Reminds me of a line from the Mornington Crescent handbook, about the great mediæval player “Mother Anna of Widdecombe”. Tried and convicted as a witch, her last words were “Get me off this ducking stool” (at least, that is how it was recorded at the time).
Choose plants that are native to your area or to very similar climates. Growing tropical trees in a desertic climate requires a lot of water; growing aloe, cacti, rosemary, thyme, geraniums and peppermint needs only a bit on the peppermint and the geraniums now and then. My mother’s terrace looks and smells just great since she figured that out (she lives in a town in northern Spain where the nearby desert has been used as “Arizona” or “the Holy Land” in several movies).
A lot of “waterless” stuff is more contaminant (in the making, or the post-use-treatment) than using water. So the best solution is to use water carefully. It’s like those Scottex “wet wipes” which according to the Spanish ads (so I imagine the French ones too) “save toilet paper”: yeah yeah, but since they’re actually cloth and not paper, they’re non-biodegradable and a bitch for both pipes and water recovery plants.
What isn’t as obvious is tha water held in artificial reservoirs is effectively unavailable to replenish underground aquifers. This is more than just a water availability issue; the water in the aquifers supplies structural support to the ground above it, and a depleted aquifer will result in compression and settling, as with the Mexico City aquifer, which not only threatens the stability of buildings and potential for geological catastrophes (quakes, sinkholes) but further reduces the aquifer’s ability to hold water.
I think what you also fail to appreciate is that the water in those reservoirs is continually replunished, often by diverting the natural flow of water; again, this can result in unexpected consequences. I can’t state an overall percentage but most water treatment systems recover only a small fraction of wastewater for reuse, the rest being used to carry away contaminants or for other nonrecoverable purposes like agriculture and lawn-watering. For the generally wet and industrial American Northeast this probably isn’t a grave issue (though contamination of groundwater is), but for areas with regular drought cycles such as the American Midwest, or areas that are traditionally arid, like the American Southwest, diverting water from the normal hydrological cycle can and is resulting in serious disruptions and depletion of natural reservoirs. You can’t look at municipal water supplies–even those in areas that flush with regular natural water supply–as being closed or even nearly closed systems.
There’s a distinction to be made here within your simile; food is a cultivated resource, and as such is (at least, ideally[sup]*[/sup]) controlled by market forces. Water, on the other hand, is a naturally replunished resource; as such, it suffers from what game theorists call “the tragedy of the commons”; i.e. you don’t pay for it, and you’d better use as much as you can before your neighbor does. Since there is no natural incentive to look out for the guy downstream, users tend to divert as much as they can and let their runoff back into the system rather than conserve or spend money to control runoff. Again, for areas with an local overabundance of water, “turning off the water while [you] shave,” isn’t going to make much of a difference. However, if you’re dumping a couple hundred gallons of water into your backyard pool a day in suburban Phoenix to compensate for evaporation, you’re definitely contributing to an increasingly dire circumstance.
The ready and inexpensive availability of water, even in areas (such as the aforementioned Denver) where water is a scarce resource, has led people to a nearly-complete ignornance about the eventual cost of water overuse. In the Los Angeles area, for instance, the people living in Orange and south Riverside counties want the nice green lawns that those nestled up in the San Gabriel foothill runoff take for granted, and so water is piped it from the Sierra runoffs to the LA sprawl, bypassing the natural hydrological chain to be used to water lawns, and then subsequently delivered straight to the ocean.
It’s true that water overuse is a local, or more properly regional, problem, but one with global implications; as water use continues to rise and areas with already overburdened water resources grow in population the problem will only get worse.
Stranger
[sup]*[/sup]We’ll ignore farm subsidies and protectionist Wisconsin dairy legislation for the purposes of this discussion.
You’ll have to pry my Super Soaker from my cold, dead hand.
Stranger’s absolutely right, and I don’t think enough people are taking this idea seriously. This page has links to a USGS study on the Denver Basin, and how its recharge rate isn’t nearly keeping up with demand. In the last 50 or even 10 years, Front Range residents have used a significant amount of water that took tens of thousands of years to collect in the aquifers.
What happens when Denverites and other residents of other booming Front Range municipalities find it too expensive to continue to drill for water? If you’ve got easier access to water, your city might getting a lot of interest from some thirsty folks.
I was in Whole Foods yesterday needing facial tissues. I have always bought Seventh Generation because they use 100% recycled paper, and their products are good. But I noticed something new: cotton tissues. You know how paper in the old days was made from rags. Well, the same cotton fiber that made rags can make tissues too. The package claimed that using cotton for tissues was better for the environment. I guess the argument was based on not killing trees. Anyway, I bought the tissues because obviously cotton would be gentler on my face than wood pulp. That’s a no-brainer.
Then after leaving the store I reconsidered. Cotton cultivation is to blame for our planet’s worst man-made ecological disaster in history in Central Asia. Ugh. As a Central Asia watcher, I would like some Straight Dope on how cotton cultivation stacks up against logging environmentally. Intensive cotton cultivation in arid climates wastes way too much water.