This is the End, my friends. And a New Beginning.

I loved this project. I hated this project. It was such a developmental, uplifting and rough time for me. I had to learn not only about sustainbility in eating but also sustainability in keeping myself accountable for the things I do in my life.

For instance, I told alot of people at my presentation today that I re-conceptualized my body as a battle ground, as a cite of protest and a starting point for sustainability. Before this project, when I thought about people hurting the environment with their actions I thought about people littering, not recycling. Now I know that eating, the very act of consuming is in itself a choice to be environmentally stable-or not.  Reducing your carbon footprint is as easy as reducing the amount of meat you eat. This doesn’t mean you have to be a hardcore (hXc) vegan or even a vegetarian 100% of the time (although I think it’s completely awesome when people choose those paths.)  It means you choose a meat-free dish once a day. Or you only eat meat three out of the four days a week.  These efforts alone can cut your carbon footprint by 25%, reducing several tons of C02 the average American would usually eat.

Vegetarianism was easy, veganism was more difficult, and local produce was nigh impossible for me, mostly because of travel and scheduling that week before spring produce was available. And although nature.org thinks that vegans produce 72% less carbon that meat eaters, I learned that the statistic might be flawed. For instance, vegans might rely on tofu, or tempeh, or veggie burgers for their main sources of protein. These have nearly as high a carbon footprint than does anything else–they require process, packaging, shipping, refrigeration, and are sent from a location to a central warehouse and then to your local supermarket.  The simple fact might be that if you’re only concerned about meat eating and C02 emissions, eating locally grown meat is the better and more sustainable choice. But as we pointed out–there are a multitude of reasons for eating or not eating meat. Some people cannot stand the cruelty done to animals. some people are worried about health. it’s all about balancing and making choice.

Those choices, however are important. To restate some statistics from an early blog post–there’s a lot at stake. 1/3 of C02 emissions comes from the food industry.  91 percent comes from methane and carbon production in farm management–this is largely factory farms and CAFOs. So yes, even eating vegetarian food cannot escape this statistic. However I am more aware of my body and my environment and how they interact with each other. I have gained a new sort of spirituality that helps me realize just how much control I have over myself and how I treat the world around me. I eat less meat, and sort of just see the world differently. It’s like a new lens in life. And I’m supremely grateful for this project and the new beginnings it’s provided me.

Gardening The Future.

I have now presented my poster to the class about my window farm. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to learn about window farming. Showing my window farm to people gives me an opportunity to educate others about creative gardening and producing/buying local organic food.

I was asked many times today about what I was going to do with window garden now that the class project is over. My garden will live on so do not worry. My window farm will be moving with me to a Boy Scout summer camp that I run. There it will hang in a window in the dinning hall. With this prime location I will have around 1500 people walk by it during the summer and I am sure that many of them will stop to take a look.

The possibility of having 1500 people learn about local food is an exciting idea that I cannot turn down. Exceptionally sense most of that 1500 will be middle school kids. Teaching kids at a young age is the easiest way to make meaning life changes.

And after camp the garden is moving with me to Chicago where I hope to expand it.

I hope that many of you are think about making your own window garden, and if you do please let me know. Here are a few things that I have learned from making my own can could help you.

First, herbs are the best to plant in a window garden because many of them do not grow to big. This style of gardening is not good for large plants. Also herbs allow you to continually harvest them without completely killing the plant.

Second, do forget to water them. The bottles themselves are not very big and with that they cannot store a lot of water. I have to water my garden every two days or it will quickly dry out. I learned this the hard way and my lettuce has not fully recovered from it yet.

Last, come up with a design of your own. You could simply build one close to mine or you could be creative. Being creative with your garden makes this project such a fun to do. A good friend of mine is now making one out of old sections of plastic plumbing of different sizes. Some of the pipes even have right angles in them so he can be even more creative with the design. He is planting wild flowers in his.

Over all this has been a fantastic project. I have truly enjoyed designing and building my garden and learning about environmental issues at the same time in class.

