No one has recorded when well digging started, but surely humans imitated elephants in digging holes in the sand to access cooler water that didn't make the children sick. Eventually, humankind began to redesign, maintain, and repair the wells they constructed, but when wells became "commodities" in the twentieth century, this maintenance ethic was

No one has recorded when well digging started, but surely humans imitated elephants in digging holes in the sand to access cooler water that didn’t make the children sick. Eventually, humankind began to redesign, maintain, and repair the wells they constructed, but when wells became "commodities" in the twentieth century, this maintenance ethic was fogotten. Recapturing that ethic, Sustainable Wells: Maintenance, Problem Prevention, and Rehabilitation is a guide to keeping well systems operating at peak capacity. The book focuses on how to prevent and forestall problems, and manage the problems with wells as they age. Examining the many challenges that come with maintaining well performance, the book provides a comprehensive yet readable state-of-the-art summary of performance maintenance, problem prevention, and rehabilitation or restoration practice with the goal of sustaining optimal performance over the long run. Rather than focusing on a certain aspect of well cleaning, or a particular technical approach, it covers the scope of maintenance and rehabilitation, from planning to evaluation testing. It also addresses the crucial subjects of preventive design, maintenance monitoring from electrical to biofouling, and evaluation testing. An exploration of the subject without a vendor or strong regional bias, the book is based on the authors’ extensive hands-on experience serving well-operating clientele. In addition to water supply wells, it addresses the problems and maintenance issues of monitoring, plume control, and other "environmental" wells. Compiling information from existing literature into a single source, and combining that information with experience, the book provides recommendations based on historical performance. Copiously illustrated with approximately ninety black and white photographs, figures, and a color insert, the book reflects the changes in the profession that have occurred during the past decade or so. These features and more make this the first resource to turn to when devising solutions for maintaining and improving well performance.

For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country—a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car. The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ

"An essential document of our time." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live? Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead. Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is a guide for housing developers, advocates, public agency staff, and the financial community that offers specific guidance on incorporating green building strategies into the design, construction, and operation of affordable housing developments. A completely revised and expanded second edition of the groundbreaking 1999 publication, this new book focuses on topics of specific relevance to affordable housing including: how green building adds value to affordable housing the integrated design process best practices in green design for affordable housing green operations and maintenance innovative funding and finance emerging programs, partnerships, and policies Edited by national green affordable housing expert Walker Wells and featuring a foreword by Matt Petersen, president and chief executive officer of Global Green USA, the book presents 12 case studies of model developments and projects, including rental, home ownership, special needs, senior, self-help, and co-housing from around the United States. Each case study describes the unique green features of the development, discusses how they were successfully incorporated, considers the project's financing and savings associated with the green measures, and outlines lessons learned. Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is the first book of its kind to present information regarding green building that is specifically tailored to the affordable housing development community.

Groundwater has provided great benefits to agriculture irrigation in semi-arid OECD countries, but its intensive use beyond recharge in certain regions has depleted resources and generated significant negative environmental externalities.

Water Wells and Boreholes focuses on wells that are used for drinking, industry, agriculture or other supply purposes. Other types of wells and boreholes are also covered, including boreholes for monitoring groundwater level and groundwater quality. This fully revised second edition updates and expands the content of the original book whilst maintaining its practical emphasis. The book follows a life-cycle approach to water wells, from identifying a suitable well site through to successful implementation, operation and maintenance of the well, to its eventual decommissioning. Completely revised and updated throughout, Water Wells and Boreholes, Second edition, is the ideal reference for final-year undergraduate students in geology and civil engineering; graduate students in hydrogeology, civil engineering and environmental sciences; research students who use well data in their research; professionals in hydrogeology, water engineering, environmental engineering and geotechnical engineering; and aid workers and others involved in well projects.