For the second time, to wrap up their annual Water Week, the Student Sustainability Cooperative (SSC) hosted a Swim-Up movie on Friday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m. where students were invited to enjoy a movie while they floated or swam in the UI Swim Center pool.
Water Week is a week-long initiative with different events Monday Sept. 14 through Friday Sept. 18, aimed at educating UI students about conserving water, and the swim-up movie was chosen to wrap up the week.
Mairen Chard, the SCC’s Sustainability Coordinator, said in an interview with the Argonaut, “A lot of our events for Water Week are either pop-in when you can or like as you’re walking to class like ‘hey learn a little bit about water conservation,’ and sometimes those can be very information-heavy, and so this event seeks to engage those students who are maybe not wanting to really be lectured at the end of their week but would rather use their brain a little bit to think about the weird connections, something that feels like a very random child’s movie and water conservation”.
The child’s movie being referenced is “Rango,” which was the movie played at the event; it’s about a pet chameleon who ends up the sheriff of a town called Dirt that is experiencing a serious drought. Rango, as the new sheriff, goes on a mission to bring water back to the town, where he uncovers that the mayor had been manipulating the supply. This movie helped explore how we use and manage our water supplies and further showed the cost of mismanaging our water that Water Week is working against.
The drought in the movie also contrasts with the fact that it’s being watched from a pool, which is the intention of the event. As Chard explained, “This event is to highlight the cognitive dissonance between wanting to conserve water and having a pool. And being in this giant body of water while you’re also concerned about the amount of water we are using in our community, [the] hope is that it makes you think and feel a little bit weird about it because, the whole point is to help people make those connections and become curious about our resources and about what we’re working on.”
Overall, the movie and Water Week as a whole were successful in bringing students together to learn about water conservation. SSC’s Volunteer Programs Lead and student at UI, Caleigh Mallett, enthused about turnouts, saying, “Just watching how many people are coming to events this week, we have a lot more people participating in Water Week … there was just a ton of little stuff throughout the week that a bunch of people showed up to, and I just think it’s gonna get better.”
McKinely Forth can be reached at [email protected]