Concluding Thoughts

 So, the Lived Ethics project is basically over, meaning I no longer have to shower in a bucket. The cool thing is that my roommates and I talked about it, and decided we might as well keep doing it; for me because of my previously stated environmental reasons, and for them perhaps only because it keeps our utilities bill just a wee bit lower. How did this individual action project end up? Pretty much the same as it's been this whole time, except that showering in a bucket got a little bit more normal and I got a little bit better at pouring the grey water into the toilet without spilling it all over the floor. My only complaint is that I feel like I wasn't doing enough, that my sacrifice was not as significant as classmates who decided not to eat meat or sleep with their window wide open. But with water, it's hard, and that's probably why people out here in Colorado Springs aren't doing more to conserve; because besides grey water (which could also be done for dishes, but that gets REALLY gross really fast), there aren't any super simple ways to conserve water. The only other thing I could think of was being conscious about my water use, which I tried to be, but it's not like there's something that shocks you every time you reach to turn on your faucet for excessive water use. It takes mental exercise. So water conservation kind of goes back to what Engel says, that people will be willing to make sacrifices if it takes little to no effort on their part, and since there aren't really any other water conservation strategies that fit under this category, it's not such an easy thing to do. 

That being said, my collective action project WAS to try and raise consciousness about water use, especially in our energy-hoarding buildings (academic buildings and dorms). I think that simple decreases in wasteful water behavior (which could be long showers, unnecessary running of the faucets, etc.) is the best thing that students as a whole can do, collectively, and the way to best do this is to force people to be conscious of what they're doing. I made a poster (check it out!) about where our water comes from, using research from this summer, and printed out multiple copies of this (don't worry, the irony of the fact that I'm trying to conserve one resource, water, while destroying another, trees, is not lost on me). Kati and I then split them up and went around putting them up in the library, Palmer, Armstrong, and the dorms. The key thing was putting them in a place people would see them, which usually ended up being on the inside of bathroom stalls (especially in bathrooms that don't have the efficient flush option) and over sinks. Our school is actually already doing pretty well with water conservation by having automatic faucets (they can't be left on), having the efficient flush option, and having a waterbottle-filling option on water fountains. But that doesn't mean that CC students, especially those like me that are coming from much wetter climates that are water-rich, shouldn't be thinking about their own water consumption and what effect they are having if they flush the toilet just for fun and games. 

In the interest of this post not being novel-length, I'll try and keep my reflections on the short side. First, as we discussed in class today, I think that the relationship between individual and collective action is very tricky. Individual action is important, and it's generally what motivates collective action, but it's the collective action itself that will really make the difference. It's also really important to approach collective action in the right way; for example, today I was eating lunch at a friend's house, and he was running the sink in one room while talking to me in the other. I jokingly told him, "You're killing the Colorado River," to which he did respond too well; something about me being a crunchy eco-hippie. Hopefully, the posters Kati and I put up will not seem as incriminating, and will instead get people to thing. I think collective action is best-encouraged through positive means, like talking about how stinkin' cool it is to shower in a bucket (people will want to be cool too). Sometimes, though, the shock factor is necessary, which is why I put a picture of the dry Mexican Delta on the poster. 

I was cynical at the start of this class that any sort of collective action was possible, because individuals are (so I tend to think) so incredibly selfish and self-promoting. And individual action, while admirable, I believed had little effect on its own. I've changed my thinking on those ideas in two respects. First, after all of our discussions in class and especially after reading No Impact Man, I've decided that people aren't as inherently selfish as I pegged them to be. Beavan states this explicitly in his book, which I will admit influenced my thinking a little bit. But as a smaller example, clearly everyone in our class is at least thinking about the environment and our relationship to it, which is the first step to action. My second conclusion is that, for better or worse, individual action tends to be really self-gratifying. Whether this should be a reason on its own to undertake an action like sacrificing a little comfort while showering to stand in a bucket is questionable, but it cannot be ignored. If an action like conserving water makes people feel good about themselves, then maybe that's the first step to collective action and getting more people to do it.

So all in all, the Lived Ethics project was a great experience, if mostly because it made me think (and less because it made me act). 

Week Three Check-in

So, not too much has changed in my project since last week, except that I admittedly take fewer showers now. This is partially because of my "heightened awareness" of water use, and partially because standing in a bucket can be kind of awkward while showering. But, it's totally working; my roommates are on board with it, and seeing as my (male) housemate takes the longest showers of anyone in the house (and daily), this is a good thing; we're saving about 3 gallons each time he showers, enough for one toilet flush. I'm still taking army showers, which I feel pretty good about (I think I've cut out about 4 minutes of shower time for each time I shower; the last time I showered, I only had the water actually running for about 5 minutes).

