-Chapala-Santiago watershed. It is fed water by four rivers, principally the Rio Lerma, and it subsequently feeds the Rio Santiago, which flows through the greater Guadalajara metropolitan area.
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We arrived safe and sound in Guadalajara last night. All of our equipment arrived as well, still in working order (as they say in Mexico, “Gracias a Dios”). For the next two weeks we’ll be in clases de Espanol, and then we’ll be able to devote all our time to the project.
There is a lot more to come in the following weeks, so visit us again virtually! We also keep a page on Facebook with updates, which can be accessed on the sidebar of this page.
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On Wednesday our friend Pablo from IMDEC took us on a powerful tour of the municipio of El Salto where he lives. We revisited La Huizachera and voyaged southeast away from the city, tracking the Canal Ahogado’s path to where it feeds into the Rio Santiago. Then we followed the Rio Santiago through the largest industrial corridor in Guadalajara, stopping to explore the El Salto/Juanacatlan waterfalls, and finished our trip along the Rio Santiago in rural Juanacatlan. It was a difficult journey.
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