HI. Welcome to the IUPUI Center for Translating Research Into Practice and our monthly conversation series with some of our amazing scholars here on campus. My name is Steve Veg, and I am the Associate Director of the IUPUI Center for Translating Research Into Practice. And it's my pleasure to welcome you here to share with us today in this wonderful presentation. So let me share my screen and share with you some initial information to help us get started this morning. First, a little Zoom etiquette, some reminders, to please remember to keep your microphone muted and to keep the noise down, you can also turn your camera off at the beginning, if you like, so we can focus our attention on doctor Bloomquist. We are recording this material, so it'll be available later and you will get an evaluation as a post event evaluation. So we want to be sure that you'll respond to that to give us some information. As we're listening to some initial information before we get to conversation, you're welcome. And encouraged to put some questions into the chat box to help us think about where will this conversation go as we begin to talk about this important topic? And if you're interested, we are working very hard on setting up, having continuing education units available for attending the series of these monthly conversations. So keep watching our website and the site these conversations to see how you might do that. To stay on top of everything that's going on around translational research at IUPUI, you might follow us in our various social media ways. So please use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever it is that works for you, but that's another way to keep up to date about what's going on. We also know that people like to have a lot of information about what is going on in the academic world that relates to how can I access what our scholars are doing? And so please go to our website. Look up. You can see, for example, doctor Bloomquist, and scroll down on his page, and you'll see all of the articles that he has posted in Scholar works, which is I UPIs repository of making academic work accessible to you without having to go to the library or to all the journals. And accessing it that way. You can see there's quite a few academic articles from doctor Bloomquist. So we encourage you to take a look and see all of the work that he does. You can access it both through our website or go to scholar work, so you can see all the translational works that are available. Now, upcoming, next month, we'd like to let you know that our May conversation of the month will be with Professor Mark Ertel, and that's on Friday, May 28. And we'll be talking then about examining the impact of intramural youth sports on social and emotional learning. So that'll be another interesting topic. And you can keep up to date on all the other exciting topics that we have as we do these every month. Very excited today, though to welcome doctor Bill Bloomquist to talk about a really important topic, and that is water. And we might think we have plenty of water, especially after this last week when we had it in various forms coming down and hanging out. But I think we'll be in for a nice conversation today to learn much more about this. So I'm going to stop my screen and welcome doctor Bloomquist to kick off our session today, our conversation by sharing some information and getting us set up to have a good conversation about water. So welcome. Thanks so much, Stephen, and thanks everybody for attending. It's nice to see so many friends and colleagues appreciate you joining today, and I'm very happy to have been invited to do this. I'm going to share my screen and get this into slide show mode. So this is really going to be an invitation to conversation, which is what the trip scholars have been doing with these monthly conversations. I'm going to throw a bunch of stuff at you in a very short period of time and leave it to you to pick out which things you want to ask questions about or comment on or engage in a conversation about. And you you see that, one of the things about being a water policy researcher when you live and work in Central Indiana is occasionally people look at you, funny, because the attitude understandably can be if you live and work in a place where 40 " of the stuff falls out of the sky for free, each year on average, people can sort of tilt their head a bit and go water. I mean, is there a problem? And indeed, we live in comparatively wet. State. And it's not only comparatively wet relative to the rest of the country. But one of the predicted impacts as much as we are able to predict at all. One of the predicted impacts of climate change is that by mid century, our precipitation in Indiana and central Indiana in particular will probably go up by another six to 8%. And so that's what the figure on the right that you're looking at indicates. So occasionally we think about climate change and we think about warming, and I'll come back to warming in a few minutes and people can easily sort of visualize some, post apocalyptic desert landscape. We happen to be in one of those parts of the planet where one of the consequences of climate change may be more water rather than less. We have a lot of surface water in Indiana. The map on the left is just perennial streams, and the map on the right is an indication of stream flow on some of our major. Surface streams. So indeed, we've