Archive for June 18, 2009

Erkin | June 18, 2009
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Facts and figures about water and human settlements

Virtually all governments accept that settlements with more than 20,000 inhabitants are urban centres but disagree about where to draw the line between urban and rural for settlements with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. Some classify all settlements with only a few hundred inhabitants as ‘urban’ while others consider most or all settlements with up to 20,000 inhabitants as ‘rural’. This has significance for two reasons: a very high proportion of people live in settlements with between 500 and 20,000 inhabitants; and their designation as urban populations generally means more government structures and improved provision for water and sanitation.

Roughly 3% of the earth’s land surface is occupied by urban areas, with the highest concentrations occurring along the coasts and waterways.
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Category: Facts and figures |
Erkin | June 18, 2009
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Only a moral person can preserve water

As it follows from the head of this paragraph, the human merits will be discussed hereinafter. It is not a secret that a different attitude of people to water can be met in our life – from worship of water as the certain sacred gift towards an odious behavior when a man disposes his wastes into flowing water of aryks or canals.

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However, a person with such an attitude to water can show concern with respect to an abandoned slice of bread – shakes off it from dust, places against his forehead, and carefully puts it in a secluded nook. Why is his behavior so different with respect to bread and water, although he knows, or has to know, that a role of water in our life no less important than of bread? For instance, a man can survive without water only three days, and without bread a few weeks. Why an internal “protective relay” or moral brakes of a man function in different ways under different situations? Of course, such a matter is in the competence of psychoanalysts and specialists in morality and ethics, but it is of interest for all.
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Category: Article |