The week that was...

Last week, I had an opportunity to go out with a team from the Organisation with which I'm involved to participate in a project that is trying to make big corporations conserve water. The project is fondly referred to as 'watersheding', just like 'loadsheding' when electricity is rationed. The current thinking in the conservation arena is that society must be reminded that whereas oil resources are renewable, water is a non-renewable resource.

So Our aim is to make big companies become 'water neutral', i.e. the net amount of water required to produce your bottle of beer must equal to zero. For your information, to make a single bottle of beer requires 4.5L of water. So how do we hope to make companies produce beer without water? Well, welcome to the field of Conservation Biology.

To do that you need to cut down trees!! And that is exactly what we did last week. But you are going to ask, ain't I supposed to be conserving the very trees I was choping down? The answer is yes.

If you are still not too confused, after finding out that you can brew beer without water and cut down trees to protect the environment, then we Conservation Biologists are succeeding in doing our job.

A famous Marine Biologist (yes, there are famous biologists), once said that if a conservation biologist can't explain what they do in a language that their grandparents can understand, then they have failed in their job.


Now how I'm supposed to tell my grandma that cutting down trees is protecting the environment?

Anyhow, maybe one day when I'm all grey and they have instituted a Nobel Prize for Conservation Biology then I will be able to explain what I do in a plain language...