The Triton Impact
For over eight years, I'd dreamed of attending the University of California, San Diego. It wasn't too far from home, it was right next to the warm ocean, and as far as I was concerned it had the best Biology Department of the UCs to help me do what I wanted to in life.
When I first got here, I was ecstatic! There were so many new people with interests similar to mine, and I could not wait to make a name in my new community. Yet as I watched and learned more about my home, the more evidence I saw of a terrible problem...
Almost no one seemed to pay attention to the drought!
Some of the people that I met acknowledged the drought, but didn't seem to think that it was that big of an issue. Many knew about it, but didn't feel that their own water usage practices made any difference. And a few believed that the drought was a fabrication, presented to us by our government to hike up water prices and create discord. I saw almost no one doing anything to make any changes to their water habits or encouraging others to do the same. That scared me.
Thankfully my school had put in some effort to the conservation of our water. On January 16, 2014, Janet Napolitano, University of California President, announced a goal to reduce the overall per capita use of the UC system by 20% by the year 2020. According to "Making Every Drop Count", as of April 2015 UCSD had stopped watering 54,000 square feet of grass, "saving 1.53 million gallons of water per year." The article also states that the ornamental fountains of campus have been turned off as a part of the conservation response and "are limited to running for an hour, three nights a week for maintenance purposes."* On a smaller scale, the school has also displayed stickers on many of the bathroom mirrors asking us to "Be a Turn-Off" and help save water.
Nonetheless - this is not enough. As a whole, the students and staff of our school are uneducated about this looming problem.
We need to raise awareness by communicating with our peers, our school, and our community, and work to together on efforts to help in the conservation of our world's endangered resource.
*While I'm proud of the efforts that my school has made to help, I cannot speak to the credibility of the statements in this article. As recently as November 2015, there were many fountains on during the day multiple times during the week, including the one along Library Walk in front on the Price Center. I have also witnessed on multiple occasions the irrigation of plant life during the day, while the article states that "Irrigation throughout campus was also shut off from December 2014 to January 2015 and now, what little irrigation is done, is done only at night," (Margoni). I have reached out to the Sustainability Committee of UCSD and have not yet heard back.
Natalia Simone King
A passionate, responsible, and affable leader with many years of community involvement, Natalia has been an active participant in numerous science programs and collaborative activities. She is a tenacious and ambitious college student with an innate curiosity and strong desire to understand all that she can about the universe. Born and raised in California, Natalia moved from the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 2015 to the University of California, San Diego to complete work on her Bachelors of Science in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. She is particularly interested in the involvement of the various conservation projects of the world and can think of no better place to start than by helping to save her home.
Water Trading (Tuesday, 11 April 2017 03:00)
Good blog post, Really i got too much information.
Joe Pementell (Tuesday, 29 December 2015 17:58)
Our home was the first home in our neighborhood to embrace the brown and stop watering our lawn! This was an easy first step to make and will help us transition to a dry landscaped environment with native plant species.
Lisanne Bzoskie (Sunday, 06 December 2015 20:05)
Hello Natalia, I believe your conservation efforts and plan of action for California is fantastic! Keep it up! Thanks to your advice my family has now switched to more vegetarian options instead of beef, and reduced our milk consumption greatly!
John King (Sunday, 06 December 2015 16:55)
I've stopped watering the lawn, I take shorter showers, and I eat less red meat since it takes a huge amount of water to raise a cow. That's too great a price for a steak.