Big news: Autodesk Water Infrastructure apps now free for educators and students

We have a bunch of great links for you this time around, but we are leading the OWB Newsletter with some very big news: Autodesk Water Infrastructure products now available to students and educators around the globe – for free. Please help us get the word out by sharing this news with other water professionals, teachers, and students.

If you didn't know that Autodesk offers free software for education, we've been doing it for a long time, and we believe strongly in it. We are committed to inspiring and empowering students to gain the skills, hands on experiences, and credentials they need to design and make a better world for all.

Also new on the blog since our last newsletter about only flushing the 3Ps: We saw that Symetri, an Autodesk Platinum Partner, published a great sustainability story about using InfoDrainage for a lake revitalization project in Baton Rouge. They rehabbed a former swamp that was falling back on its swampy ways. Read Dredging up the past at the University Lakes of Baton Rouge to build a better future.

We have another new customer story for you, too. Trevor English talks to Mira Chokshi, P.E., founder of Climate Adaptive Systems, an engineering consulting firm for hydraulic and hydrologic modelling capital planning with a sustainable bent. Read How small consultancies like Climate Adaptive Systems use Autodesk Water Infrastructure software.

Now, on to the links....

The coming water wars

There are already lots of stories brewing about water wars, and you will see a lot more of them in the coming years - local, national, and international. Some aquifers are starting to dry up or are draining at worrisome levels, which is leading to political battles between competing interests: farmers, local water managers, municipalities, regional and national administrators, consumers – just about everyone how has a stake in the water, which is ultimately everybody.

The Kansas Reflector wades deep into the subject in Hoping for a miracle to save the Ogallala Aquifer? Prepare for the new Dust Bowl. It has a really great quote: "Once the water is gone, it’s gone for the rest of our lifetimes — and because geologic recharge is so slow, several hundred or perhaps thousands of lifetimes to come."

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, we read Farm fertilizer runoff is impacting drinking water in the Midwest, not just the Gulf's 'dead zone'. This one really gets to the heart of the issue of nitrate runoff. Who is going to pay to remove all of that nitrate? Utilities like Des Moines Water Works, that's who.

Attention water entrepreneurs

Can you see how much more important water quality will become?

A lot of money will surely be poured into technologies that can test water for bacteria, nitrates, PFAs, and all manner of other pollutants. It seems inevitable that we will see faster and more efficient testing, and not just for water professionals. There is already a boom in home-water testing kits, which might get faster and more efficient, but boy are they expensive. There are a few potential products out there that claim to be solving this problem in a gee-whiz high-tech way like Drinkable in Canada, a start-up working on an app-paired water-testing device, but until it's produced and shipped, this start-up's solution remains theoretical.

Praying for a hurricane

The New Yorker also has a nice water war piece on The Decline of the Rio Grande, which approaches the US/Mexico water border dispute from an interesting angle: some people are actually praying for a hurricane. As one says, “It takes a catastrophic event to fill up these reservoirs.” Let's hope not.

Solar + water = light

This is not a new story, but it has a nice milestone. The mission-led company Liter of Light in the Phillipines that builds solar-powered bottle lights has been working on this project for a decade now, and they recently celebrated their Guinness World Record Tree of Light installation in Dubai. Their solar bottle lights, some of which are filled with water and installed in holes in roofs to provide light indoors, can last for up to 10 years. They are powered by the sun and a bit of water. If you have some time and an engineering bent, you can make one yourself.

Musseling into the wind market

We love a good multi-use development story, particularly one with a sustainability angle, and this one is a tasty one. Eighteen months ago, Swedish state-owned power firm Vattenfall started an experimental underwater seafood farm.

Here's what they did: They strung lines between their offshore wind farm turbines to grow seaweed and mussel crops, and they just had their first harvest: Clean energy, fresh mussels: Scandinavia’s experiment to harvest seafood and wind power together. Imagine the possibilities as wind farms proliferate. In 1991, Denmark became the first country in the world to install a commercial offshore wind park, and more than 30 years later, nearly half of the Danish electricity production comes from wind turbines. They aren't the first to try the mussel experiment, though. That was Belgium.

Andrew Millison free permaculture course

Finally, to bring it all back to "free for education", we are big fans of Andrew Millison, who we wrote about in our Planet-saving power of ponds article. This Oregon State University professor (and champion of beavers) has a new Introduction to Permaculture course that is entirely free to anyone.

Doing our best to make every link matter.