Order Influencing Environmental Assignment

Order Influencing Environmental Assignment
You middle schoolers are growing up in a beautiful place, you don’t need me to tell you. Our lives here are dependent upon water. Have you ever noticed that your family has to wash your cars early in the morning on weekends?
How many of you have gone fishing in the Rio Grande, in the streams outside Pecos, or even at Cochiti or Storrie lakes? How did the water compare to when you were younger? Kind of low, right?
What about the fires? I know those are frightening, it’s OK to be scared and feel sad. Who remembers the fires in the Jemez that almost burned down the labs in Los Alamos? Those were really frightening, right?
Remember when you could set your watch by the afternoon monsoons, after spending the day watching the small puff of cloud grow larger and larger over the mountains and by 3pm you knew you had to be home or else you’d get wet? We haven’t been able to do that lately, have we?
All of these are local examples of how the global climate shift is impacting our lives, and how it affects the water in our aquifers.
What’s an aquifer you ask?
Good question! It’s a complicated word for water bank. The same way that you add money from your allowance to the bank, you can only take out what you put in. When it rains, water is added to our water banks, and every time you turn on the tap at home you take water out of that bank.
With our changing monsoon, sometimes our water bank doesn’t get filled like it used to. This means we all have to be more careful every time we open up the tap.
Why?
Because just like a bank, the water can get to 0, and that’s when the problems really start.
What happens if we have low water in the aquifer/bank and we have an emergency? Like all the people in the hospital or there’s a fire that breaks out and the firefighters don’t have water to fight it?
Order Influencing Environmental Assignment
Imagine it’s bath time and you go to turn on the tap in the tub and nothing comes out? Maybe it’s okay the first day (eeewwww, I know!), but imagine sitting here and everyone hasn’t had a bath in over a week.
What official stuff is being done now to try to resolve the problem? Santa Fe has water use restrictions, which are in place year-round now. Starting in 1996, the city adopted regulations that allow it to declare water emergencies, which limit water usage city-wide to ensure that supply is not exceeded by demand. Yearly, between May and October, outdoor watering is limited to 3 times a week and can only be done before 10am or after 6pm. The city also encourages xeriscaping, which is landscaping that requires little to no water.
So, what can we do about it? Maybe you are saying to yourselves, we are just kids, we can’t control the rain! I know I know, bummer, right? Well, we can’t control how much water gets put into our city’s water bank, but we definitely can control how much we take out.
One thing we can do is take shorter showers. We can make sure that when we wash our cars we turn off the water when we aren’t using it. We can also make sure that our gardens are being watered in the morning or evenings, and even better, we can help plant and use our amazingly beautiful local plants.