Water World

(Nothing like naming a blog post after a crappy Kevin Costner movie.)

So Ch. 5 of the Roseland book is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

I'm interested in how we use water resources because it's always been a scare commodity for me.  Growing up in California, we experienced some pretty severe drought conditions from the late 80's through the mid 90's.  The water conservation measures we had to adopt during this time period ingrained in me how precious this one particular resource is.  After graduating from high school, I moved to southern Arizona, which, as you may know, is a desert.  Deserts, as you may also know, are known for their scarcity of water.  What's worse, the area was (and still is) in a long-term drought.  I probably don't have to tell you that droughts in the desert are not good.  So the lessons learned growing up continued to pay dividends in my new home.  After spending six years in Arizona, I picked up stakes and headed to North Carolina.  While I was living there, for a couple of summers, we experienced extreme heat and little precipitation, leading to a situation in which we had less than one hundred days left before our water supply ran dry.  After another six years there, I once again picked up stakes and moved to Bloomington for graduate school.  What did I find when I got here last summer?  More drought, and more 100 degree heat.

The moral of the story is:  where I go, water shortages tend to follow.  Sorry 'bout that.  So you can understand that I am a wee bit concerned about our use of water.  That's why this particular chapter resonates with me.

There are two aspects in particular of this chapter that caught my attention.  One is the use of solar aquatic systems (SAS).  These are basically greenhouses that function as wetlands that help filter wastewater and make it safe for human use again.  This reminded me of an experience I had this summer.  I spent part of the summer in South Lake Tahoe, CA, interning with the Sierra Nevada Alliance, which is a non-profit environmental organization.  One of the projects I worked on was a meadow forum, where we gathered a group of local and regional experts on meadows and wetlands to visit some restored wetlands and discuss some of the best ways to preserve and protect them.  In the process, I learned a bit about how wetlands function and what ecosystem services they provide.  Basically, they act as both a water filter and as a way to replenish water supplies.  As water flows downhill (in the form of run-off from the Sierra Nevada Mountains in this case), the vegetation helps absorb some of the water and let it percolate to replenish groundwater supplies, while also slowing its progress so downstream communities don't get inundated with overflowing water.

That's what these artificial SAS systems sound like to me.  I'm sure they're good things (and apparently tourist attractions, too), but I can't help but wonder:  wouldn't it just be easier to preserve wetlands in the first place instead of constructing fake ones?  You know, stop building subdivisions on top of them, overgrazing them, etc.?  It just seems to make sense to me.  It sounds like this approach is starting to gain some momentum; I read somewhere (don't remember where) recently that Massachusetts recently protected a bunch of wetlands to help preserve Boston's water supply.  So that's good.

The second topic that struck me in this chapter was the idea of integrated resource planning.  As Roseland discusses it, this means integrating all parts of water management and planning, like irrigation and wastewater treatment.  I think this is great, but I think it can and should be taken further.  Last week, I had a conversation with someone from the California Department of Water Resources (whom I met at the aforementioned meadow forum) about his work.  He mentioned that what he and others are trying to do is integrate water planning with land use planning, urban planning, forest management, wildlife management, etc., etc.  Basically, the idea is to integrate lots of different ecosystem service management departments to deal with all aspects of the environment as a whole instead of treating each resource independently.  This to me seems like an amazing idea.  As we've already learned, you can't just wall off different pieces of the environment, manage them independently, and hope it all turns out okay.  Treating the environment as one big whole I think will result in a much better outcome (not to mention cheaper because I imagine we can streamline the bureaucracy in that case).  Maybe this is an idea that can be further developed, put into place, and then adopted widely.

Until next time, when I promise not to write a post entitled "The Postman"...

Random Things You Might Like

Even though it is not my week to blog, I thought I would pass along a few links of things that I find thought-provoking and, yes, at least a little uplifting.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/two-thirds-worlds-biggest-businesses-put-climate-change-central-to-strategy.php?campaign=th_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29

These are the kinds of things I like to see.  I firmly believe we need big responses to the big problems that we face.  Business and commerce play huge roles in our lives.  What if the world's biggest businesses were to all adopt more ecologically sustainable business practices?  That would be a revolution in commerce that could have a tremendous impact on our lives.  I question that it would be what we really, truly need, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.  Perhaps the best solution would be for huge corporations to go away completely, but at this point that seems neither realistic nor imminent.  However, I can imagine that, if the world's biggest businesses succeeded in going "green," their customers could begin to take a hard look at their lifestyles and make conscious choices to change how they live, which could eventually lead to mega-business slowly going the way of the dodo as consumers choose smaller local products to the extent possible, and maybe even overthrown our consumer society completely.  Now THAT would be a revolution

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/The-Beginning-End-Suburban-atlantic-1156625650.html?x=0

Here's another example of a big structural change that could have big ramifications.  The article doesn't delve too deeply into why this is happening, but the study linked within the article does.  It discusses some of the structural economic issues that have led to a decline in suburbinization.  I don't know if this necessarily represents a change in attitudes, but I guess it's a step in the right direction.  I hate seeing urban sprawl, so anything that makes some of it go away is fine by me.  Maybe a crappy economy and high gas prices will cause people to slowly realize that living way out in the middle of nowhere isn't so great.  Unfortunately, though, that same crappy economy is hitting hard at public transportation and other social programs that could bring people closer to their places of work (assuming they still have one) and play, which illustrates the limits of what passively letting events dictate our actions gets us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlwh8vT2NU

