The sin of the $4 Fuji water is the carbon foot-print and the price tag, not the waste of water.
Charles Fishman, armed with excellent research, preached to change our behaviors. As I plowed through the pages, the conclusion became evident and, ironically, the opposite of his agenda: there is really nothing that I can do. There is no shortage of water in Fuji, unless you want it clean and cheap. But not buying or drinking that square bottle of Fuji water cannot quench the thirst of any one in Fuji. If I take a shorter shower in Seattle, the saved water cannot irrigate those Almond trees in California central valley, or to grow rice in China.
First some fun factoids:
- There are more water trapped in the rocks, hundreds of miles underneath the surface, than all the oceans added together.
- Water is not the most abundant substance on earth. In fact, by weight, it is less than a tiny fraction.
- It is quite possible, although no one knew, that earth’s water all came from the outer space.
The book is a series of case studies on how societies, with rare exceptions, horrendously mismanaged their water. He shouted from his tome, “The hell is upon you! We are destroying our future by not investing and managing water properly.” Sigh. Fishman could very well be right. But there are a long list of things we human beings are doing to destroy ourselves, or the future of our kids: mismanaging education program, mismanaging health care, dietary habits, pollutant of the year (ozone, CO2, plastics, pharmaceutical, etc.), self chemical injection (nicotine, alcohol, botox, etc.). I have the crisis fatigue.
Of all the crisis in the world, water is actually definitively not one, agreed by Charles Fishman too. This earth has sufficient water for all of us, way into the future. There is no shortage of water on earth. There are absolutely shortages, at crisis level, of clean, drinkable, available, and free (or ridiculously cheap) water, for pockets of population around the world. This seems paradoxically absurd, that there is no global problem but many local crisis.
Since transporting water is very difficult, water problems are all regional. If someone in Seattle drink one less bottle water, that one liter of water cannot be use to irrigate the rice paddy in China, to quench the thirst for a kid in Africa, or to relieve the pollution of India’s rivers. Secondly, we have technologies to solve all water problems. There are desalination, water treatment, transportation, etc. If there are sufficient will and resources, no one person will die from dehydration and all farms can be irrigated. We can built a nuclear plant to power a desalination plant large enough for all farmers in California central valley, instead of them waiting for the opening of Lake Mead. The Los Angelesians can recycle their water like Orange County, instead of relying on the channels that crawl all the way from the north.
All water crisis rooted from the single matter: price. The dust bowl in California central valley exists only because no one is willing to pay for the irrigation water: not congress, not California state government, not Californians, and certainly not those farmers. If someone else will pay, no one would have any water problems.
Technically, no one can really waste water, you can only use it unwisely or uneconomically. Water never goes away and is nearly impossible to destroy. We are all drinking dinosaur pees, or to that matter, our own.