Random Window Farm Thoughts

This last weekend my window garden took a turn for the worse. I had to be out of town to finalize some post graduation plans in Chicago, where I am moving to, and while I was out of town my garden did not get watered. The red lettuce and chives both are not looking so well, but I believe that they will pull through. I have always had plants growing in my room and have seen them look worse then this before and they have always came back. I am hoping that this happens this time as well.

This does bring up a problem with my design of a window garden. The amount of soil in each bottle is small and therefore the amount of water it can hold is small as well. This means that I have to keep up with the watering or the plants will quickly die. I have been watering every other day or so, but over the weekend they went four days with out water. Just these four days made the plants look sick.

The window farming website does have some plans for building an automated watering system for those who are to busy to water everyday.

Also my last post I talked about a new question that I had come up with. I wanted to know how many trees would I have to plant to cancel out my CO2 emissions. That way I could eliminate all my CO2 emissions and be carbon neutral. Here is what I have found from reliable sources.

The average person in the United States emits 10,185lb of CO2 per year. (International Energy Agency 2009) And a tree absorbs on average 48lb of CO2 per year. (U. S. Department of Energy 2008) Which means I would have to plant 212.2 trees, a huge number but doable at the same time. Please note: This is rough average calculation with many variables not taken in to account and this is also for only one green house gas. With that said this still shows an interesting solution.

I find this to be a fun idea to play with in my head, trying to figure out if this is truly doable.

One last thing, last week I had an unexpected surprise come out of my garden. In with my red lettuce I had a foreign plant start to grow. After it got large enough I was able to identify it as a sunflower. A seed must have gotten mixed in with the potting soil. A sunflower is way to big to grow in a bottle, so I am trying to decide what to do with it. This is one of the things that I love about gardening. You never know what is going to happen.

Final Blog

Before this class I have to say did not know what an aquifer was and I had never heard of T. Boone Pickens or the Ogallala. When she briefly described what the Ogallala was and how municipalities were selling it off, and the fact that it was a huge water supply that was diminishing extremely rapidly, I was intrigued to say the least.

In my first blog I researched and presented the basics of the Ogallala, including what an aquifer actually is, how big the Ogallala is and was, how much water was being used up, and in what ways the aquifer was replenished. I was shocked to learn that the Ogallala one of the largest aquifers in the world, expanding across 174,000 square miles and eight states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. I was stunned to discover that more than 95 percent of the water being pumped from the Ogallala is used for irrigation and the Mid-West High Plains is responsible for an astonishing 65 percent of what is being used for irrigation. It made me wonder why we are trying so hard to produce crops in areas that are not meant to produce these crops, and why we don’t care about the amount of water we waste trying to produce crops in these arid areas!! I also researched the effects the diminishing of the Ogallala had on the panhandle region, and how this water shortage effected their economy and crop production output. I also researched T. Boone Pickens and his position in the “water industry”; how he is involved in water ranching (the selling off of sections of the Ogallala). I was shocked to find that in some places in Texas, water is more expensive than oil!! I also studied the image of water in religion, and how it is seen as such an important aspect of life; without water, we could not survive. Finally I took a look inside how media effects how we view water, and I was hoping to find that because water is seen as such an important amenity to our species, there would be a great deal of information on water, and how to prevent the overuse of water. I found a few websites and companies like Save Water America that had a lot of information on how we can greatly reduce the amount of water we currently use.

One of the main things I took from this research project was that I am so privileged. I know I have said this many times, but I truly mean it. I am so blessed to be able to have easy access to such amenities like clean water. This is a privilege and many of us often forget this, taking water for granted. It is scary to think that we have become such a greedy breed, taking more than we need, and not thinking about the repercussions our greediness has on this earth and our natural resources. What will happen when we run out of these natural resources? Where will we turn next?

Throughout each step of my research project I became more and more intrigued with the information I found about the Ogallala and also other types of problems faced by water shortages. The more blogs I completed, the more I began to understand how truly blessed I am to be able to have access to water. It really frightened me to find out that researchers predict that 36 states (that includes Kansas) will be in a water shortage within the next five years. I began to comprehend what this would mean for me, and what kind of effects it would have on everyone’s daily lives. Water is such an invaluable resource, and honestly I am scared to see what will happen next if we continue to mistreat this aquifer and misuse our water supply.

