Here is an article from the LA Times about who literally owns the water in California and about the people who collect “someone else’s” water in rain barrels.

Here is a link to a Minnesota blog called CleaningUpTheRiver.com which encourages people to take ownership of local rivers through trash collection. The author marks the location of trash items (tires, safes, etc.) with GPS and then encourges people to go remove it = geo-trashing. Clever, huh?

This is a topic I’ve some professional familiarity with – I spent some time working with the DNR’s Adopt-a-River Program.  Among many different ecological lessons, it was in that position that I learned the Minnesota Governor has a unique contraption at his (and hopefully in the future, her) disposal – a signing machine. Used to imprint the governor’s signature on duplicates – such as Adopt-a-River certificates, it somehow traces the governor’s original signature with a mechanical arm that holds a Sharpie. It works rather slowly and the poor soul assigned to monitoring the process (me) loses a few brain cells and gets a little loopy inhaling the Sharpie fumes. I inquired if some other writing utensil could be used, but was informed that the governor thought that Sharpie was the most “manly.”  If I remember correctly, the machine is the only one like it in the nation.