The Instagram posts of cloudless winter days and beach excursions in January coming from UCLA students have made the pristine climate in Los Angeles a cliche on social media.
But sun-kissed weather has its drawbacks, including the nearly annual need to conserve water to avoid running through California’s limited water supply. In particular, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency this month as California entered what is predicted to be its driest year on record.
For its part, UCLA has a long list of big plans for reducing its environmental footprint, such as the UCLA Water Action Plan released in January. But instead of waiting for larger, more drastic steps to be put into play, UCLA needs to start small while thinking big.
The UCLA Water Action Plan includes a proposal to reduce the campus’s annual water usage by 143,800,000 gallons before 2020. To accomplish this goal, the plan proposes to work with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to recycle wastewater and install artificial turf on the Intramural Field, eliminating the need to water it.
Although these goals do directly address UCLA’s immense water usage, they don’t include any short-term plans to approach the issue of drought. In order to deal with the present situation, UCLA has to focus on making incremental reductions in the areas where it uses the most water.
Much of UCLA’s water consumption comes from students who live on campus. The residential section of campus, known as the Hill, produces 500,000 gallons of wastewater each day.
Dorm administrators are currently evaluating what short-term actions they can take to conserve water, said Aliana Lungo-Shapiro, sustainability manager for Housing and Hospitality Services.
But the nature of short-term action is that evaluating must be kept to a minimum, and UCLA should take steps that will at least make a small impact, even if they can’t massively reduce water usage.
One small step both the Hill and campus administrators can take is posting public service announcements with UCLA’s water usage statistics and information on California’s impending drought.
Placed next to showers and sinks in dorm bathrooms, on bulletin boards on dormitory floors and in public spaces around campus, these announcements would illuminate the small changes students can make to preserve water and reduce UCLA’s overall consumption.
The Hill could also use the water crisis as an opportunity to fully enact a tray-free dining policy in all residential dining halls – a long-standing initiative for the dorms. Finally eliminating trays would significantly reduce the Hill’s water use: when Hedrick went tray-free in 2009, the move saved 6,300 gallons in a month.
The onus for water conservation is on students as well as UCLA administrators. For undergraduates, sustainability groups like Ecology, Economy, Equity, or E3, provide vehicles for action, but graduate students can also play a part. For instance, the Leaders in Sustainability program through the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability offers a means for graduate students in all fields to take on the issue of water conservation through collaborative projects.
Students will find themselves more inclined to take action if their peers – whether graduate or undergraduate – are goading them to take action, rather than just administrators.
UCLA has the unique benefit of being located in a part of the world that allows for suntanning while a polar vortex hovers on the other coast. But rather than bragging about #beachweather, both students and administrators need to start thinking about #sustainability.
Tweet Freedman @ZoeyFreedman. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.