We’re all stewards of something. Whether it’s our job, our home, our mode of transportation, or our finances, all of us can point to parts of life that were delegated or entrusted to us by someone “higher up the chain.” That’s the basic meaning of stewardship: taking care of something that may or may not belong to you. In a technical sense, stewardship is “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care” (Merriam-Webster). In the area of climate wellness, you might think of stewardship as taking care of the earth and its natural resources, particularly the…

We have been hearing for decades that we must address climate change. However, the only solutions that have been offered by the environmental community are to reduce use of plastic, separate trash, eat vegan, buy local, and protest the oil and gas industry. The majority of environmental nonprofits are focused on the latter. Earth Day was started in 1972 and yet here we are still talking about our poor air quality. The issue is that the above solutions don’t take advantage of the way nature intended to clean our air – the process of photosynthesis. As we know, in healthy…

The promise of making it rain has a long history of fool’s errands. From superstitious rituals to biplanes salting the clouds, we just don’t have a good solution to make water fall from the sky. However, we now can make water fall from irrigation systems from a brand new source: industrial by-product water. You see, across the US, we have 882 billion gallons of this by-product water from the energy industry every year. But we don’t put it to beneficial use on our land. Instead, we throw it away and dispose of this water down an injection well or let…

Our system of how we handle our energy industry by-product water is desperately broken. Here’s the situation. Case study: In 2020 Wyoming produced 89 million barrels of oil.  Wyoming also produced 1.3 billion barrels of water.  As each barrel consists of 42 gallons, that works out to 58 billion gallons or 177,995 acre feet of water.   For perspective, a swimming pool that is 267 feet long, 50 feet wide and 10 feet deep holds 1 million gallons. Other western, oil producing states have the same issue Most, not all, but most of this water was disposed of, either being pumped…