What I have learned in this class is that this misuse of natural resources is cyclically tied into ecofeminism. We cannot live without water, without clean air, without natural resources, but the world can certainly thrive without humans. In fact, it may be able to thrive better if we weren’t here! As we read in ‘Women and the Environment’ article, ecofeminism is a connection between the domination of women and the domination of nature. With the misuse and the abundant and careless overuse of water seen by millions of us everyday, water is clearly being seen as a “down”. Because the water is seen as unimportant and many men(human race) think of water as this endless resource, some begin to see it as just a simple object that is always going to be there and they being to mistreat the resource. As we discussed in class in accordance to the ‘Deep Ecology’ article, ecofeminism sees nature as everywhere and everything. Ecofeminists believe that nature is everywhere, and nature is involved in our everyday life. Just think about it, you breathe air everyday, you eat food everyday, you drink water EVERY DAY! You cannot escape from nature, we are always surrounded by aspects of nature, and without it we would perish. Nature can go on without us, be we need it to live!

I would love to learn more ways on how to conserve water, and I hope that as time passes, more attention is brought to the subject of water. With the assistance of the media, I believe information is more likely to get out there faster and further than by everyday discussion. I believe education is very important. It would be most effective to educate people about water shortages and how to conserve water, and learning these new concepts and incorporating them in your everyday life would be the most effective treatment to conserve our natural resources. However, this cannot happen if people do not know about the Ogallala and our water resources. I will definitely keep updated on new and improved ways of conserving water, and I will keep track of the Ogallala and how much it is diminishing.

Water and Media

I was watching Oprah the other day in light of her “Earth Day” Celebration. She had a variety of environmentalists and specialists on her program, citing information and statistics about pollution, discussing local food, global food, energy and other aspects of our natural resources, including ways to save money and save energy by “going green”. They had solutions and suggestions of ways to tweak your current ways to make them more earth friendly. Anyways, there was one quote from journalist and environmentalist Simran Sethi that really grabbed my attention. She said “In five years, at least 36 states will be encountering a water shortage”. I wanted to know if this statistic was actually true, so I set out to find some answers!!

On my search for the truth behind this statement I found this very informative and interesting website:

http://www.savewateramerica.com/home.swa

Be sure and check out the WATER SAVING IDEAS tab located in the upper-right corner. The videos are really informative and can teach you how to significantly reduce the amount of water you currently use. One thought I had: Do you not think its weird that the water that is in our toilet is clean enough to drink? Maybe It’s just me, but I have a hard time rationalizing and trying to understand WHY it has to be that clean. I mean, isn’t the ultimate purpose of toilet water to contaminate it?

Low-flow aerators and low-flow shower heads sound like a GREAT idea to me. They are easy to use, everyone has the ability to purchase these and it’s something that can significantly reduce your water use. I was watching the BRAVO channel the other day and a commercial came on promoting the usage of these low-flow aerators on your faucets. I am so excited that a considerable amount of people are finally getting creatively and innovatively involved in and promoting ways to conserve our water supply. Although information about the scarcity of water is not as publicized as it should be, it is being seen more and more in television, newspapers, the internet and other media sources. I googled “Ways to save water” and had almost 8 million results. Probably not as many results as if I had googled “Brad Pitt”, but it’s a start!

This website I found has 100 ways to conserve water. Most of these wouldn’t work for me because I live in an apartment, but there are some very useful tips for homeowners

http://www.wateruseitwisely.com/100-ways-to-conserve/index.php

In Need of An Effective Solution

Hey Everyone! Hope you are having a great weekend!
Since I have already discussed certain aspects of the Ogallala Aquifer, and you are all aware that it is depleting!! (so sad, i know!) I thought I would discuss some of the ways that one group, the “Panhandle Water Planning Group” suggests as courses of action to change this pattern of depletion, to insure that the Ogallala is clean and available for agriculture and human use for years to come.

