On the West Coast

I'm working on a poster to educate students/faculty about the importance of water conservation.

My sister recently moved to California, where they are experiencing a serious water shortage. They have to import all of their water from the Colorado River, which is causing a huge strain on that body of water. The citizens are aware of this issue and adapt their lifestyles accordingly. For example, my sister has lived there for about 4 months, and during that amount of time she has only seen TWO plastic water bottles. Everyone uses safe, reusable containers for their beverages. Stainless steel containers, glass containers, BPA-free Nalgene bottles.

I get a bit frustrated when I walk around campus and see plastic water bottles everywhere. In a time of climate change and peak oil, we absolutely do not need to be 1. using oil to create trillions and trillions of these non-resuable containers that take up ungodly amounts of space in our landfills (only 12% of plastic bottles are recycled in America) and 2. using oil to ship (basically) re-labeled tap water across hundreds of miles of America. I find this type of behavior completely illogical.

Plus, this kids are so young and they're already being exposed to so many hormone-disrupting, cancer-causing chemicals.
The bottom line is that Coke and Pepsi have no soul. These companies need to be the ones to either stop producing these dangerous products or educate people about the risks.

The Transition Movement helps me keep my sanity when I think about stuff like this. Thank god that we're running out of cheap oil.
(post from Thursday, Aug 31st)