Tuesday, June 28, 2016 11:10 pm
Day 3 of the Washington Youth Summit on the Environment began with a bang… well actually its more of an old piano riff, or the sound of my alarm. I was arranged to attend the DC Urban Treehouse/Anacostia River Watershed in Washington DC, which was one of the six field visits we were given the option to attend.
It was organized chaos trying to find my group that wasn’t leaving until 9:00 am. I showed up an entire hour earlier due to the fact that I woke up at 6:15 am and finished breakfast around 7:30 am.
Once loaded onto a bus of the unfamiliar faces of fellow delegates, we were on our way to DC. Once we had arrived, we were split into smaller groups. While the other groups separated from us, we played a number of fun team-building games and a trivia game where we had to guess the decomposition time of different types of garbage. From that game, I learned that glass bottles can take over a million years to decompose and I learned that Styrofoam can break down but it never decomposes.
After lunch and a much needed water bottle refill, my group was headed out on the Anacostia to get a tour. Something else that I found enlightening was the fact that the Anacostia has high and low tides that fluctuate at least 3 feet and even more today since we had rain showers yesterday.
The high tide meant that we couldn’t pass under the same access bridge as the other group without shaving off a few inches of our heads so we journeyed down river where we learned about the dysfunctional DC sewer system and how it dumps around 1.5 billion tons of sewage and run-off water into the Anacostia even with the slightest bit (0.5-1 inch) of rain.
Our tour guide was Trey Sherard and he told us about the history of the Anacostia and what measures we in place to make the river “swimmable”. According to him, I should be able to safely swim in the River by 2018, so I guess I will just have to come back to WYSE then in order to have a nice swim!
After getting back to GMU, I was delighted to find out that we could wear “casual attire” to the simulation and our dinner.
In summary, the simulation that we participated in was titled “The Last Ocean” and it was one of the most entertaining parts of my day, not only because the topic was fascinating, but because there was there was so much passion flowing throughout my group. And by passion, I mean shouting, jumping/running around, and a sense of urgency to be heard by the opposing side.
“The Last Ocean” simulation was based on a real case dealing with Chilean Sea Bass in the Ross Sea, which has been called “The Last Ocean” because of how pristine and beautiful the area is. If you haven’t heard of this story of struggles, compromises, and disagreement, I highly suggest that you look into the subject matter because I found the topic to be very incredible but heartbreaking.
In the simulation, I played the role of the country of India who, according to our workbook, was undecided about the matter and was supposed to be open to reasoning from both sides of the issue. Countries like Australia and the US argued that these fisherman should find other places to fish because these fish are top predators which means that as their numbers decrease, other “prey” animal populations increase which causes an imbalance to this ecosystem. Countries such as Russia and China claimed that if their countries stopped fishing, their people would have nothing to eat. After weighing the arguments, I decided to vote for a protective area to be placed around the Ross Sea.
Tomorrow breakfast starts at 6:30 am and we will be headed to National Geographic.
As always, thank you for reading and I will be sure to post tomorrow!
-Lola
lolaswysejourney 