By Samantha Zaluski
In the article “Water Crisis Ends! Summing Up What Happened...” Mr. Heimbuch’s main point is that everyone needs to conserve water to help with global water shortages. The author says, “Learning more about water issues is vital to the conservation effort.”(Heimbuch, 2009) Conservation is to conserve, which is defined as “to use or manage (natural resources) wisely” (dictionary.com). Effort is defined as “an earnest or strenuous attempt”(Dictionary.com). These two definitions would lead you to believe that conservation effort is a sincere undertaking of knowledgeably managing one's consumption of water.
Mr. Heimbuch never defines what he means by conservation efforts and only instead gives examples. His first example is that we should know the amount of water it takes to produce the items that we buy, such as a pair of jeans. His second example is to know the amount of water used in making our food. Both these examples might lead you to believe that just by knowing how much water is used to produce your food or consumer products, you will be conserving water. This is false, since managing consumption requires not only knowing the amount of water used in production of your food or products, but then also being able to assess the relative benefits and risks of making different choices. If it takes a litre of water to grow a medium apple and 5 litres to produce a banana of similar weight, should we never eat bananas? Also, does it not matter how far the fruit had to travel to our homes? What other factors might need to be weighed? What if by having a shower every other day instead of every day you save 60 litres of water? His final statement on water conservation is that we cut back on water consumption. Once again, cutting back is not truly conserving, since managing implies determining all alternatives and making a long-term plan.
Well thought out, effective conservation is a difficult and complex endeavour. It requires a great deal of understanding between the relative benefits of our consumer choices and the water consumption choices in our home. By not fully exploring the complex and difficult nature of truly managing water resources, readers of this article might be mislead into believing that by choosing to eat lettuce instead of beef, they can help poor, drought stricken East Indians. If only it were so simple!
References:
"conserve." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 28 Oct. 2009.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conserve
"effort." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 28 Oct. 2009.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/effort
Heimbuch, Jaymi. “Water Crisis Ends! Summing Up What Happened...”. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (water). San Francisco, California. 06.30.09. Accesses October 26, 2009
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/water-crisis-ends-summing-up-what-happened.php
At first glance your title drew my attention in. I am glad it did, I got to enjoy a fun easy to relate to article. The idea how introducing your statement into definitions was very creative on your part. Also I liked that you chose an article that everyone can put themselves into. Of course everyone has to eat but as you introduced to us in your post, how can we make that help the water shortages?
ReplyDeleteOf course it can't ever be so simple, but articles like these serve as an introduction to issues, and not a lifetime's worth of knowledge.. I think knowing where your footprint is going is a huge step to doing the right thing to manage or conserve what you are doing.
ReplyDeleteI thought your review of the article was very well done! Your discussion of how the language is ambiguous and the implications of this was clear and thoughtful. You bring up some interesting counter-arguments to the original author's discussion on water conservation - specifically how water conservation is not as simple as it was made out to be.
ReplyDeleteI liked this post very much, great job!!! i thought the intro was very origional, and the conclusion was very good. Great work in fitting alot into just 300 words.
ReplyDelete