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Please urinate with precision and elegance

Mac McKee, the outgoing director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory, spoke at Utah State on Friday as part of the Water and Environmental Seminar series. The Utah Water Research Laboratory exists to provide practical answers to difficult questions about water resources in Utah. As an arm of Utah State University, the lab employs about 200 faculty, staff and students to inform water policy and management and improve water resources engineering in the state. “The question is, are we doing the right things,” McKee said. McKee has a diverse academic and professional history. With a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and professional engineering experience in Thailand and the Israel, McKee said the difficult part about water resource engineering isn’t the calculations or construction – it’s the politics. “It’s easy to make the desert boom if you can do it with water you have stolen from someone else,” McKee said. As the director of an institution tasked
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Green thumbs for brown plants

Guy Banner, a horticulturist at Red Butte Gardens, said human psychology is crucial for understanding the perceived beauty of human landscapes and gardens. Banner uses his green thumb to encourage appreciation for the beauty of desert and dry landscapes in an effort to inspire more thoughtful use of water in residential and commercial gardens. On Monday, he shared the efforts that the Utah Public Garden Network is taking to alter perceptions of natural beauty for the second driest state in the nation. The Utah Public Garden Network is comprised of 12 community gardens throughout the state with diverse but harmonious missions. From water conservation, to support for local economies and species, these gardens exist to change the way people think about their residential green spaces – spaces that some argue should more frequently be shades of brown. “American gardens are inspired by people coming from Europe,” Banner said. Outdoor aesthetics in the West have
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What wizards and prophets have to do with climate change

“Outbreaks in nature don’t end well,” said Charles C. Mann, an American journalist and author. In biology, outbreaks occur when a species reaches a population that requires more resources than are naturally available. “We’re reaching the end of the petri dish,” Mann said. For microorganisms, the edges of a petri dish are physical limits to growth. For humans – the natural limit isn’t as clear or tangible. Mann spoke at Utah State University on Thursday to discuss his book, “The Wizard and the Prophet,” a biography of two scientists who Mann said embody competing approaches toward mitigating harmful impacts from population outbreak and climate change. The ideologies of the wizard and the prophet “are less about technology than they are about values,” Mann said. “These are different ideas about what kind of world we want to live in.” In Mann’s example, the wizard tackles challenges with industrial-scale science. Geoengineering, genetically modified a
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