Paz & Ben: Week 18

Paz's update

This 2017 year, Mar Menor’s landscape has been present as an “idyllic tourist destination” at Fitur, the International Tourism Trade Fair, that celebrates its 37th staging from January 18 to January 22, 2017. FITUR is a global meeting point for tourism professionals and the leading trade fair for inbound and outbound Ibero American markets.
 
The Minister of Industry, Tourism, Enterprise and Innovation, Juan Carlos Ruiz, greeted at the stand of the Region of Murcia to their Majesties the Kings of Spain, who this morning officially inaugurated the Tourism Fair accompanied by Minister José Manuel Soria. 

​The following pictures represent how Mar Menor was shown in this tourism trade fair:

​I’m in touch with an environmental organization called ANSE working on the Mar Menor area close to scientists and they are going to give me more information about the quality of this lagoon. I was also into a conversation with an environmental scientist working at the Mar Menor, but she can not show me some scientific tests because they will be published.

​“The Committee on Petitions of the European Parliament examined yesterday in plenary meeting in Brussels the petition presented by Isabel Rubio representing the organizations Pact for the Mar Menor, Fishermen's Guild of San Pedro del Pinatar, Ecologists in Action of the Region of Murcia, Federation Of Associations of Neighbors of Cartagena and Region and Association of Naturalists of the Southeast (ANSE) on the very serious deterioration situation of the Mar Menor.”
 
I also have to point out, that a researcher at the University of Murcia published nine years ago a work that accurately anticipated the collapse of the lagoon, a friend of mine, Javier Lloret researcher at the Department of Ecology and Hydrology.

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Ben's update

This week Paz has some fun photos and news from her work studying the Mediterranean lagoon of Mar Menor. I'll let her explain what's going on there, but the slick promotional photos used to encourage tourism definitely contribute to the popular disregard for environmental science and health—If it looks pretty, who cares?

I'm planning on writing a parallel "case study" about Pennsylvania and it's ongoing struggle with fracking, but it will probably be more in the style of armchair journalism than what Paz is doing.

Our website will start to fill in some blanks within our popular understanding of water. I won't be contributing any new discoveries, but I hope my research will be accessible enough that more people can begin to ask questions about their environment. I'll be launching the site next week, though it's likely that we'll add additional content later (deadlines, am I right?). To tide things over until then here's a peek at an animated guide I made about municipal water supplies. Did you know that 86% of people in the United States get their water from a municipal water distributor?

For any designers out there, the site is based around the FullPage.js plugin (which I've found to wonderfully customizable), and is mostly a full-width vertical layout, but adapts to a horizontal layout for this page to show the progression of water through the pipes. The animations are simple CSS transitions that are triggered by Javascript.