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Water Supply and Waste Disposal

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Indigenous Environmental Knowledge

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Abstract

Traditional communities are skilled at devising ways to channel and store water to meet their requirements and some striking examples are described. Unfortunately such communities give much less attention to water purity. In the case of drinking water this often means ignoring the possibility that the water in question might contain dangerous pathogens. They also generally underestimate the capacity of water bodies to support disease vectors. Likewise, whilst they make ingenious use of human wastes as farm and fishpond fertilizers, they often fail to implement the measures required to counter possible health hazards. On balance, water and waste management emerge as one of the least secure sectors of indigenous knowledge and various suggestions are made for improving the situation.

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  1. Environmental Studies Programme, University of Cardiff, Wales, UK

    John Edington

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Edington, J. (2017). Water Supply and Waste Disposal. In: Indigenous Environmental Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62491-4_7

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