Terri Plake: Using Water, Agriculture, and Sustainability in Hydrology: Sacred Waters at Northwest Indian College

Unit 1 What is Sustainability in the Context of Water
This unit is a strong introduction to sustainability concepts and discussion of global water crisis evidence. Especially good for students who have little to no prior background in concepts of sustainability. We did not utilize on-line discussions but instead held the discussions at the start of class.
For Activity 1.1b. Water statistics. This activity is very powerful with a larger class – 30 to 40 students to take ownership of data to share and discuss with the class. With our small class size, students each had complete set of statistics to look over and study. Students each chose a data set of personal interest and we together discussed them. Indeed, students did agree to the conclusion that we are sliding into a water crisis.
For Activity 1.3 Cases in unsustainable water use in agriculture activity is a jigsaw-type format which limited a small class to discussion format. For the jigsaw method, awareness of student backgrounds in relation to content is essential to prevent any student from feeling alienated.

Unit 2 Water Footprints

Unit 2 is eye-opening in that seldom do we think about products we use and the water that it takes to grow, produce, and distribute the products.

Hands down the winning activity for my students was learning about virtual water through studying the water foot print of pizza (Activity 2.1a). The path to a student's mind is their stomach! Virtual water and water tied to commodities is very timely. Should we export crops that use enormous amounts of water to grow, perhaps stressing local water resources in the process where local citizens may be rationing water that may be scarce to begin with. To debate the pros and cons of virtual water trade, I had the students choose several commodities in the virtual water trade, discuss pros and cons of this trade, choose a side and defend their position.

Unit 3 Crops and Irrigation Patterns in the United States

At first students were intimidated by all the charts and numbers for crops and water use. But when they applied the U.S. map showing annual average precipitation, the activity became a revelation. They questioned the history behind growing crops in the desert with transported water and inspired deep critical thinking and personal research into how this situation came to be, especially in terms of water rights and integrated economics aspect and $$ revenue of the crops. To adapt content to our local issues for example, in Washington, the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River provides water to create agriculture in the Columbia Basin Project, allowing crops to be grown in the rain shadow desert of the Cascade Mountains. Relevant to our course outcomes is the damage salmon life to cycle from dams and electricity generation. Also, the current events of droughts, floods, and implications of climate change invoked lively discussions.

Unit 4 Irrigation and Groundwater Mining
In order to adapt the lessons to a small class I had students work together to observe the well data on Google Earth. Together they inferred trends from their observations. We were able to project the well data on the big screen which promoted a strategy of student-centered cooperative teaching and learning. Extending this exercise, students were motivated to find well data from their states to see what was happening to their groundwater supplies. Learning about aquifers, mining of water and groundwater depletion, especially the High Plains Aquifer, produced an amount of anxiety in the students as they observed implications of unsustainable withdrawal of fossil water. Students did bring up questions concerning water use for crops that are not used for food, but for fuel instead.

Unit 5 Agriculture and Freshwater Pollution

Unit 5 content probably is the most important to my course and adapted easily to include our local freshwater contamination issues.

Lesson 1 brought out the many local threats to water quality and the health of ecosystems, impacted largely due to degradation in water quality from agriculture, dairies, berry crops, and other sources such as on-site septic systems (to highlight a few). Salmon and shellfish are critical to the lifeways of local tribes, their culture, their food, their ceremonies. Contamination of the Nooksack River and other local streams compromises salmon spawning and salmon freshwater life cycle. The river and creeks carry pollution and fecal coliform downstream to the Salish Sea where it contaminates near shore habitat and shellfish. Of grave concern is the high fecal coliform load that contaminates and often closes shellfish beds to harvesting. The Salish Sea has hypoxic zones that some of our students are collecting data for their studies.

Here is the link to our buoy in Bellingham Bay: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=46118

Lesson 2 was adapted to include impacts to waterways of high loads of fecal coliform.