The Panhandle Water Planning Group, (formerly)lead by Jarrett Atkinson, survey the amount of water used by the Panhandle region and use that data to calculate the projected water use and availability of the Ogallala. They then create and offer solutions for the preservation and protection of both the quality and quantity of water in the Ogallala aquifer. If you’re curious about the rate of depletion for different counties in the Panhandle region, you can visit their website and see their estimated projections at http://www.panhandlewater.org/Index.html and When they studied the information in 2000, they found that the Panhandle area was using more than 1.7 million acre per feet of water a year! 91% of that amount was used for irrigation and agricultural purposes, where as municipalities only used 4%. (I don’t know about the other 5%) To give you a visualization, 1.7 million acre/feet is enough to fill the Superdome in New Orleans 599 times!!

Atkinson believes that there are many factors that can change their predictions. They believe we have the ability to change our future if we change our current practices, and install ones that are more efficient.

They believe that conserving irrigation water through the use of local control is the best way to make a difference in extending the life of the Ogallala. Local control allows a group of people to regulate their resources for the common good, and allows them to take only what is necessary and essential for their particular resource. With local control, you would also be able to regulate the quality of water as well as the quantity. Another suggestion the PWPA has is capping or plugging wells. They hope that this will eliminate unhealthy water, as well as an overuse of water. Capping is a temporary cover for a well and is used when landowners do not wish to permanently seal the well(see picture). It prevents chemicals, pollutants and fertilizers from entering the well and can prevent animals and their fecal matter from contaminating the water as well.

I will end with a quote from Atkinson: “The planning group is on record saying there is no surplus of water. We need to think of it as a savings or retirement account, We may want to withdraw from it in 50 years, but no one is going to fill it up.”
How do you think we can accomplish this? There are problems and benefits with their suggestions, but which way do think would be the most effective for recharging the Ogallala? Would installing a local regulatory system be effective?

Sources:
http://southwestfarmpress.com/mag/farming_panhandle_water_group/

Water and Spirituality

So, in my last blog I discussed the importance of water, and how we often take for granted how lucky we are to have accessibility to clean water sources almost everywhere we go in this state (country even). But as you know, water is an extremely precious commodity, and as the Ogallala continues to be drained faster than it is being naturally replenished, this vital resource is becoming more and more valuable and more precious to us.

I wanted to research how water is interconnected with spirituality, and when I began to research this topic, I immediately thought of Native Americans and indigenous people who live off the land. My first thoughts were of native American tribal leaders telling ancient stories of mother earth and father sky, and legends of the water and how it brings life and is life to so many. Then I realized, hello do not be so judgmental there are many people and religions that hold water as sacred and a major part of their spirituality!!

For many people in many religions, baptism is an important spiritual ritual that involves water. This sacred water that is poured on the person, or that the person is bathed in is supposed to cleanse the person of all their sins. Many churches and some homes sprinkle holy water for blessings and spiritual protection. There is also a Pagan custom in which the person is bathed in herbal or mineral water for spiritual and emotional purification. In Cornwall and other locations throughout
Britain are holy wells and sacred springs. These springs are said to be sacred to religious practitioners (more distinctly, Christian followers). Even in Disney movies like snow white, there are depictions of wishing wells, where a well of water is supposed to be magical and grant wishes and heart’s desires.

In Christianity, water is depicted as many things, most commonly as a source of life and nourishment, but also usually as a strong and powerful force; destructive and at the same time, cleansing. In the story of Noah and the Great Flood, water was seen as destroying the old, to create a new and fresh beginning. Also in the Bible, Moses and his followers roamed the desert for forty years, not to mention the story of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. There are few religious stories about being lost for years at sea. In the early chapters of the Book of Mormon, Deity provided a special compass called the Liahonato to guide people across the ocean. Water has an important part in many religions and their stories.