got quite a bit of surface water in Indiana. We also have abundant underground water supplies, not everywhere. So as you look at this particular slide and these two maps, which just compare what we call well yield, which is to say how much gallons per minute, does a well drilled into the groundwater produce. We have some very productive groundwater resources in the state. But the whole state is not rich in groundwater resources. So we have abundant groundwater. In many places, we do not typically have a lot of groundwater resources in the southern half of the state. Southern half of the state is pretty reliant on surface water supplies. So given that we're a wet state possibly getting wetter with plenty of surface water and in many areas of groundwater, who needs a water policy? I mean, you know, goodness, aren't there, more pressing things to worry about? Well, first, there probably are more pressing things to worry about, but second, we might want to think about what other states have been doing and are doing. And I'll only call out a couple of the rows on this table, and if you want to talk about it later we can. But one of the things that caught the eye of a lot of us who live in the Midwest, was when Minnesota, the land of 10,000 Lakes, decided it needed a state water plan and needed to start funding water resource protection and improvement projects and dedicates money annually to that task. Kentucky to our South does something similar, has water shortage plans in place, and also dedicates some state funds to water resource projects, and then you can see a smattering of other states as well. And we're not really I mean, we're in their company in the sense that there are a lot of similarities. We're not in their company in the sense of doing quite the same level of water resource planning or funding at the state scale. So what could go wrong? Well, even if you live in a wet place, things can go wrong. This is a few years ago, Toledo. Toledo lost their water supply. To algal blooms, certain kinds of algae that grow in freshwater lakes and rivers when they get too warm. And have too much nitrogen and phosphorus in them. Some of those algae produced toxins and are actually dangerous to us. And Toledo lost its drinking water supply. The residents of Toledo live on the edge of an enormous freshwater lake. But for a few weeks in the summer of, I think it was 2014, might have been 2017, they might as well have lived in a desert. I mean, the just was you opened the tap. It wasn't there. The water treatment plants had to be taken offline. Charleston, West Virginia is a wet place. But some of you will recall a few years ago, chemical storage tank leaked into the Elk River, which is the drinking primary drinking water source for the city of Charleston. And so one of the photographs on the left here is emergency water supplies being brought in by the National Guard. Milwaukee, Wisconsin is a wet place, but they had a pathogen outbreak, cryptosperdium, had to take treatment plant offline and have a citywide boil water order. Walkerton, Ontario, the Great Lakes above the Canadian border, had an EC contamination incident that shut down the water supplies. And of course, if I hadn't mentioned it, you'd have brought it up Flint, Michigan, also a wet place and just two years ago, in a crisis over water contamination. So the fact is that even if you live in a wet place, we're all one bad day away from losing our water supply. Including a couple of places in and near Indiana here that have had to take their drinking water systems offline or Owensboro, Kentucky, across the river from Evansville, water main break that feeds the main water treatment plant. So just an infrastructure disruption. Yes, what Owensboro no water today until we can get this thing fixed. In Indiana, there are a number of things that despite the fact that we have abundant freshwater resources, we should be thinking about. We are an unusually heavy water using state. We have a lot of water, which is a good thing. We use a lot of water too, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but we do stand out when you look at a map like this. For being an exceptionally heavy water using state. In terms of millions of gallons per day, we use water at rates that exceed what you would find in California or other places that you might think of as using a lot of water. You know, Las Vegas shoots fountains of the stuff into the sky in the desert. They don't use as much water as we and it's not just that we use a lot, we depend on it a lot. There was a comparative study of the states done by researchers out of the University of Michigan several years ago. Mapping sort of water use against the state's economy. And what proportion of the state's gross domestic product comes from water using industries or water using activities. And guess who was number one? It was us, the most water dependent economy in the country. Having a lot of water is a good thing. Depending on water makes sense. Using a lot of water if you have a lot of water, probably makes sense, too, but you do have to be mindful of both sides of the equation. Having a lot, using a lot, both matters. There's a headline here that indicates that during the summer, the entire volume of the Wabash River, our largest river is used. Now, the Wabash doesn't go try because water gets reused and treated and flows back in to the river. But when I say we use a lot of