Lessons For An Optimist - Giving a Dam
May 26, 2009
On a recent trip to connect my 80-year old father-in-law with the Grand Canyon for the first time, I came away with an unexpected realization ... while our lives may be short in the bigger scheme of things, our impact can still be great.Contrasting an 80-year lifetime to the two billion year old layers of rock at the bottom of the canyon, you immediately get a sense of how short our time is on this wonderful planet. Yet, it was just 26 years ago in 1983 that the Glen Canyon Dam almost spilled over as Lake Powell had reached “full pole” and the water needed to be released to allow the Colorado River to flow into the Sea of Cortez for the last time. Lake Powell is now estimated to be less than 50% full. While drought has contributed some to this trend, the vast majority of the depletion is a result of exponential growth in demand by a growing population.
Recently, our friends at Teva teamed up with our hero Wade Davis – and frequent guest at our Telluride Mountainfilm event – to release the recent Imax film River at Risk documenting the challenges this beautiful river faces after spending its lifetime carving one of the planet’s most spectacular natural monuments.
The optimist in me says we can reverse this trend by just paying more attention to the water we use everyday. I recently learned that one of the largest impacts on energy and water in the clothing chain was customer care. Reducing the number of washes, hang drying and applying efficient practices to care can reduce impact by upwards of 30-40%. So we are on a mission to promote lower impact care requirements and practices. We can also take shorter and fewer showers and reduce usage in many other obvious ways in our daily lives.
So let’s fill Lake Powell back up and spill the Glen Canyon dam by 2040!
posted by gordon | tell a friend | leave a comment |
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