The neighbor's dog barks a little extra loudly and wakes you from that awesome dream...the one where you were playing shortstop for the White Sox during the World Series...right before you were coming up to bat in the bottom of the ninth. Your disappointment only lasts until the sun blinds you and you realize it's time to stumble to the bathroom and get your day started. After the morning ritual, you flush the toilet, but nothing happens. You curse your old house, and vow to figure it out after you've showered and dressed. Once in the shower, you realize that the toilet is not alone. The shower refuses to work as well, you scramble to get your robe on and start scrambling around the house to find out what's going on. After visiting fixture after fixture, it dawns on you that not a one has any water available. Grabbing your cell, you start to dial the number for the city to complain, meanwhile as you look out front to see if there's a break in the main at the street, you notice all your neighbors out on their front lawns with their cellphones. You walk outside, and in a scene reminiscent of The Day After, the streets are filled with zombie-like people in various states of dress all sharing the same horrific thought...
We are out of water.
Sound like the pitch for the next B-movie attempt at the apocalypse? More accurately, it is a dramatization of what people in Barnhart, Texas experienced this year. After years of drought, expanding population, growth of ranching, and then the descent of the fracking industry on the county, the water supplies could no longer support the population. It is the beginning of the "nightmare scenario" for those who see water as the most critical resource of the 21st century. First small rural towns that rely on wells and sub-terrainian aquifers...then farming towns and suburban areas not connected to city water supplies....then finally the cities. We developed our American infrastructure - the foundation of our quality of life - during a time when energy and water were (mostly) plentiful, and saw them as tools on which to build further advances in that quality of life (the desert Southwest being the exception). As these last two years have shown, food, energy, and water coexist as competitors, and not mutually exclusive building blocks. As populations grow and urbanize, we place greater and greater strains on the limited resources available to us. Up to now, we have always been able to fall back on energy (in the form of transportation, pipelines, or manufacturing) to overcome natural limits. However, the time when we no longer can do that rapidly approaches.
One in seven people on our planet do not have access to fresh water, and over two in seven do not have access to sanitation. Throughout history, we sought to increase access to water, energy, and food through development and nation building. We thought that bringing people to the quality of life we enjoy in the West would deliver them from lives of struggle to lives of plenty, but now we see that we contribute to the problem of resource scarcity, not only jeopardizing those who have access to little, but threatening those on the margin of our own society. If we do not act quickly and decisively, we could find ourselves in a spiral from which we may not recover.
To give the problem some perspective, imagine an area of about 4.5 million people living on about 4,500 square miles and mixed among rural farmers, small town folk, suburbanites, and city dwellers. They share a water source and reservoir that holds 412 billion gallons of water to supply the region. That source gets replenished from a river basin 721 square miles in size and at a rate of nearly 600 million gallons per day. The area gets about 45 inches of rainfall a year, which provides an average daily available recharge of about 1.5 billion gallons. As long as withdrawls do not exceed the replenish rate, the source and reservoir remain stable and the community need focus solely on pollution prevention. In a year, each year these folks would, on average, need:
25,500 gallons of water per year for personal health (70 gallons per person per day)
440,000 gallons of water for dietary needs (assuming avg meat consumption...510k if heavy meat)
Meaning that for just health and food, the area would need a little over 2 trillion gallons of water or about 5.8 billion gallons per day. That well exceeds the 1.5 billion gallons of average daily recharge, so at that rate of consumption for just health and nourishment, the reservoir would be drained in about 100 days. In order to prevent the devastating loss of water from happening, the food sources for the community must be shipped outside the community to an area of far lesser density where the water is available only for crop and feed source growth. But this adds another source of stress on the water availability, because each gallon of gasoline used to truck or transport food from another area to the people of the area in question uses 80 gallons of water. This turns out to be a small tradeoff - depending on the transportation source - as only about 2% of the energy needed to produce, process and deliver food goes to transportation, but this means we still need more water to satisfy just these 4.5 million people.
With the consumption rate back under our average daily replenish rate (315 million vs. 600 million), we have new opportunities to use water to our advantage. The average household uses about 50 gallons per day for watering lawns and decorative plants, which increases our total consumption from 315 million to about 365 million. Next, we look to add our typical electricity usage at our homes, so that we can power our lights, cooling, and entertainment systems. At about 2.0 gallons per kWh, and a per capita electricity usage of 36 kWh per person, we end up needing 324 million gallons per day to supply our electricity needs. This, again, puts us over our total, meaning we must extend our electricity generation outside the watershed (or area that includes the system of rivers, streams and water features that supply our water) in order to keep from eventually draining the reservoir. That electricity generation number assumes that the fuel development and power plant generation simply withdraw the water and return it - unpolluted - to the watershed. One of the dangers of mining for oil and natural gas using fracking technologies is that they do not restore the water to the watershed.
We can see the trend, as we add new resources to our lives, we need to extend the area we consider "ours" in order to have access to these resources, with water as a limiting factor. As populations grow, with world and US population looking to increase by almost a third in the next forty years, these areas we identify as necessary to our quality of life will continue to overlap. In the extreme cases, like Texas where the average rainfall is significantly less than that of our example, and where industry like ranching draws significantly more than other forms of industry, the population feels the pinch today. Unless we start making smarter choices, the problems will not remain confined to small towns in Texas, but will expand greatly. We have a couple of simple changes we can make over the next decade that will greatly reduce the stress on our water supplies.
1. Reduce our need for energy
Citizens of the US consume energy at a rate nearly twice that of developed countries like Japan, UK, and Germany. Making that reduction not only reduces demand and cost of energy, but it significantly reduces the stress on water.
2. Revamp our policies on food
This takes the form of two complementary paths: reduce consumption, and eliminate subsidies for water intensive crops. Cotton and corn require many times the water of fruits and vegetables, and high meat-based diets require even more. It may seem "un-American" to suggest lowering the meat and corn we take in, but not only does it significantly drop our water needs, it improves our overall health. Both of these have positive economic impacts as well.
3. Change our relationship with outdoor plants
The movement to native plants has already taken root (pun intended), but getting the country - especially the suburban population - past the "manicured blue-grass lawn" will take some convincing. The alternating day watering schedule is already a staple of most communities, but water prices have not yet climbed to the point where the market will act. Given the manipulation we have seen in energy markets over the years to keep prices artificially low, we may not see that pricing signal until it is too late. If communities can step up to the challenge and develop beautiful landscaping with water needs that fall within the average rainfall, people will change over based upon common sense frugality.
4. Use more naturally occurring water
Adding onto the point about landscaping, the limits of our example come from the replenish rates of our watershed. It assumes that we do not capture any of the rain that naturally falls outside those direct watersheds...a good assumption since for the most part, we do not. What if we used some of that (in this case 45 inches per year) to flush toilets, wash our clothes, wash our dishes? We may not be at the point where urban dwellers need rainwater purifiers to supply their drinking water, but if everything but drinking water could come from the naturally occurring source, our withdrawls would fall accordingly.
None of these options requires the development of currently-unknown technologies, nor the sacrifice of quality of life. They simply require that we think of water as a resource with limits, and that we overcome those limits not with energy, but with thought. The more we extend the area that needs to be exclusively "ours" to survive, the more tentative we make our existence. By shrinking that area closer and closer to the area we occupy, we create a resilient, and high quality, life that the world can and should emulate.
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