One Saturday morning in December, I drank half as much coffee as usual and then, dull-
eyed, walked to a hardware store to purchase the 18-gallon storage container I would use to take showers for the next seven days. Because for one week, I was going to shrink my water footprint to see how that small shoe felt.
Much of my home state of Colorado is in a drought. Last May, when I moved to Denver, where I share an apartment with my sister, Rebekah, the locals promised me snow by October. None fell till mid-November. Rainfall was about half the amount normal for fall. I’d come from California, where drought is so severe that lawns have turned brown and swimming pools go unfilled. Colorado isn’t that bad yet. Neither is most of the U.S. But while we’ve largely been spared, a big chunk of the world is struggling. In some places, it is our carbon that is melting their glaciers and shriveling their lakes. So I decided to find out what an average citizen—me, you—could do here at home.
How often you and I turn on the tap would hardly seem to make a dent. Of the 355 billion gallons of water that wash through American pipes daily, less than 10 percent is for domestic use. Thermoelectric power accounts for nearly half of the total, while irrigation amounts to a third. Much of the rest goes to livestock, aquaculture, and mining.
But did you ever think about how much water your shirt uses? Not just to wash it, but the amount that went into making it? Then there’s the water that feeds the food you eat and helps produce the gas that makes your car go.
In other words, our individual choices add up to an enormous demand as a society—664 billion gallons per day. In a 2014 Government Accountability Office study, water managers in 40 out of 50 states said they expect shortages in their states in the next 10 years. By late last year, nearly a third of the contiguous U.S. was in moderate to exceptional drought, the latter defined as widespread crop loss, shriveling reservoirs, and water-shortage emergencies.
