1. The global economy means that you are using water from around the world.
Who uses the world's water? 70% Agriculture. 20% Industry. 10% Individual and Residential. To conserve water, your biggest impact comes from wise food choices. Example: One hamburger equals 2,500 gallons of water. Just giving up 1 hamburger a month saves 30,000 gallons every year
You buy food grown in South America, Europe and Africa. You wear cotton clothes grown in India and use computers and cell phones made in China. Food and products flow around the world like never before, and with them goes the water that went into making them.
When food and products are exported, its water footprint is called “virtual water”. Through virtual water, you are connected to people all over the world. Collectively, our water choices in the US make a difference to millions of people in other countries. And looming water shortages in countries that have strong agricultural exports will affect global security.
2. Mountain glaciers are melting on all continents. Rivers will fail. Irrigation will fail. Will we have global food shortages?
When mountain glaciers melt in the spring, water fills the rivers which irrigate millions of acres of farmland for billions of people. If rivers run dry, farmers turn to groundwater but there isn’t enough to compensate for lost river flow. Seasonal water shortages mean that crops fail. On a global scale, disappearing glaciers threaten food security for everybody.
Melting glaciers in the Sierra Nevada and Rockies threaten water supplies in the US western states. The Andes, the Alps are retreating also, but the most severe problem is the Himalayan glaciers where spring waters fill the major rivers of India and China: the Yellow, Yangtze, Indus and Ganges Rivers. China and India are the world’s largest growers of rice and wheat. The looming threat of widespread food shortages is real.
3. To have energy systems you must have water systems. Understand the connection.
Water and energy are the basic building blocks of modern civilization and both are challenged in the 21st century. Energy supplies depend on abundant fresh water. Electricity from dams needs dependable river flow. Coal and nuclear plants need billions of gallons to operate. Even solar panels need cooling or water to manufacture. In your home, the electricity to power one 60 watt light bulb takes 8 – 16 gallons of water to produce. How many light bulbs are on in your house?
4. Much irreplaceable groundwater is permanently gone. We need to manage groundwater more wisely.
What a difference irrigation makes! This is an aerial view of fields using pumped groundwater to grow crops for export. If the groundwater cannot be replaced, the area loses it's ability to grow food in the future. Overpumping groundwater and using fossil groundwater is not sustainable.
Groundwater is hard to understand because you can’t see it. Even the water professionals like hydro-geologists have trouble measuring how much water is available under the surface of the earth. But, for a quick overview, there are 2 basic types of groundwater: 1) the type that can be replaced by rain or irrigation, and 2) the type that is sealed in rock-lined underground caverns that can never receive new water. These are called “fossil aquifers”.
Because of new powerful pumps invented 50 years ago, we can now reach deeper into the earth and pump out this fossil water. It’s ancient and irreplaceable. One of the largest fossil aquifers in the world is lays under 7 states in the US. It’s called The Ogallala and is thought to be more than half empty. For decades, we’ve been pumping out fossil water to irrigate corn, wheat and soybean fields (among other crops). Most of the corn is fed to livestock to produce our meat. A lot of the wheat is exported to other counties like those in the Middle East which don’t have enough of their own groundwater to grow grain.
One cow takes 674,000 gallons of water in its lifetime.
5. Billions of people live without clean water and their children are dying. People in the US are in a very small percentage of people who can make things better.
You have food, education and water…and the ability to make choices. Most people sharing the world with you are struggling to just survive the day. A hundred years ago, before the globalized economy and communication, we could live our lives and not know what was happening 1,000 miles away. Now, we’re all connected and we all have the same problem: Water is not available fairly and equally for everyone to survive and most people in the US are not using global water wisely.
With your help and attention we can change this! We need our students to learn about water. In college and in their careers, students can invent ways to clean water. They can teach their friends to conserve. They can shop knowing about water footprints. And so can you!
You can be water literate. You can be a leader, a policy maker, a creator of a better future.
Water is a life or death issue. Choose life.
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