The new, young, green crusaders focus less on individual efforts like recycling and clean rivers, and more on long-term, lifestyle efforts like combating global warming by living a more sustainable life.

Case-in-point is a group of college students at Oberlin College who, with the help of their college, have created a new sustainability house - a SEED house, they call it - Student Experiment in Ecological Design.

Among many noble efforts aimed at reducing energy expenditure and waste, these housemates have some pretty inventive methods of water conservation:

• Shower "races"- Each housemate uses a shower timer to track his or her time. The time (or score) is entered on the message board next to the sink - the object is always to take the shortest shower - and the competition is always on!
• Housemates catch their shower and sink water in a bucket and reuse it to flush their make-shift, low-flow toilet. (a budget model with a couple bricks in the tank to achieve the "low-flow" effect)
• Putting a picture of John Edwards on the top of the shower, looking down at shower-takers. This serves 2 purposes - 1) no one wants to linger in a shower with someone staring down at them 2) and also so that students can imagine John Edwards is encouraging them to take shorter showers

While these methods of water-conservation are obviously not appropriate for everyone, these students certainly win props for inventiveness - and just plain being pretty cool.

Can you do just one thing different today to help conserve water? Think about it and write in with interesting ideas. We would love to hear from you.

Jennie Day

Interim Public Information Officer