Finally, I saw this movie at the IU Cinema last weekend, and thought it was really good.  "Wasteland" is about an artist who goes to the world's largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro, where he meets the scavengers who sift through the garbage in search of recyclables, befriends them, photographs them, and then makes pieces of art out of the photos using the same garbage the "pickers" collect, ultimately selling the pieces and giving all the money to the pickers themselves.  It's mind-boggling to see what happens to all the crap we throw away.  Also amazing is what we reduce some segments of society to; I think the artist, Vik Muniz, indirectly refers to the pickers as trash early in the film, before he's gotten to know them.  When you think about the confluence here of our human and inanimate detritus...it's actually pretty sickening.  But at the same time, the movie manages to show that there is some hope there, and that these people are real and have real thoughts and aspirations for the future.  Rent it, if you can...or Netflix it (possibly the first use of "Netflix" as a verb ever, and if it is, I want credit for it), if you're still using Netflix after their price increases, that is.

That's it for tonight.

Personal Sustainability Project Idea

The personal sustainability project I would like to undertake has to do with food.  My goal is to try and use more local, organic food that is healthy, and learn how to use it to make plenty of new dishes and recipes.  My preliminary action plan involves talking to a few friends (including a classmate and one of my neighbors -- who happens to work at Bloomingfoods) about the types of food they eat, how to use local, organic products to create a balanced diet, and hopefully to obtain some recipes that I can cook myself.  As another part of the project, I might do some research into the advantages and disadvantages of local food, such as comparing the ecological footprint of local food versus mass-produced commercial food brought in from across the world.  I know such studies exist, I would just like to find them and do a write-up on them or something.  Other topics to address could be the obstacles faced by small-scale, local farmers (such as structural issues that prevent them from competing on an equal footing with major food producers), or a comparison of the economic advantages to local vs. non-local food sources.

I have several motivations for this project.  One is that I would like to learn to incorporate local food to reduce my personal ecological footprint.  A second is that I would like to improve my diet in general.  I am not much of a cook.  I know how to make some things, but frankly, I'm getting tired of the food I cook.  I would like to incorporate more variety in my diet, and make it healthy to boot.  I figure learning to use different ingredients to make different dishes would enrich my culinary life.  The last goal is a financial one.  I just think that I spend too much money at Kroger every week.  I'm really not sure that switching to more local food and raw ingredients instead of stuff that comes in a box will save me money, but it's worth a shot.

That's my idea for now.  If anyone has comments or suggestions, please feel free to post them.

Determining the Correct Path to Sustainability, and How to Not Become Overwhelmed in the Process

Before we start, go take a look at this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/going-green-but-getting-nowhere.html?_r=2

Go ahead, I'll wait....Done?  Kay.  Good.

There are two reasons for posting this article.  One is that it provides an excellent illustration for why I would like to look at sustainable development policy at a national and international level.  I know this is a course focused mostly on local sustainability, but I still believe that we need to tackle these huge problems in a huge way in order to really make a difference.

The second reason for posting it is that it perfectly illustrates the mountain of obstacles in our way to establishing a sustainable lifestyle.  Yeah, sure, I may be able to do a lot of things to save the world, but in the end, I can't control the other 6+ billion people on the planet and what they do.  No matter how many people we reach, how many lifestyles are altered, there's still billions out there that are actively working towards our destruction, and they don't even know it.  Last week, we talked about how we try and motivate ourselves in the face of such obstacles, but when you look at the big picture like this, it's really, really hard.

Also last week, we calculated our eco-footprints using two different websites.  Depending upon which site you believe, if everyone alive consumed the way I did, we need either 4.3 or 4.5 Earths to sustain everyone.  Wow.  And here I thought I was doing well.  Turns out I'm still part of the problem, not part of the solution.

So what is the solution?  If changing people's actions is so difficult, maybe we just need to reduce the number of people on the planet.  It can be done.  You improve people's access to health care, education, and other basic services, and they should acquire better access to contraception and knowledge about the advantages of having fewer kids.  All of these things will raise people's standard of living.  But I think there's a Catch-22 there.  You raise people's standard of living, and all of a sudden they start wanting more stuff, so even though we might start gradually reducing the number of people alive, those that remain might still use up more resources because they're consuming more.  So in the process of trying to fix one side of the problem, you create the conditions that could allow the other side of the problem to get much, much worse.

So are we doomed to some sort of Malthusian/Darwinian catastrophe where only the strong survive?  (I'm picturing a scene from "The Road"...the movie, because I haven't read the book yet.)  I hope not.  Don't know exactly how we're going to get where we need to be, but maybe this class will help us figure it out.

One thing I do know can be revealed by this second article (if you don't read the whole article, at least watch the video):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/at-colleges-the-marketers-are-everywhere.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

There's so much wrong with this, but I'll just say one thing and be done:  We're not going to get anywhere until we stop socializing our young people to be nothing but good little consumers.  That's all you accomplish when you hold a huge shopping party for young people at Target.  I know rampant consumerism needs to be stopped, but then I read things like this, and I figure we're toast.

(Full disclosure:  I actually used to go to this very same Target from time to time when I lived in Chapel Hill...because, really, where else can you get batteries, underwear, windshield wipers, Clif bars, and cheap DVDs all in one place?)