Welcome to my passion blog! Before I discuss the article I chose for my first post, I feel like I should first explain a little bit about the theme of this blog. My goal for this blog is to take news articles describing either state news, national news, or global news and make them relevant to us. We can all act like global issues are so important to us and feign interest, but in all honesty how many of you care about what is going on in Syria right now? How about how the stock market is performing? That’s what I thought. This is why I want to take these issues and give a brief synopsis of them, and show how they relate to our community: Either as residents of State College or as students of Penn State University. By providing a little insight into how our community is impacted, hopefully it can spark some interest in current events and spur people to become informed, which I believe to be a civic responsibility. Wait, am I in the right blog?

Anyways, now that I’ve given you a little intro, I can talk about my first article. I discovered this article in the New York Times (which we get for free as students). I’ll provide a link to the article at the bottom of the page, but for those of you who don’t want to read it, I’ll give a brief summary:

Over the course of this summer, California has been having a unbelievable drought, even for their standards. There have been record breaking temperatures almost every week, crops are dying, water bills are shooting through the roof. These spikes in water bills have led to rationing of the water in California; I mean they have to irrigate all their water as it is, droughts can be very taxing on the water supply, particularly in Southern California. One of the rules of the rations is that you aren’t allowed to water your lawn, which has led to plenty of dead lawns throughout California. People have started opening start-up businesses that apply dyes to homeowner’s lawns to make them appear green again.

Who wants this for their lawn?

As many people know, Penn State is world renowned for their turf grass and landscape management majors. Instead of dying these lawns, wouldn’t laying down turf grass down for their lawns be a much better solution? If each homeowner had their lawn sodded and turf grass rolled out, their lawn would be lush and green year round. No longer would they have to worry about droughts destroying their lawn or making their house look poor. Sure, dyes could also be an acceptable solution, but the dyes will only last for so long. Why use a temporary solution to a permanent problem? California will always struggle with droughts, and applying turf will allow them to have a permanent solution instead. Given, there will be a larger initial capital investment, but in the long term it will end up saving the homeowner money on both their water bill and having to replace their grass every year. So, is it about time that Happy Valley shares some of that lush green grass? I think so.