Earth Month brings excellent speakers

Students at the University of Oklahoma celebrated Earth Month in a big way this year. The month started off with "Water Jeopardy" and water jug scavenger hunt that was set up by our Sooners Without Borders service organization. A Film Festival centered around the theme "Rhythms" and showcased feature films, music videos, documentaries and short films on the diverse soundtracks of Native America. Several distinguished speakers were on campus, speaking of such topics as low impact design, religion and creation care, and local environmental challenges in Oklahoma. 

Students lead a game of Water Jeopardy to celebrate World Water Day 2018.

Two distinguished speakers were also invited as part of Earth Month on behalf of the WaTER Center.  Shane Walker is a Civil Engineering professor at UT – El Paso. The title of his talk was: “A tale of two cities: evaluation of point-of-use drinking water treatment with membrane filtration and desalination​”.  Through charity-based partnerships, teams from El Paso, Texas have collaborated with community leaders in El Recreo, Ecuador, in which many urban residents receive intermittent supply of piped water, while most of the suburban residents rely on truck-hauled water stored in used drums.  Sawyer PointOne filters were provided house-by-house to hundreds of residents in both the urban and suburban areas, and the residents have responded very positively to the taste of the filtered water and are agreeable to the responsibility of regularly backwashing the filter. 

Dr. Shane Walker gave a public talk on his experiences with point-of-use water filtration in Ecuador.

A second WaTER Center speaker was Steve Jones, PhD, environmental engineering consultant with Garver. The topic of Steve’s talk was water reuse for municipalities. Specifically, Steve spoke about “The Occurrence of Trace Organics in Wastewater Effluents and Control Options to Protect Public Health in Potable Reuse Applications”. 

Dr. Steve Jones gave a talk and led a discussion on municipal water reuse, a very important topic for water-stressed areas in the U.S.

The talk was followed by a panel discussion which included a hyrdogeologist, a leader of a local citizens’ advocacy group, and a member of the environmental health faculty at the OU Health Sciences Center. The discussion was centered around the safety of indirect potable reuse (IPR) and the concerns of citizens around this practice being considered locally.

OU students, Heath Orcutt, retrieved a painted water jug on campus while learning about global water challenges.