Baxter Conservation Reflection

On our trip to the Baxter conservation area we discussed and learned a lot of new things. One of the most interesting thing we did was the pink cards. These are wooden cards that were thrown into the water and acted as oil (in the event of an oil leak) and floated down the river showing where it would go and collect. I found this part of the trip extremely fascinating because it was a very cheap and effective way to see where the oil would go. They also had a very easy way to collect the pink cards by sending volunteers down the river to pick them up from their location. This has a lot to do with the tar sands and transporting oil on the keystone pipeline which we talked about in geography. I also found all of the speeches interesting, they explained in more depth what the situation with the pipeline was and how it is going to affect our community specifically. This also related back to geography talking about the tar sands and oil again and resource management, and making sure we have liveable communities without oil polluted waters. I also found the water testing very interesting to see what makes water clean and how clean the water was at that given point compared to others even if they were on the same river only a few meters away. This has to do with livable communities because we need to make sure our water is clean so animals can drink from it and our ecosystem can stay healthy.