It just feels like such an easy thing to do, I wonder why EVERYONE doesn't do it, or why we haven't zoned properties so that it's mandatory to actual grey water systems installed in houses. But then I think again about Engel's paper, and remember that not everyone is vegetarian (I'm certainly not), and remember that even the smallest of hardships/sacrifices are very challenging to overcome in collective action scenarios. I'm certainly guilty of it (I was vegetarian for 11 years...now I'm not), but now that I also see how simple action can be, I may test the waters (ha) with a few more sustainability measures. My inner pessimist then goes on to argue that my individual effort to save water (or even the effort by my two housemates and me) will have no actual impact whatsoever on supplies of the Colorado River. However, I do know that my mentality has changed, and that is such an important first step for realistic, practical me that I surprise even myself.

I generally still think that the best actions taken to urge conservation will be economic (dis)incentives, like a tiered water rate structure or rewards for decreased water usage. The point I made in my first paper, in which I addressed the topic of vegetarianism by analyzing Singer, Regan, and Engels' arguments, was that unless we are presented in an immediate way with suffering (and its connection to our life is proven to us in front of our very eyes), even reasoning as persuasive as Engel's will be unable to sway us lazy people of degenerating morals (hey, American populace, I'm talking to you--and yes, I acknowledge my role as part of the American populace). And that even then, some people who were face to face with a factory farm would still determinedly consume meat. But! I realized that my decision to attempt to conserve water, and knowing from the first time this project was explained to us that I wanted to do something that would in some way help the Colorado River, is actually proof that maybe I'm just a little bit wrong in my pessimistic outlook. I studied the River all summer, and after knowing nothing about it I became very fond of it (perhaps a personification) and very desirous of making a better future for it. This displayed a little bit of optimism that I originally wouldn't have believed possible.

So, after that jumbled ramble of reflective reasoning, my point is that I'm not as pessimistic towards activism as I like to think I am. I am a total environmentalist at heart, it's just my practical rationality (thanks, Kant) that gets in the way. But it feels good to let that optimistic environmentalist shine through every once and awhile, especially when it's to do something as important as "save the Colorado River." Now, the only problem is how to get the other 30 million users of Colorado River water to do the same...I see why this blog project was logically followed by the collective action project for class.

Just as a reminder of everything that is dependent on water from the Colorado River, here's some stops from our field trip down the length of the River this summer, from North to South:

 The Black Canyon of the Gunnison, with flows protected by (hard won) instream flow rights;

Glen Canyon Dam, which creates Lake Powell behind it (and which Edward Abbey speaks extensively of blowing up in his book "Monkey Wrench Gang");

 Dates growing in the literal desert/agricultural paradise (what?) of Imperial Valley, CA; and

The cracked dry Mexican Delta, where the Colorado River hasn't reached the Gulf of Mexico since 1998.

So, the moral of that story is: shower in a bucket! You and everyone else could actually make a difference.

Where DOES our water come from?

So, I realized that I have yet to post about my collective action project, and a large part of that was due to the fact that I was struggling to think of a good idea, that went along well with water consumption and trying to scale back. Then I realized if I'm trying to be conscious about my water use and remember where it comes from each time I turn on the faucet, why shouldn't everyone else? Whether or not it cuts back on their actual consumption, at least sharing this information with people has the potential to raise awareness, which I think is the first step to behavioral change (as we're learning in this class).

With Kati, I'm going to make eye-catching signs to put up over the water fountains, bathroom sinks, and toilets in prominent-use locations (Worner being key, but also all of the academic buildings) that inform people (mostly through the use of pictures) about where our water comes from. The best part about this project is that while I know Colorado Springs gets 75% of its water from west of the Continental Divide (Western Slope), I don't know the details on how it gets here, how much energy that takes, what the costs and benefits are, etc. So that means Kati and I get to learn, and then inform! The best kind of learning.

As some preliminary research, I found this video from Colorado Springs Utilities (which, while honest about where our water comes from, definitely puts more of a positive spin on the situation than perhaps an environmentalist might). It gives a good, basic background on where our water comes from and how it gets to us. It must be noted that Colorado Springs is classified as a high desert environment, meaning that it is in a region more than 2000 ft above sea level (it's 6000 ft) that gets less than 15 inches of precipitation each year (we actually get an average of 15, but that's still fairly arid). Most major cities in the US not in the west are located on or near a major water source, but a lot of western cities are arid and far from a water source, Colorado Springs included. The Western Slope of Colorado has 80% of the state's water, yet the Front Range (eastern slope) has 80% and growing of its population...clearly a dilemma.

Those posters will be created and will be going up in the next week or so. In the meantime, just on the off-chance that you're following the State of the Rockies Project, you might know that we have two recent graduates who just recently started a float trip of the Colorado River, from Source to Sea (or, as close to the sea as they can get; the river does not currently reach the Gulf of Mexico, and hasn't since 1998). They're keeping all of us media users updated with daily spot GPS posts of their location, and just recently made this sweet video detailing the beginning of their trip. Check it out!

