“The more we can do on our personal property the better. Every one of us contributes to stormwater pollution. We can help by driving less, we can help by creating rain gardens and more previous surfaces at the places we live and we can talk to our neighbors and try to get them to do the same thing, try to get them to stop doing things like washing their car in their driveway, that sort of thing,” First said.On campus, Western students are also learning about stormwater management. Western junior Willa Cooksey, an environmental policy major and the Students for Environmental Equity and Disaster Reduction (SEEDR) president, learned about stormwater management in both wilderness and urban settings in her Environmental Systems course. “Because of the high usage of cement, there is a lot of runoff which causes problems with backup, which can cause sanitation problems and is just generally bad for the environment because it has a high peak flow,” Cooksey said. To learn more about RE Sources, visit www.re-sources.org.
