Water Conservation

Water is pretty great, right? It’s able to carry people and goods long distances, can be cooling for many animals in hot areas, and it is a key element of life on Earth.

As nice as water is for human beings, we often take it for granted. The average American uses between 80-100 gallons of water per day doing various tasks. Some of these tasks can be surprisingly inconspicuous; taking a shower longer than 15 minutes, for instance, can use more than thirty gallons of water. However, those statistics are nothing compared to 3,000 gallons that can be lost annually due to a single leaky faucet or showerhead.

This can be certainly taxing for the natural environment, as even major lakes and rivers such as the Colorado River have dried up due to water mismanagement and overuse in the past. While Agriculture may be an especially hard hitter when it comes to water use, everyday tasks are also something to keep in mind when conserving water.

With that, a few more ways that you can help reduce your water use that are:

Don’t wash small/half-full laundry loads – Along with cleaning fewer clothes, a modern-day load of laundry can demand up to 15 to 30 gallons of water, with older models sometimes using as much as 45 gallons!
Switch to a “low flow” shower head – This choice is not only environmentally friendly but cheaper too! A low-flow showerhead can use up to 75% less water than a conventional shower head, conserving both water and costs!
Avoid wasting food– A 2013 study by the World Resources Institute indicated that the wasting of 1.3 billion tons of food was equivalent to the wasting of 45 trillion gallons of water! It’s a shocking statistic, especially as the same institute believes it accounted for nearly ¼ of all agricultural water waste in the same year.

Hopefully, you can find ways to apply these tips in your own life– or if you’re already practicing these, you can comment below any more environmental tips you may want to share. Either way, stay mindful or water use, as too often it can stumble into water waste.

Slash and Burn Awareness

Around the world, many of our greatest forests are quickly disappearing. In Brazil, increases in agricultural demand caused the loss of nearly 27,700 square kilometers of forest in 2004 alone. While there are many reasons for forest loss, slash and burn agriculture is definitely one of them.

Slash and Burn Agriculture is a practice of clearing land for farming by rapidly cutting down and burning trees or forests. Farmers practicing this will often cut down a plot of trees, burn the recently slashed area, and once the land is clear they move to a new plot and begin the process again. This causes a very fast destruction of the natural environment, a rapid loss of soil fertility in the affected plots, and significant deforestation (the rapid clearing of a wooded or forest area) in the area.

Why is it a problem? While slash and burn clearing is often the most convenient way to clear a forest, it is far from the healthiest. The practice of Slash and Burn Agriculture is a major contributor to the agriculture industry producing 24% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions internationally.

However, there are some solutions to the problems that slash and burn agriculture causes. Some of these are the following:

If you found this blog post interesting, you may want to check out this Global Giving wildlife conservation fund, or a project to help the previously mentioned Inga Alley Cropping internationally, via the INGA Foundation. Both are great ways to help recover from the damages done by slash and burn clearing, and great projects to help the greater environment!

An Unseen Pollutant

Many people across the world are familiar with light pollution, the pollution that causes the night sky over urban areas to remain dark and starless. However, there’s a secret pollution that’s very similar to light pollution and that not many people know about. Light Pollution has a brother: Noise Pollution.

According to conserve-energy-future.com, “noise pollution takes place when there is either excessive amount of noise or an unpleasant sound that causes [a] temporary disruption in the natural balance”. For most human beings, noise pollution seems to be a feature of regular life; whether it’s people talking loudly into their cell phones, distant cars going by or children at play, it all just seems like a feature of the everyday. This feature, however, can be deeply damaging to the natural environment as well as our own health.

There are, fortunately, a few ways you can help reduce noise pollution:

Avoid using loud machinery, especially at night. This one’s just a given unless you insist on being “that guy” in your local neighborhood. Alternatives to using a leaf blower, for example, include raking the leaves, which also provides more exercise for you.
Plant a Tree! No kidding: trees or other leafy vegetation excel at absorbing noise, with leaves and branches acting the same way as soundproofing walls do in recording studios.
Keep the windows closed. Whether you’re listening to music, watching a movie, or just making a lot of noise in general, make sure you keep the windows shut. The world might be just dying to hear your cleaning playlist from 2007, but unfortunately, it will only add to the noisy pollution in urban areas.

Additionally, if you’re looking to get more involved (as the upstanding-environmental superhero you know you are), Noise Pollution Clearinghouse is an organization dedicated to raising awareness and supporting any activism in the fight against noise damaging the greater environment.

Desertification

All around the world, deserts seem to be doing something scary– growing. In Sub-Saharan Africa, experts are called in each year to help build greater environmental infrastructure, or help with educating of better farming practices to fight this slowly-increasing problem. In China, the Gobi Desert is slowly creeping Eastward, forcing the government to relocate tens of thousands of people as “ecological migrants”. In our own backyard, California faces serious struggles in the agricultural industry thanks to seemingly ever-scarcer water.

Conserve-Energy-Future.com defines desertification as “a process of land degradation in arid, semi-arid and sub-humid areas due to various factors including climatic variations and human activities”. It is a process which often debilitates soil and makes the land unsuitable for farming and growth for many years to come.

Since the growth of desertification threatens the use of arable land all across the world, many scientists are searching for ways to reduce desertification around the world. However, this is easier said than done. One Ecologist, Allan Savory, spent decades of his career trying to reduce overgrazing, only to realize later that he had been working against himself all along.

While desertification is challenging to eliminate, there are some ways that it can be reduced. Things you can do include:

One example is to practice leaving plant residue on drying lands to deteriorate naturally and restore nutrients to the soil. This is something everyone can do in their local garden.
Another way to stop desertification is ensuring that the food you are eating is farmed with healthy practices, and returns nutrients to the soil it’s grown in.

A neat project to check out is the African “Great Green Wall”, a project that aims to revive land that has been wounded by desertification by the replanting of trees and relocation of soil in the area of dying land.

If you’re looking for more ways to get involved, a project in Ethiopia aims to plant 10,000 trees strategically to fight desertification, and the link is here!