Initial Publication Date: May 9, 2023

Robin Madel

Water Resources Professional, The Water Footprint Education Project

About Me

I'm a water resources professional with a passion for native plants and the Chesapeake Bay. For the last 15 years I've been educating people about their water footprints and how they can reduce them. I'm also a Calvert County, MD Watershed Steward, where I help people figure out how to reduce their stormwater impact on the Chesapeake Bay by doing things like planting rain gardens and installing rain barrels.

I have a BA in geological sciences, a BS in Civil Engineering and an MS in Environmental Sciences and Engineering.

Being in nature (in the mountains, on the water, at the beach, in the forest) is my church and my salvation. My favorite bird is the American robin (Turdus migratorius), and my favorite flower is the Eastern Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis).

I really hope we don't create a world full of water scarcity. The natural world would never survive it.

Focus of current FEW-Nexus-based education work

I've spent a long time helping people (mostly teachers and students) understand how water is in everything we do. It takes water to make our food, our energy and all the consumer goods we use and consume. We use water at an unsustainable rate, and as anyone who has looked closely at the FEW-Nexus knows, when one system is out of balance, everything goes out of balance.

I've been comanaging the watercalculator.org website since it was launched and we have a section on the FEW-Nexus that we hope to revise over the next year.

FEW-Nexus-based education experience, expertise and interests

I hope to create a Nexus module on the website that, similar to a StoryMap, will help to outline the connections between food, water and energy in ways that go beyond text and photos alone. I hope to create an interactive module full of case studies that very clearly illustrate the connections and imbalances to teachers and students.