Campus Engagement: A Reflection

 A Blue Planet

     Alexandra Cousteau, the granddaughter of world famous French explorer and filmmaker Jaxques-Yves Cousteau, came to UCF on March 28, 2012. Her main discussion was about preserving and sustaining a healthy environment through water management. She talked about her tour back in 2009, where for 100 days she visited many countries and and discovered places where water was unclean and too poor to even drink. She received comments from people all over the United States, praising her achievements and mentioning how these sort of problems didn't even exist in the US. These comments inspire her on another tour in 2010 for 140 days, within the U.S.A and Canada to prove the ignorance of these comments. She discovered that the water resources within are own boarders are unclean, rivers are being drained and how global warming seems to interacting with this whole process. However, the most sentimental evidence she brought to the table was the complete death of the Colorado river. She showed a video, which stated that the river had once crossed over 2 million acres but now couldn't even reach the sea, has been reduced to mud and has gone through desertification. And what little remains is being sectioned off between Mexico and the USA for famring and commerical reasons and with no water being able to return to the environment. She urged the audience to understand that if the rivers do not meet the oceans, estuaries (the widening channel of a river where it nears the sea, with a mixing of fresh water and salt water) will not be created and some of the most important nurseries for fish and plant life will not flourish. She believed that there needed to be a long term plan in order to fix what was happening. By the end of the presentation, she concluded that there needs to be a long term solution put into place if we are to save our fresh water supplies.

     Cousteau is an amazing women with a very interesting idea. When I first walked into her program, I was expecting really just another rant about how global warming is destroying everything (it gets a little tiresome as I have to hear it all the time in my biology classes) but instead, I found her position to be compelling. She is obviously a women who has broken through the glass ceiling and is very intelligent and has a become a powerful voice within the environmental community. I didn't even know who she was until I got there and now I wish I had done some extra research in order to prepare more questions. She is doing something that I hope to do in the future (but instead of water rights, you know, with giant tigers). I really enjoyed her program, much more than I thought I was going too. And while I am not interested in working with water management, I hope to follow in a similar pattern she has taken and be able to voice my opinion as well as she does.

I was here! :D 

My sister took this one...sorta blurry.