Water Water everywhere! Or, we think.

Holy summer! Can we just take a minute and give thanks to what ever mystery climatologists know about and I don't? It's been so warm here the past week with temperatures averaging about 26 or so. For May that's crazy. Then again, we had an extra warm April, a warm March and a pretty much snowless winter. I'm about to go all environmental editorial on you so if you'd rather not hear it because you don't care or for some other reason, pop down an entry and get some suggestions for some wicked summer tunes.

In my boredom, I've stumbled across some really intriguing articles, websites and TED talks. With limited internet access I've resorted to TED talks as being my window into the outside world. Being in one of the most beautiful places in the world we're biased, ignorant to the issues and take what we have for granted. I'm probably one of the worst people for that and am a huge hypocrite. I take 15 minute showers, sometimes twice a day if I feel gross. I run the water while I wash my face too. However, I've learned some crazy facts over the past 3 weeks that makes me tale a step back and think, maybe I can make a difference. It also makes me want this job I had an interview for not too long ago even more. I wish my interviewer would email me back...

The top 2 fun facts that I've learned between coming home and yesterday:

1) On average 100 Billion gallons of water evaporate from the great lakes daily. DAILY! Which is 25 times more than what all humans consume. There's less and less rainfall and less snowfall replacing the loss. There's less and less ice coverage in the winter allowing evaporative losses to increase during the time we would expect it to be safest.

This huge loss of water could create large scale economic losses for all great lakes industries, particularily hydro-electric and shipping companies. Lower water levels don't just impact us and the ecosystem of the lakes, but also the surrounding wetlands. While these evaporative patterns do occur cyclically, as cycles peak, they are not reaching restorative levels. With the exception of Lake Superior, each of the great lakes is at a lower water level now than they were just 10 years ago. The changes have been extremely dramatic in such a short period of time.

2) Only 1% of the worlds oceans are protected. The size of the giant floating mass of plastic in the middle of the pacific has a larger square footage than the area of protected marine environment. There's something seriously wrong with that. $35 billion dollars world wide go to collapsing fishing industries. It would only cost $16 billion dollars to protect 20% of the ocean which would be enough to maintain marine populations to sustainable levels. This protection would create approximately 1 billion jobs world wide.

There are issues associated with trying to protect 20% of the ocean of course. People need places to live! You cannot just up root an entire population because you want to protect an area. However, there are some places that have low enough populations to sustain this idea. If people were properly educated than this wouldn't be an issue. Proper governance of these areas needs to happen. Ignorance is the biggest enemy to biodiversity.

I want to save the planet so badly!