water, I mean picture the entire flow of the Wabash River as being an amount of water that gets used per year. And as we think about climate change, I told you I would come back to Warmon. Yes, it may well be that at least the forecasts indicate that we may receive greater precipitation on average per year. By mid century. But the flip side of that is, it's also likely to be warmer, which means we'll have faster evaporation, and so the increase in precipitation won't necessarily translate into increases in soil moisture. And as many of you already know, extreme precipitation events are another thing that we are associating with climate change trends, and so we may get more water, but we'll get it flashier and heavier, which can aggravate things like flooding and erosion and property damage. We have 39 superfund states in the state of Indiana. So we have plenty of places that have toxic contamination incidents. There's a real brief excerpt here from article from Northwest Indiana Times. Some of our smaller towns are having a hard time affording. Some of our smaller towns and smaller water systems are having a hard time affording, keeping their water treatment systems up, not only because of rising water quality standards, but also because of contamination issues. When we think about contamination, we tend to think about things like a storage tank leaking or or a spill of some kind. But there's also what is called non point source pollution, which is just the stuff that is on the ground and runs off into our rivers and streams and lakes th stormwater. And so this is a map of n of nitrogen deposition. So it nitrogen deposits on the soil. Nitrogen, of course, used in fertilizer. So in agricultural areas, you tend to have more fertilizer application and the scale scale, the gray scale, not the yellow red dots, but the gray scale is nitrogen deposition, and the darker, the gray, the more nitrogen deposition. And you can easily find Indiana on this map if you didn't already know the state borders. Just look for the rectangle of dark gray in the upper middle of the eastern US. And this also finds its way into water supplies in the form of nitrate, and nitrate is a contaminant. That can reduce the ability of our blood to carry oxygen. And infants are especially susceptible to a condition called heb globinemia, which is a condition of having insufficient oxygen levels in your blood. Some of you will recall reading or hearing about our coal ash situation in Indiana. Another area where we number one in the country. Number one, most water dependent economy. Yeah. And number one in the number and acreage of unlined coal ash what are called ponds. In the country, coal ash ponds that are unlined as cars are because there's no requirement in the state that they be lined. If they don't have a lining beneath them, they gradually leach when there's precipitation runoff that mixes with that coal ash, it leaches through the soil into groundwater supplies. Well, what could go wrong with that? Little charcoal never hurt anybody, right? Well, coal ash also has all kinds of fun things in it like Mercury and other things that are toxic, so you don't want that stuff in your groundwater. And indeed, we already have incidents of coal ash related contaminants found in groundwater supplies in various locations around the state. But doing something about this is going to be extraordinarily expensive because there's a lot of coal ash to either remove cover or otherwise contain, so this is quite a challenge. And I invite you. I don't have a slide for this because I just found out about it yesterday. But but public media and side effects public media and Indiana public broadcasting are showing a documentary. On Indiana's coal ash situation on Wednesday evening next week. So Wednesday evening, I think it's 630. So you might, if you want, if you're interested in this, poke around on WYI's site or side effects media. If you search either of those, you may be able to find a documentary coming up called in the water, and it's about our coal ash situation in Indiana. So that's another thing that we can be concerned about. And then we also, like the rest of the country, have aging water infrastructure. We have old pipes and distribution systems. Of course, the greatest public attention understandably goes to the situation of lead pipes because of the leaching of lead into the water supply and the potential human health effects from that. But in addition to the lead pipe issue, there's just the old pipe issue, which is that a lot of both our water delivery and wastewater collection, pipes and other infrastructure are old enough that they are failing fast and very expensive to replace. All right. So that was quite the litany of worries. So before you go out and lay down in the middle of the street, let me share with you some things that are going on that show a little more hopeful sign. You can see here some results from a public opinion survey, actually a pair of public opinion surveys done in 2017 and 2020. They were done by a public opinion lab at Arizona State, but these are Indiana Respondents. And you'll see that protecting the states air and water quality land use and wildlife by 2020 tied with attracting and retaining businesses and jobs for third on the priority list of public concerns among Indiana survey respondents. What does that? Well, it indicates that at least there's some receptivity on the