Day 3 of Project Save the Colorado River

It's day three of our lived ethics project, and subsequently of my effort to save the Colorado River, all by myself, through conserving water. So far, I've found out that I wasn't really thinking about water use too much (even once I'd started the project), until I put the grey water bucket in the bath tub and took my first shower. Standing partially in a bucket made me (uncomfortably) hyper-conscious of the amount of water I was using in that one shower (so I took an army shower--turned off the water each time I shampooed or soaped), as well as made me think twice before flushing the toilet. That's partially due to the fact that I found out that:

One minute with a normal shower head = 2.5 gallons of water (and I usually take about an 8-minute shower, so that's 20 gallons of water right there)

One flush of a normal toilet = 3 gallons of water.

I'm going to be honest here and say that I'm not the most frequent shower-er in the world, usually about once every two days, so I've only taken one shower with the bucket so far. However, in my approximately 7.5-minute shower, I was able to fill up the bucket all the way. The bucket itself (which can be seen below) is 5 gallons, so that's two minutes of shower water that I caught, and almost 2 toilet flushes. I flushed the toilet with it once today, and my roommates used it another time, so we saved 5 gallons of toilet-flushing water. Sweet.

More fun facts that I found out, about water use: the average US citizen uses about 100 gallons of water per day (often called gallons per capita per day, or GPCD), BUT the crazy thing is that on average, GPCD for those living in western states is even HIGHER, closer to 125 gallons. This makes very little sense, given the fact that we're in a much drier part of the country, but is in part due to our attitude that all of our lawns have to be green; it takes more water to make this so in a dry western climate.

My next goal is to think every time I turn on the sink (because I'm not quite at that level of hyper-sensitivity yet). I find that as a human, I can quickly be trained into habits (like doing my dishes when they get dirty, etc.), especially if I associate them with something; I'm now going to try and think of an image of the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers in Canyonlands, Utah (see below) every time I touch a sink handle.

(yes, it's supposed to be that brown; that's really healthy for the Colorado River! The clear, cold water you see below Glen Canyon Dam and running through the Grand Canyon is much less conducive to aquatic life.)

Save the Colorado River Basin: A Description of My Small Individual Effort

For my "lived ethics" project, I decided I wanted to do something dealing with water, and how to decrease my own personal use of it. As a disclaimer, I am an environmental policy major at Colorado College not because I am a crunchy believer in individual action to save the environment, but rather because I believe that environmental protection and behavioral change in favor of this will come at the policy (and especially the economic) level. Even if 15% (an arbitrary number) of the world changed their environmental practices, we'd still be in trouble, and as it stands not everyone can afford to do so; but if environmental protection is built into our political and economic systems in a structural manner, then the choice is made for people.

That being said, I'm going to embark on a very small, personal project to attempt to reduce water consumption at an individual level. I was a student researcher for the State of the Rockies Project this summer, and our topic was the Colorado River Basin. While I knew very little about the Colorado River and western water use in general at the start of the summer, I learned a ton over its duration, enough to be pretty terrified about the river's future. One huge issue that is only going to continue to grow is that of supply and demand, and how water is going to be shared between agricultural users (80% of water use, yet a minority in all other respects) and municipalities (15% of water use), especially as western population only continues to grow nearly exponentially. In fact, in the last 20 years, per capita use of water (water used per person per year) has gone down across the board, and yet overall water consumption of Colorado River water has still increased due to massive population growth and westward migration. This, compounded with the current drought and the looming specter of climate change, is a seriously scary situation for the bone-dry west.

For my project, I'm going to try one of the recommended strategies for reducing individual and household water use and start showering while standing in a bucket, which will catch about 50% of the shower water for use as grey water. I will then use this grey water to flush the toilet, so that instead of taking a shower (2.5 gallons of water per minute) and flushing a toilet (3 gallons), I am taking some of this shower water and negating that toilet flush.

I'm going to fill out this survey on daily household water use by the USGS on the day I start my project (tomorrow), and then again at weekly intervals throughout the rest of the block. My hope is that by the end of the project, I will have cut my water use by 25%. My project also extends to trying to be more water-conscious in other areas of my life, like dishwashing and toothbrushing, so that will also be included in the survey.

I think that one of the biggest issues facing the west is that even with the decreases in per capita water use present throughout the Colorado River Basin, people's attitudes have not changed that much. People with green lawns (up to 50% of municipal water use in some cities!) either have no perception of the value of water in the west, or have values that they place much higher than water conservation. The only way we're going to have enough water for the future is if people in the west decrease their water consumption, which I think can and will happen in two ways: attitude and subsequently behavioral changes, and policy changes (higher water rate structures, etc.). Because I only have power (and very little at that) in the first realm, this is my individual contribution to saving the Colorado River.

For more information, check out the State of the Rockies website and facebook page!