How You Can Help Fix the Global Water Crisis

Elaina Zachos in National Geographic

The average American directly uses about 2,000 gallons of water each day. Your morning shower takes 17 gallons of water and growing the coffee beans for your cup of joe took upwards of 34 gallons. It takes 13 gallons of water to generate one gallon of gas, which adds up on your commute to work or school. The desktop computer you'll sit at for a good portion of the day took about 7,300 gallons of water to make.

Before lunch, you've used up thousands of gallons of water. (Use this calculator to figure out your water footprint: https://www.watercalculator.org/)

Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and former National Geographic Society Freshwater Fellow, demystifies humanity's obsession with water in her new book Replenish. When National Geographic caught up with her in New Mexico, she explained how people are coming up with innovative ways to conserve water before we run dry.

The book begins in a Colorado canyon. Can you describe the scene?

The opening of the book describes a trip up through a canyon known as the Cache la Poudre. There had been a fire in this canyon the previous year, so you could see the blackened trees. I was heading to a family wedding, an outdoor wedding, and it looked like it was going to just start to pour at any minute. I was contemplating the sky. The wedding happened OK, but this was the beginning of a deluge that produced an enormous amount of flooding. Because the trees had been burned so recently, there was just a lot of erosion and a lot of tree trunks moving down through that canyon.

I opened the book with this story because I was there to see the canyon right before this happened but also to indicate that the combination of wildfires and flooding and drought is coming together. We're moving into a very different period where the past is not going to be a very good guide for the future.

Why did you write this book?

There are so many ways in which the global water cycle is broken. And water security, down the line, is going to increasingly mean finding ways to fix this water cycle. This is the greatest asset on the planet and we need to come up with new solutions. We're running out of places to build dams cost effectively and in a way that's not going to cause harm. We're running out of the ability to pump more ground water because we're already depleting so much.

My goal with the book was to find those innovative farmers, ranchers, cities, communities that are showing we can have a healthier water cycle. We can repair it, we can replenish it, we can rebuild it.

The average American directly uses about 2,000 gallons of water each day. Your morning shower takes 17 gallons of water and growing the coffee beans for your cup of joe took upwards of 34 gallons. It takes 13 gallons of water to generate one gallon of gas, which adds up on your commute to work or school. The desktop computer you'll sit at for a good portion of the day took about 7,300 gallons of water to make.

Before lunch, you've used up thousands of gallons of water. (Use this calculator to figure out your water footprint.)

Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and former National Geographic Society Freshwater Fellow, demystifies humanity's obsession with water in her new book Replenish. When National Geographic caught up with her in New Mexico, she explained how people are coming up with innovative ways to conserve water before we run dry.

The opening of the book describes a trip up through a canyon known as the Cache la Poudre. There had been a fire in this canyon the previous year, so you could see the blackened trees. I was heading to a family wedding, an outdoor wedding, and it looked like it was going to just start to pour at any minute. I was contemplating the sky. The wedding happened OK, but this was the beginning of a deluge that produced an enormous amount of flooding. Because the trees had been burned so recently, there was just a lot of erosion and a lot of tree trunks moving down through that canyon.

I opened the book with this story because I was there to see the canyon right before this happened but also to indicate that the combination of wildfires and flooding and drought is coming together. We're moving into a very different period where the past is not going to be a very good guide for the future.

Why did you write this book?

There are so many ways in which the global water cycle is broken. And water security, down the line, is going to increasingly mean finding ways to fix this water cycle. This is the greatest asset on the planet and we need to come up with new solutions. We're running out of places to build dams cost effectively and in a way that's not going to cause harm. We're running out of the ability to pump more ground water because we're already depleting so much.

My goal with the book was to find those innovative farmers, ranchers, cities, communities that are showing we can have a healthier water cycle. We can repair it, we can replenish it, we can rebuild it.

You take the reader across the U.S. and also to China. What was your favorite place to research for this book?

The Verde River in Arizona is a gem of a river in the Southwest. In the desert Southwest, rivers are lifelines for birds and wildlife and irrigators and communities. They're extremely important in so many ways.

But irrigators are taking water out of this river in the way that they've been doing for a century and a half. And so, the river was dry for five, six, seven, eight miles at a time. Obviously this isn't good for birds, for fish, and for the community.

A very entrepreneurial hydrologist with The Nature Conservancy worked with these irrigators in the Verde Valley to find a way to use that water in a smarter fashion. And the solution in this case was putting in a solar-powered head gate on the ditch system that allowed the irrigators to take just the water they needed and leave the rest for the river.

There had to be partnership between, in this case, a conservation organization and irrigators in the valley, a willingness to try this, and a technology that was going to allow this smarter water use to happen. Water's finite, so it's all about getting smarter about how we use it and increasing the value of it.

In the book, you mention how much water it takes to make a pizza.

We tend to think of water only as it's coming out of our tap in the morning when we're brushing our teeth or washing vegetables or whatever. But, in fact, water is imbedded in everything we use and buy and do throughout the day.

And I give the example of a margarita pizza. It takes about 330 gallons of water to make a delicious pizza, most of that going into growing the feed to raise the cattle that we milk for the cheese and to growing the tomatoes. These are very water-intensive activities, especially agriculture.

What are some ways that people can reduce their use of water?
Conservation and more conscious consumption. Not just turning off the tap, as important as that is, but thinking about how much food we waste. Every time we throw away a cup of coffee that we don't drink, we're indirectly throwing away 34 gallons of water because it takes a lot of water to grow those coffee beans.

Buying recycled things helps a lot because you're then using recycled materials rather than using water to make things brand new. If you buy a shirt from a second-hand store, well, you're not causing 700 more gallons to be used to make a new shirt. How many t-shirts do we need, you know?

Full content and image source credit: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/replenish-sandra-postel-water-conservation/?google_editors_picks=true