part of the public to paying attention to this regarding it as an important issue. There are some huge investments going on, and so the left hand side of the screen shows the what's called the Dig indi project, the deep rock tunnel that is being constructed here. To try to intercept our heavy stormwater events so that the stormwater can be collected and treated in our wastewater treatment plants before being discharged into the river. This is to address our combined sewer overflow problem where we built our water infrastructure with stormwater and wastewater running in the same pipes. And if you get a sudden surge of stormwater, it blows the wastewater right past the water treatment plant and directly into rivers and streams and direct discharge of sewage into water is nobody's idea of good water management or good public health policy. So there's a big investment to do that. The other thing that you can be helpful about is there's increasing attention from policymakers. To water resource issues in the state of Indiana. And not just policymakers, but on the left here, you see the cover of a report by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, sort of tugging on the sleeves of our state policymakers and saying, Hey, this is important, and we need to take a new look at this. The Indiana General Assembly has a couple of task forces of legislators organized around stormwater and water infrastructure. And on the right hand side, you're looking at the report cover from a state agency called the Indiana Finance Authority. I'm willing to wager that unless you're a close follower of state government, you probably don't know a whole lot about this Indiana Finance authority, but the Indiana Finance Authority has really stepped forward and exercised a lot of leadership in trying to assess where we are, especially on the water infrastructure issue. And then what are the financial requirements of addressing it and how can we finance and accelerate? Infrastructure improvements in Indiana. So I take that to be a hopeful sign that there's attention being paid. So attention being paid by the public, attention being paid by policymakers. The Indiana Finance Authority is also funding regional water studies in Indiana. So taking the state the right hand of your screen is the state marked out into regions by River basin roughly, kind of a combination of River basin and county boundaries there. That's not exactly the regional bodies that the Indiana Finance Authority is organizing its studies around, but it gives you an idea of how you can think about the state in terms of its water regions. And Indiana Finance Authority has already commissioned a water supply study for Southeastern Indiana, and it's currently concluding Central Indiana. Water study. Why are these hopeful signs? They're hopeful signs because they're going to give us some fresh data on supplies available now and in the future, but also projected demands on those water supplies. Where do we have some vulnerabilities? And how might we think about addressing now? Speaking of attention, I mean, the Nina Mason Polam Charitable Trust has devoted a lot of resources to a collaborative partnership, they call partnership for the White River, including a number of our environmental NGOs in Central Indiana around the White River, in addition to that, parallel to that, Marion County, City of Indianapolis, and Hamilton County. Have partnered on what's called the White River Vision Plan, thinking about how we could take the White River, which has already seen some improvements in recent decades and really turn it into a gem of quality of life and an attraction for people visiting Indiana and so forth. So the White River Vision Plan, I think is another hopeful sign in terms of changing the way we're thinking about our water resources. We've had three years running now of what we call the Indiana Water Summit, organized by the White River Alliance, I'll talk a little bit more about them in a minute with very good attendance and attention for those. So we've had one in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2018, was the first one. We'll have one coming up in 2021 as well, probably in October. And at this point, I'm going to duck out of my screen share and Nuri McLucas is going to share with you a short video that has to do with the Indiana Waters s. The water summit is for everybody. The reason the White River Alliance organizes and hosts the Indiana Water Summit is to get people together in one route for a day to talk about not just what they think. About Indiana it's water resources. What needs to be done? I love this gathering because of the diverse people here. We've got state legislators, state agency officials, farmers, researchers. I always learn more each time I interact with various communities. Also, it's great to hear what people are doing. I was on the agriculture panel. I was a farmer. We have three farmers here talking about what we do as for conservation minded improvements to the farm. Thing I'm most excited about today's event is the idea of how we can all work with the public and the media and think about how to share our messages in a bigger picture. We're actually at the point now where we need people to stand up and start being active in solutions, start being active in planning. Be prepared to take your day job hat off and participate in a community that is actually building the next level