Many cultures correlate water with women by using the Goddess, or goddesses, or a variety of female nature spirits. In opposing views, those of ancient Greek history, springs were the place where water nymphs would lire men, where elemental spirits who took the form of beautiful young girls would haunt and tempt men. These springs were then seen as satanic and alluring. Other Greek springs were sacred to Aphrodite and Hera and alleged to have miraculous powers. Hera would cleanse her sins and reclaim her virginity each year when she would immerse herself in the fountain of Kanathos. In an Aboriginal myth from northern Australia, the All-Mother arrived from the sea in the form of a rainbow serpent. It was All-mother who made water for the Ancestors by urinating on their land, creating the lakes, rivers and water holes to satisfy their thirst. The “living water” or running water of springs and natural fountains is especially linked in ancient mythological systems with women, fertility and childbirth.

As you can see there are many different perspectives on the spirituality that water holds, expanding over many different religions and cultures. I think that water was seen as far more spiritual many years ago when it was a lot more difficult to obtain and less accessible. Nowadays because water comes in so many different forms, all extremely accessible, I think it somewhat diminishes the power and preciousness that water should be granted. Because water is so abundant, it is not seen AS important as it was many years ago when it was much harder to come by.

The Importance of Water

Obviously we all know how important water is, we cannot survive without it. However, we have become a culture of consumerism. Many people, especially Americans, believe that we are entitled to sooooo much. With this sense of unwarranted entitlement, we have created problems with our environment. With the reduction of the Ogallala, there has been a great need to restructure how we use water and reducing the amount of water we use in general.

Check out this guy:

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

We forget that clean, drinkable water is a privilege that we have. I often will grab a water bottle or fill a glass of water and drink it without thinking about how lucky I am to have this endless source of clean water that is available virtually wherever and whenever I desire it. As Americans, we are very fortunate to have this accessibility to drinkable water. We have this reaction of entitlement when it comes to getting water, we expect that there will always be accessible drinking water nearby. For millions abroad, they do not have the privilege of clean water sources nearby. Often times people must journey miles to gather water(clean or otherwise) for their entire village. In some places in Africa, people are not even allowed to gather rain water as a source of nourishment for it is owned by corporations. Living in an apartment, I don’t even have to pay for my water supply, it is provided at no cost. It just makes me wonder, can I even go one day without this necessity? Water is clearly important, but the rate at which many Americans are using water today is having devastating effects on our planet.

If there comes a day when the Ogallala ceases to produce water, what sources of water will we turn to next? And when those are gone? We cannot survive without water, it is the basis of life, and without it we will not exist.
Hopefully this wasn’t too depressing for you all, I am simply trying to re-emphasize the importance of water, and restate how lucky I think we all are to have such privileges and conveniences here in America.

This last video should give you a good laugh

Check out this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaNw3a0JZ3Y

Will We Run Out of Water?

It’s the information we’ve all been afraid to hear… What Dr. Carroll has been telling us in class… Municipalities are selling off the Ogallala. In some places water has becoming more expensive than oil. People are actually buying and selling off their rights and ownerships to the water of the Ogallala.

In the dry region of the High Texas Plains, cities gather water from two main sources:

1) the small flow of the streams rising in or crossing the area, and

2) the groundwater from the dwindling Ogallala aquifer.

Because this region is so short on water supply the cities have established laws which entitled the landowner to do what they wish with the groundwater produced by the Ogallala and the surface water from the runoff from streams and rivers and the like.

Texas Water Laws

The most famous Texas Law regarding the ownership and use of infiltrating groundwater was the Houston and T. C. Ry. Co. v. East (1904). This doctrine allows landowners to pump and use the groundwater beneath their property without any guidelines. As years passed, court decisions have decided to grant landowners the right to do what they wish with their groundwater rights, including selling them if they wish.

This process of buying and selling rural land for the rights to the groundwater underneath is sometimes referred to as “Water Ranching”.

The main authority over landowner rights is being implemented by local underground water conservation districts also called UWCDs. These conservation districts were established by special legislation. Presently there are more than 45 UWCDs operating in Texas, covering much of the Ogallala aquifer. The main duties of these districts are to ensure that the rules for conserving, preserving, protecting, recharging and preventing the waste of groundwater are kept with accordance to the laws.

