The Crash Course, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 23Parched: THE COMING WATER WARS

When you were young, perhaps your mother admonished you to turn off the tap while brushing your teeth to conserve water. That's good advice, and I don't want to diminish it, but the coming water predicaments will be driven more by the food on your plate than by the few gallons you might send down the drain. Water tables all across the globe are falling fast because aquifers are pumped at rates far faster than they are being recharged.

As Lester Brown explains:

The link between water and food is strong. We each consume, on average, nearly 4 liters of water per day in one form or another, while the water required to produce our daily food totals at least 2,000 liters—500 times as much. This helps explain why 70 percent of all water use is for irrigation. Another 20 percent is used by industry, and 10 percent goes for residential purposes. With the demand for water growing in all three categories, competition among sectors is intensifying, with agriculture almost always losing. While most people recognize that the world is facing a future of water shortages, not everyone has connected the dots to see that this also means a future of food shortages.¹

While turning off the faucet as you brush your teeth isn't a bad idea, residential water use comprises only 10% of the total. Even if we could cut our domestic water use by 100%, we'd still have 90% of the water issue left to deal with.

As with Chapter 21 (Minerals), my purpose in this section ...