of solutions, the next level of engagement, and the way to band all of our resources together in favor of kind of one path forward. Thanks, Derry. Now, I'm going to come back to these slides, and wrap up here by trying to give some indication of what can you do? If any of these things have piqued your interest, if any of these things have made you wonder, how can I get involved or how can I make a difference? These slides will be available. We're not going to go through each of these in detail. But for example, there is a online resource called the Clear Choices Clean Water Program that takes all of these issues and then boils them down to your and my individual household love. What can I do in terms of how I maintain my home and the property around it. What can I do to keep contaminants out of our waterways? And also allows you to map your participation along with everybody else's participation. So you can see what you're doing, what your neighbors are doing, what everybody else in your town is doing. And it also translates this into impact. What does this mean? You know, if you're regularly picking up your pet waste, if you're reducing the amount of fertilizer you're putting on your ground, what does that translate into in terms of water quality improvements in your area? If you want to get more actively involved in that, you can go out on a swat, not the kind you see on the TV news, but SWOT in this case stands for stormwater action teams. And you can help keep our stormwater drainage cleaner and clearer. If you want to get out on the water, there's ways to do that too. Paddle Days. Hamilton County runs a White River cleanup every year. And of course, the White River Summit or the White River Summit. The Indiana Water Summit run by White River Alliance is open to the public each year. There are organizations that would welcome your support, your membership, or you can just follow to see what's going on that White River vision plan I talked about. You can find a Mhite River, I should say mywhit river.com. Reconnecting to our Waterways, who's your Environmental Counsel, White River Alliance, which is the organization that I put my time into as I UPIs representative, has a website full of information and things that you can do. So in terms of being an active participant, there are some suggestions. There's also a ton of additional information through Indiana University's Environmental Resilience Institute, based in Bloomington, also based in Bloomington, but with a presence at the McKinney School here at I UPI is the Conservation Law Center that put out tremendously informative reports. And if you well, I'll put it this way because I said it this way to a student journalist in Bloomington last week of the week before. If you can order door dash, you can contact your state legislator. All right. People go, h, yeah, I know I should contact my state legislator, but I don't know how I know, who's going to research. Indiana general Assembly IgA n do. You type in your zip code, they'll tell you who your state legislators are, and they'll give you a direct link to email your state representative and your state senator. In the amount of time that you order at Uber, you can contact your state legislators. It's not hard. Likewise, Governor Holcomb. Gov.n.gov. Ain't hard. You want to send the governor a message. That's what it takes. You want to look up your county officials. There's an Association of Indiana Counties. You want to look up your city officials. There's an association of Indiana municipalities. There you go. All right. I've thrown a lot of stuff at you. I'll be interested to see what caught your attention and what you want to talk about. And my thanks to the Trip Center and Steven and Nuri for getting together, and Charles and Sandra for leading the trip initiative that is now one of the signatures of I UPI and to all of you for attending. And I'm going to stop screen sharing it at this point. And go back to where I can maybe see her faces. Thank you, Bill. And so we will invite people to turn their cameras on and to help begin joining into a conversation. And I would say that another opportunity, perhaps for people to get in the water or near the water will be the Brigada on our own campus, which is going to come back this fall. So watch for details about that. And I appreciate your comments about reaching out to our representatives and making it so simple. I love that analogy, because I might be somebody who just uses my drive time when I'm coming to campus and sitting in traffic to call them as well. They're on my speed dial. So why not call and leave messages. So it is that easy, it's important. Merle. Were you showing up there again? She was that's a regatta call back. Okay. Was just doing a regatta call back there because the Dean's office has had a team at the Regatta paddling our canoes for years. And Merle Merle has been in and out of a few canoes. She been out And maybe got a pants leg wet or two along the way. There we go to add some comments, you know, some opportunity to educate people about the importance of water. And I was going to say, I had noticed that on the side of a building downtown that we're a state that works. I sought there. And when you said that Indiana is a high user of water, I'm assuming some of that is for business and economic gain. So Right. I'm wondering then. And I also noticed in the media this spring during this legislative