Because there is this variety of private and public water rights, the management of the surface and groundwater resources has been extremely difficult with regard to establishing fair private and public ownership rights.



Since the 1960′s the Ogallala has provided the majority of the water used for irrigation and was the main source of municipal water supply for almost all of the High Plains communities. Then a large number of communities in the High Plains began purchasing others’ groundwater rights because they could no longer expand their local wells to extract water. The city of Lubbock has purchased over 80,000 acres of groundwater rights and the city of Amarillo has purchased over 163,000 acres of groundwater rights in adjacent counties and continues to add to its groundwater reserves.

You may recognize the name T. Boone Pickens, the man who founded Mesa Petroleum, the Company that has bought the rights to all of the groundwater in the Texas Panhandle. The Panhandle is over 150,000 acres and Boone owns more than 200,000 acre-feet of water to date. Because the Ogallala is in the process of depletion and it is unable to recharge as fast as it discharges, the Mesa Petroleum company is selling the water to municipalities facing severe water shortages. It is scary to think that the world is in a place where companies own such amenities as water; the substance of life. But Pickens is no dumby, he realizes the value of this depleting water supply and recognizes that this natural amenity is diminishing quickly. In some places in Texas where water is scarce, the cost is found to be higher than oil! Although Pickens is widely known, he is among many Water ranchers that are emerging in this age.

Sources:

Templer, Otis W. “Municipal conjunctive water use on the Texas High Plains.” The Social Science Journal 38.4 (Oct 2001): 597(9). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. Kansas State University Libraries. 5 Mar. 2009

.

Economic side effects: Revenue Reduction

In this blog I will be examining just one of the many economic effects caused by the excessive pumping of the Ogallala aquifer. As I stated before, the water from Ogallala aquifer is being withdrawn faster than it can replenish itself naturally, and therefore the amount of water is greatly declining. I would like to focus on the Ogallala from a local level, so you can see the economic effects more clearly. A region I found that had a dramatic response to the decline in the aquifer was one small region in the Southern Plains.

This particular land expands across 19 counties in Texas, and contains approximately 2.5 million acres of irrigated crop land. Their economy (along with much of the Southern Plains) is very dependent upon their agriculture businesses. Many of the components within the agriculture business here include grain elevators, cattle feed, cotton production, meat packing plants, production suppliers, plants and textile mills. This region heavily relies on the Ogallala aquifer, producing nearly 72% of the four major field crops grown in that region which are cotton, wheat, corn and grain year-round. Because the amount of irrigation has grown, the amount of water that is used has dramatically increased. In 1949 the approximate use of water for this region was 4 Million acres/feet each year and in 1980, the amount had leaped to an astonishing 18 million acres/feet. Because of this heavy discharge of the aquifer, the amount of water has dramatically declined, especially in irrigated areas which have left the farmers with declining water reserves and reduced yields in irrigation wells.

Given these declines, some farmers have had to adopt more efficient irrigation methods such as dryland farming. Many farmers started to shift their focus to the crops that they know would utilize less water during their particular “growing season”. However budget constraints and a loss of revenue were inevitable. This led to a huge decline in crop production for this region, totaling the economic loss to over $190 million. Because these farmers had carelessly overused the water from the aquifer, they were eventually forced to cut back their production. Clearly the amount of water a farmer is allowed to use can have a dramatic impact on how much is yielded from their production. The Ogallala aquifer greatly effects the amount of revenue and production one land can yield.

In the following video, they vaguely describe the financial(as well as personal) side effects the decrease of the Ogallala has had on the state of Nebraska, and asks what can be done to stop the decline in water.

On a more positive note, there are many researchers and research programs dedicated to the preservation of the Ogallala, one of the world’s largest aquifers. New technology is being invented to measure input and output, and to design the most efficient ways to farm and irrigate large-scale. I will be researching and reporting all of this in a later blog.