Fruit | Water | Life

The Sustainability of a Few (Domestic) Things

The life of a meandering practitioner

Dawn Nelson
2 min readNov 13, 2023

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The Sunday Dispatch ~ November 12, 2023

Just a close up of an orange. Photo by author, © Dawn Nelson.

Earlier this week I found myself reading up on the citrus industry and some of the challenges within it, such as pest management and the health of fruit trees. Sometimes us northern states folk really don’t understand what goes into having orange juice in the winter time.

We should. Florida has been having a bit of a rough go since 1998, it seems, with the citrus crops. Pesky Diaphorina citri bring about something called citrus greening that makes it difficult to maintain healthy orchards.

A lot of work goes into bringing consumers half gallons of orange juice to the local grocery store shelves. It is not something I will take for granted.

On a related note, I also had some interesting conversations about water. It was a discourse on water use and consumption and how conservation ethics differ between the west and east coasts and everything in between.

In particular, in the Great Lakes region where water is seemingly plentiful.

From what I could gather, in California, people need to ask for water at restaurants. Here in the Midwest, water is commonly…

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Dawn Nelson

Writing creative nonfiction & essay. Editor of Chronicles of Absurdity. WIP: 0100 Series on Medium // Art, Life & Ecology at https://dawnnelson.substack.com