When the temperature heads for 90, our collective worries about money and politics are temporarily eclipsed by the urgency of the need for rain. Nationally, two-thirds of the corn crop is damaged; rises in the price of corn are expected to affect the price of feed, making meat more expensive, as well as the price of everything in which corn or the ubiquitous corn syrup is an ingredient. Just since June, 2 million acres of grasslands have burned. At press time, the government had declared 1,300 counties, mostly in Midwestern states, disaster areas.
Most sobering of all is the thought that what we’re now calling drought in a relatively few years may be normal. Fast on the heels of that comes the realization that water isn’t only necessary for drinking, cleaning and growing food, but for the production of nearly everything. A big part of that everything is energy; conflicts involving the use of water for energy production as opposed to its use for drinking and agriculture are becoming frequent and ominous. Consider this recent report from the Union of Concerned Scientists:
“The high-stakes competition for access to groundwater among power plants and other Great Plains water users is intensifying even as the resource is being depleted. Today’s groundwater use—17 billion gallons pumped each day from the High Plains Aquifer—is unsustainable: the aquifer is being depleted at a rate that will take centuries to reverse. As cities grow and temperatures rise (between 1° and 6°F by mid-century), demand for both water and energy in the region may increase.”
There are solutions, however, and in some places they’re being implemented. UCS offers this example: “By switching in 2007 from once-through cooling to cooling towers, the 1,250-megawatt coal-fired Plant Yates, which previously withdrew more water per day from the Chattahoochee River than that used by all of metropolitan Atlanta, cuts its withdrawals by 93 percent.”
Meanwhile our individual and family water footprints have taken their place alongside our carbon footprints as things to watch. National Geographic has a device to help us measure our water footprints (http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/water-footprint-calculator/). It’s useful to play that little game if only because NG shows that it’s not the water that goes into your glass, your kitchen sink and your bathroom that enlarges the footprint. As the site explains, “Nearly 95 percent of your water footprint is hidden in the food you eat, energy you use, products you buy, and services you rely on.”
What the writers mean by “hidden in the food you eat” has nothing to do with your cooking, but with the fact that some foods take much more water to produce than others. To bring the water issue full circle, eating red meat enlarges your footprint because it takes water to raise corn for feed and more water to supply the needs of the animals themselves. A pound of beef, for example, takes 1,799 gallons of water to produce, while a pound of lamb takes much less—731—and a pound of chicken takes only 468. (On the libation side, a gallon of wine takes 1,008 gallons of water to produce, while a gallon of beer needs only 689.)
Apart from food, water is so necessary to the production of nearly everything that whatever we conserve on saves water. Five hundred sheets of paper need 1,321 gallons of water for their production; one T-shirt needs 713. The electricity that powers our lights, our household appliances and the electronics we use takes large volumes of water to produce.
Intensifying drought underscores the point that distinctions between economy and environment are specious—that whatever fleeting spike in wealth we create with paper instruments, the true basis of the economy is the ecology.