session, there was a whole lot of discussion about wetlands bill. And how does that relate to this whole water discussion? Is that Yeah, thanks. The Wetlands Senate Bill 389, which has now passed as amended in the House and is sitting at the governor's office, and the governor has to decide whether to sign or veto it sometime probably within the next few days. But the Wetlands Bill got a lot of attention, probably more attention than the sponsors of the bill wanted it to get because what it does is it repeals state regulation of the majority of the Wetlands remaining in Indiana. And the reason I put it that way is because some of the historical context here is we already have lost a lot of wetlands in the State of Indiana since we became a state, estimates run about 80% of the wetlands that were present in the state when we became a state are on. And then state Senate Bill 389 would remove state regulation of about three quarters of the remaining 20%. Of wetlands in the state. And it was prompted by people who were frustrated by the permitting process for getting a permit to develop or otherwise alter a wetland. And I'm putting words into their mouth, but there's no secret which side of this I'm on, so this is not a neutral analysis. But they decided that the solution to their frustration with the permitting process was to eliminate regulation of the wetlands altogether. Rather than reform the process. And so there's been some amendment, but the bill still will eliminate state level protection of the majority of the wetlands we have remaining in the state. Okay. Who cares? Why should you care? Wetlands, which usually just look like a wet patch of ground, sometimes just look like a pond. They play a few important roles. Those spongy marshy areas also soak up a fair amount of stormwater, and they help therefore alleviate some of the flood damage that we get. They also filter that water down into our groundwater supplies, and we rely increasingly on groundwater in Indiana for drinking water. They also provide habitat for a lot of birds, both small bird species that are native to our state as well as migratory birds that travel through the state. Also the plants that you find, the native plants that you find in most wetland areas in Indiana and elsewhere also take up contaminants that as part of their sort of nutrition, they absorb minerals, including minerals that are harmful to us and compounds that are harmful to us and transpire them the plants. And so losing wetlands is harmful in the sense that it aggravates our flooding issues, and it aggravates our water quality issues, and it interrupts some of the recharge or our groundwater supplies. And furthermore, it costs a lot more. I mean, there have been wetland restoration initiatives and wetland restoration projects in Indiana and all over the United States. But as is so often the case, it costs a lot more to try to put something back then it costs to protect it in the first place. And so the physical fixes that we try to do to construct wetlands are always much more expensive than the cost of retaining. But as always in policy, what matters is who's paying those costs and who's receiving those benefits. And so if you are, for example, a developer, as some of the legislators who were in favor of Senate Bill 389, the costs of the permitting process fall on you. The benefits may be spread across everybody, but the costs of the permitting process fall on you. And so if you can get rid of that permitting process, you're saving a cost to you. The harm from getting rid of that permitting process will also be spread across everybody. So the fight over 389 became this fight over, are we going to protect wetlands that produce these benefits that are spread across the population as a whole, or are we going to support 389, which will confer benefits on people who want to develop that land, but spread the harm across a broader population? The good news, if there's any good news out of Senate Bill 389, which is the longer it stayed in the legislative process, the less support it had. It made it through Senate committee almost unanimously. And then people started realizing what was going on and raising concerns, and then it made it through the floor of the Senate, not quite so overwhelmingly, and then it got to the House, and then it accumulated some amendments that tried to make it a little bit less harmful, and it passed the House Solidly, but not overwhelmingly, and then it had to go back to the Senate because the House had amended it and then it passed out of the Senate. Pretty close margins. So it was one of those, it was one of those pieces of legislation to know it was to dislike it, and the opposition to it sort of grew. But it nevertheless passed. And the governor may or may not veto it, but one of the reasons why the governor might consider vetoing it is that two of his state agencies, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources opposed Senate Bill 389. So he has to decide whether he wants to listen to, you know, his state agencies as well as a whole coalition of voices opposed to 389 and veto it. Unfortunately, as Margie Ferguson, whom I see here knows well, the powers of the Indiana governor, when it comes to vetoes are almost as weak as the powers of the governor of North Carolina from which we got Margie when she came here. Which is to say that the legislature can overturn the governor's veto with