Post Carbon Fellow Sandra Postel was one of the authors behind a recent article in Solutions on saving water via the ‘Change the Course’ program.

From the article:

We depend on freshwater ecosystems for clean water, fisheries, food, and recreation. They support the web of life on the planet. Any hope to keep rivers healthy requires that we do two things: shrink our human water footprint and restore flows to depleted ecosystems.

At the moment, however, the cards are stacked against success. As long as water flows from a tap when the faucet is turned, most people do not think about water. Few have any idea that each of their cotton shirts requires some 700 gallons (2,650 liters) of water to make (with most of those gallons consumed by cotton crops in the field). Likewise, most people are unaware that it takes vast quantities of water to cool the thermoelectric power plants that generate their electricity or that each gallon of gasoline fueling their cars takes 13 gallons of water to produce. All told, the average American’s water footprint amounts to some 2,000 gallons of water a day—twice the global average.