Thirsty? Let Gravity Do the Trick
One of the pleasures of parenthood—and it must the same for teaching—is the wonderful excuse it provides to dip back into one’s favorite books from childhood. For me, Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends is one of those books.
I happily rediscovered my copy recently, 30 years after receiving it, while browsing the shelves for something to read to our young son. I quickly alighted on an old favorite, “Lazy Jane.”
If you’ve never read the poem or don’t remember it, Lazy Jane wants a drink of water, so she “waits and waits and waits for it to rain.” In Silverstein’s accompanying drawing, there Jane lies, flat on her back, her mouth open to the sky.
Of course, we can’t be like Jane. Relying on gravity to drop rain in our parched mouths just isn’t practical or feasible.
Instead, it’s much easier to tilt back our heads to take a swig of water. More and more, that water comes from a bottle.
Worldwide, we guzzle more than 175 billion liters (46 billion gallons) of bottled water a year, according to recently published tallies. Since one-liter and half-liter bottles are fairly standard, I have to think all that water comes packaged in a comparable number of bottles.
Recently, I saw first-hand where some of those bottles end up—and no, it wasn’t a clean, well-lighted recycling center. It was a small but fast-flowing river in Eastern Europe. Here’s a picture I took.
Earlier in the day, I’d been to the river’s pristine source, below a medieval monastery just 16 kilometers (10 miles) upstream. From there, the river snaked down a narrow valley, flowing past at least two impromptu garbage dumps and an abandoned trout farm.
Over the years, I later thought while snapping my picture of the gyre of plastic, the farm probably emptied of fish as the river filled with trash.
After I put away my camera, I started thinking of ways to clean up all the bottles bobbing in the swirling eddy. More than a few of my ideas centered on Rube Goldberg-type arrangements that involved stringing up nets to snare the bobbing bottles as they floated downstream.
Then Lazy Jane, fresh from my recent rereading of the poem, popped into my mind.
Good old Jane helped me see a practical solution to the bottle problem. And it had everything to do with her lazy reliance on the force that drags rain from the clouds.
That force is called gravity, and it’s what municipal water systems harness to make the water flow. All we have to do is turn the tap.
It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten, while schlepping back from the store the billions of bottles of water we quaff each year, that gravity supplies drinking water, cheaply and abundantly, right to our homes.
Now, if only more of us took a hint from Jane and, lazily, let gravity slake our thirst.
It’s not often that doing so little can do so much for the environment.
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Ask your students to log everything they drink in a week, noting both beverage and container type. Include tap water. How many disposable containers (glass, plastic, aluminum, paper) do they go through in a week? How many glasses of tap water? How much less trash or recyclables would your students produce in a year if they substituted tap water for a quarter of the packaged beverages they drink? How about half? |
Andrew Bridges is a science journalist and author who has written several books for Sally Ride Science, including Earth’s Precious Resources: Clean Air.