Editor’s Comments: Reflections on Water

We often crave what we don’t have, so water seems to be on everyone’s mind lately-why we don’t have enough of it, how we can get more (or save more), and what the consequences will be if we don’t. Scientists are calling California’s drought the worst since we began recording rainfall levels 163 years ago, and many predict things will get worse, especially for the state’s agriculture and the people who rely on the food produced there.

As an indicator of how bad things might get, a recent report from the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources shows that the effects of drought can persist even after the rain comes back. Soil in the Midwest is still unnaturally dry following that region’s two-year drought-even though there has been plenty of rain and snow in the past year. The moisture, researchers say, hasn’t penetrated down to the level that will really benefit crops, four of five feet below the surface where mature plants draw water. There has been a bit of improvement, but because so much of the precipitation came in heavy spurts-most of which runs off-rather than in a slow, gentle drizzle that sinks into the soil, it didn’t provide as much benefit as expected. That doesn’t bode well for California’s farmers, who are just at the beginning of what looks to be a long, dry spell.

And a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides more food for thought along these lines. The report shows that Americans drastically underestimate how much water we use-and perhaps even worse, we don’t know which activities and products consume the most water, so we’re particularly ineffective when we try to conserve. Most of us use about twice as much water as we believe we do. When asked what single activity they thought would save the most water, close to half of the people surveyed said they would take shorter showers-although the report estimates that would save, on average, only 8% of the water used in a typical home. The most effective thing we can do, the report’s authors say, is flush the toilet less and install low-flow fixtures, as toilet-flushing accounts for 28% of water usage in the average home. Yet this solution occurred to only 2% of the people responding to the survey.

The report also has some interesting statistics about the amount of water needed to produce the foods we eat. For example, 157 gallons of water are required to produce one pound of sugar, 299 gallons for one pound of rice, 606 gallons for one pound of cheese, and (to my personal dismay) 2,264 gallons for one pound of coffee. But most people surveyed guessed that all of these items required about the same amount of water.

These are the kinds of details our sister publication, Water Efficiency, more commonly deals with, and in fact the editor, Nancy Gross, provided some astonishing statistics in a recent blog about exactly how much water it takes to produce various meats and vegetables. It’s definitely worth your time to read, although it might make you think twice before you bite into a hamburger.

If you’re in an area like California that’s currently experiencing drought, what are you anticipating-from increased dust problems to new legislation to voluntary changes in people’s behavior? And if you’re in one of the many areas to have gone through a drought in the last few years, what effects do you still see? Leave a comment below.