just a simple majority vote. So the same folks who voted for SB 389 the first time vote for it a second time, you know, the governor's veto was, you know, the right thing to do, but not necessarily, the final word. Well, I appreciate your explanation of that in terms that are accessible to all of us, and your invitation to if you have a concern about this or an interest, it sounds like there's full opportunity to make your voice heard gov dot.gov. You could do that. In the amount of time it'll take you to check your next e mail you can communicate with the Governor of Indiana. We have several questions coming in, but I noticed earlier before we started this conversation that doctor Petrono and Emeritus Chancellor Banz had unmuted, so I think they might have a question for you. Well let them ask a question before I might share a couple of these other ones? I You're still muted. Yeah, you'll get there. Every. I muted this back again. Thank you, Phil so much. It's so fun to hear you talk about this and not only talk about administration. So we're very glad to do it. And your presentation, as Steve just pointed out, really does help those of us who are not experts in either policy or groundwater issues. I guess, one of the questions that I always have about Indiana is that, you know, we've made very big decisions over 200 years to deforest the state. Leno Tedesco taught me about that. We've made the choice to unprotect our wetlands, as you have taught me. Is there something you see in your now good period of time in Indiana that suggests that there is an avenue for us to position more positively a more sustainable future Fs kindly. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks so much for the question, and it's great to see you too. Yeah, I actually part of the reason that the presentation was organized as it was, was that there's a lot of stuff to be hopeful about, as well as a lot of stuff to be worried about. And one of the things to be really hopeful about, in my opinion, is the recognition slow in coming and still not all the way there, but the recognition. That our abundant freshwater resources in the state of Indiana are not only an environmental asset, they're an economic asset, and that this is why you've had groups like the Indiana Chamber of Commerce start to try to push and prod the state policy making process in favor of doing more to protect the state's water resources. I titled the talk being smart and lucky. We are lucky. Relative to a lot of folks on the planet, we're lucky. We have a lot of fresh water in Indiana. But we can screw it up. And as folks in Toledo or Charleston or Walkerton or Milwaukee or Flint can tell you, as I say, you know, we're all one bad day away from losing it. And so if you've been lucky, it's then important to be smart. And so let me elaborate on that just for a minute. The fact of water abundance ought to be an economic development attractor for the State of Indiana. We, those of us who've been around as long as I have and have lived our lives in the Midwest, in particular, we saw a lot of economic activity migrate to the Sunbelt in thee and 80s. Well, what do you know about the Southwestern United States? These days. Well, it's extraordinarily prosperous and populated, but also hanging by its fingernails when it comes to water supply. And so places like my childhood hometown of Dayton Ohio are out in the Southwestern United States now knocking on the doors of businesses and industries and saying, Come on back. Come on back. We got p. Michigan has made water. A cornerstone of its economic development strategy. We could, too. And why would we want to do that? Well, first of all, you know, everybody who knows a little bit about Indiana and its economy knows that we've been lagging behind the last few decades in terms of household income, college grads, staying in the state, you know, all of those sorts of indicators of long term economic prosperity. So, you know, it might be good to attract higher end industry back to the state, as well as growing our own. But we can only do that if we're smart. We can only do that if we're also willing to put something like a state water plan and state Water policy into place that is willing to devote some resources to protecting that asset. Because you or I would not pick up and move a multi million dollar facility back to Indiana unless you had some reasonable assurance that that abundant water supply that you were sold, as it were, to attract you back to the state is also still going to be there. Ten, 20, 30, 50 years. You amortize out the cost of an investment like that over decades. And so it is in the economic interests of the Capital S state of Capital I, Indiana, that is to say of state government. It is in the economic interest of the State of Indiana to do a better job of protecting its water resources so that it can also do a better job of taking advantage of the economic asset that our water supply is. And if you do that, the good news is you will also take measures that protect our water resources as the environmental asset that they are, as the public health gift that they are. And so it doesn't have to be is one of the things that I think is most encouraging, and most hopeful and it's one of the strongest reasons to invite people to, join in putting a shoulder to this wheel is this is an issue a an issue that doesn't have to be economy versus environment. This is an issue that doesn't have to be economy versus public safety or economic development versus public health. This is an issue that can be a both if we're willing to see it that way, talk about it that way, understand it that way. This can be a common ground issue. And that's why I thought it was a hopeful sign that folks like the chamber realize that water is actually one of the attractive things about the State of Indiana and that if we don't screw it up, we can make something out. Well, there's several other questions that have been posed that we won't be able to get to, but they relate to what you've been talking about around the complexity, but also the opportunity. And I think there's a great interest in this topic and hopefully continuing some conversation about, you know, what we can do and learn and understand about this. So I appreciate your efforts to encourage people, first of all, to present this and share in such a way that it's accessible, and we can talk about it. But then and maybe have these continuing conversations and to help us understand the connections and complexity. As we near the end, because we want people to have a chance to have a little break before they go? We have to take a moment to acknowledge that you have a big transition coming up yourself here coming up soon. And I know we have Dean Idle with us today, and the chair of the Political Science Department, Arin Desso perhaps, if either of them would like to get on for a moment just to acknowledge what's about to happen when we are going to welcome doctor Bloomquist to enjoy a transition into, I think it's called retirement. Would either of you like to say something? If I could just say a little bit. Yeah, we want to always congratulate you know, it's always I used the word congratulate, but, you know, it's an accomplishment to getting this far and transitioning into a new phase of life. But maybe congratulations isn't always the right way to say it. So like I won a prize or something. But I know that Bill's been great. I mean, I came here. He was a dean when he hired me when I started here 09. But, you know, it's been great having him as a part of our department. To say that he's a calming voice. I mean, you can tell it and how he presents, you know, even what we just watched today. I mean, it's a calming voice in the room. You know, when Bill's around, you can go to department meetings, and, you know, we're not going to have knocked down and drag out fights, and those 'cause Bill can can kind of make us all see the light of day oftentimes. But, you know, for me, you know, being, you know, kind of a young scholar who came in under him. It's been, you know, great, you know, just the few conversations and times where we've been able to have where he just tells the stories of the past, you know? So hearing the stories about him grading homeworks that were sent in from, you know, the classes that were taught on public television TV. That is something. I just can't even imagine having to wait for the mail to show up so I could grade the homework. But, Yeah, I mean, I would just, you know, say, thanks for all those times that we had small It's all those small little conversations over the years that, I think, really are impactful. Yeah. Takes a little of the anticipation out to go into the mailbox. I Right. Exactly. Well, on behalf of the Center for translating research into practice, we thank you for hosting this conversation today. There were some resources shared chat. And please know that Nuri Mc Llucas will be sending out a follow up message. And so that it will include all of that stuff, some of the PowerPoint slides, but also the invitation to do a quick evaluation of this experience. And so you'll have that information, and we'll share the other questions that are part of the chat with Bill so that he can see who sent them and maybe continue some conversations. I know he's interested in continuing this. This is something near and dear to his heart, and should be a passion, maybe for more of us. So thank you for doing that. Having me one last note of thanks to Charles for understanding because I went to Charles what's now 6.5 years ago and said that I wanted to step down as dean so I could do more of this stuff. And he not only understood, but supported and encouraged as all my colleagues have throughout the years, and I much appreciate that. Well, good call, Charles. It turns out this is important work. So I'm glad that was able to happen, and that we had a chance today to hear from everybody. So a quick reminder that next month on May 28, we'll be doing another conversation, and we'll be hearing from doctor Mark Bertel who's going to talk about examining the impact of intramural youth sports on social and emotional learning, and then a reminder to follow us, any way you can. We like to have a good social media presence. So whatever your channel is, we've got information for you and check out our website, so you can get more information particularly about all the resources concerning water, and we might do if you visit the featured scholar page with doctor Bloomquiz. So thank you all very much. If he's available, we can just if you want to hang out for a minute here, we can stay on and continue any conversation, but we will officially end our program Ns because we know you have other things to do, but we're glad that you're able to join us today for just a little bit. Have a great day.