It may have been raining non-stop for the past couple weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area, but we're still in a major drought. Reservoirs filled with last year's precipitation are at much lower levels than usual. The rain we've been getting--and will hopefully continue to get--just means that things won't be quite as bad during this summer's dry season as we had feared.
Arnold Schwarzenegger just declared a state of emergency for California due to the three year drought that we're in. I heard on the radio that California farmers expect that they won't have enough water for this year's growing season, so some are letting their nut and fruit trees die and others are not planting their crops. The last time California experienced a major drought in the 1990's, urban areas won over agricultural areas in the battle over the small supply of water. Since then, farmers have lobbied hard for rules that won't let history repeat itself. It makes sense that California's agricultural fields should not wither and lie fallow because they provide so much food for our nation. However, that means that water might be rationed in urban areas so that we can decrease our water consumption by 20%.
Farmers and urban dwellers alike should practice water conservation so that no one has to sacrifice. In a world where climate change will bring many future droughts, we need to use technologies that will allow us to deal with these natural disasters. I happened to have done some informal online research for the Union of Concerned Scientists on this topic a few years ago. Who knew that it would be so relevant so soon?
With regard to farmers, their short-term response to drought is to fallow (meaning that crops are not grown) crops that have high water demand such as cotton and alfalfa; irrigate crops less but not to the point of water stress (up to 10% reduction in water use); use groundwater to irrigate (but if too much groundwater is taken, salt water from the ocean will contaminate the drawn-down pools of freshwater underground); and change irrigation schedules and other management so that less water is wasted. In the long-term, farmers can switch to growing crops that use less water and use irrigation technologies that save water, such as drip- and micro-sprinklers, to replace water-wasting irrigation methods such as flooding and furrowing (in which water is flowed down trenches in the crop fields).
With regard to urban dwellers such as myself, there are many more less costly and easier to implement water conservation tactics. The southeast United States is also dealing with drought in the face of ballooning urban populations (a double whammy), so the following tips are not just for the Californians. Give all the following tactics a try, and see which ones you could incorporate into your daily life.
ONE TIME EFFORT WITH PERPETUAL PAYOFF:
(1) Get a water-saving shower head, especially if you like long showers. I don't like standing in the cold while soaping up, so I went to Home Depot and spent $10 on a shower head that uses 40% less water with no loss in water pressure. A typical five minute shower uses 40 gallons of water so that's 16 gallons saved per day.
(2) Put a floater into your toilet tank away from any of the mechanisms. You can buy a floater or make one with a plastic bottle filled with a few inches of sand or pebbles. Toilets made after 1994 only use 1.6 gallons per flush, but older toilets use 3.5 gallons or more. This will save around 10 gallons per day.
(3) Get leaks fixed right away. A slow-dripping faucet wastes around 15 gallons a day! If you aren't sure your toilet is leaking, you can put a drop of food coloring in the bowl water and watch to see the color gets lighter over time, meaning that it is getting diluted. A leaky toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water a day. Yikes!
CHANGE IN HABITS THAT ACTUALLY MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER:
(1) Don't rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. Sometimes a few things won't get clean, and you'll have to wash them by hand or rinse them before sticking them back in the dishwasher for a second go. To me, that's still less effort than rinsing everything beforehand. You'll be surprised how well your dishwasher can do, unless you have some ancient machine.
(2) Wash veggies in a bowl of water or stoppered sink rather than washing them under running water. I was horrified when I found myself washing dirt-encrusted spinach from my CSA box leaf by leaf under running water. Besides wasting water, I was wasting my time. I probably use 3 times less water by swishing all of the spinach in a bowl of clean water a few times.
(3) Only run full loads in your dishwasher and washing machine. This is much more water efficient per amount of dishes and clothes you'll eventually have to wash. With dishwashers, if you place your dishes in smartly, you can fit in twice as many dishes as you would with haphazard loading.
(4) Skip on washing your car. We just park our car on the street when it's raining, and it's almost as good as a real car wash.
CHANGE IN HABITS THAT WILL REQUIRE MORE EFFORT:
(1) Don't keep the faucet on when you aren't actively using water. This applies to brushing your teeth, shaving, washing dishes, and showering. Yes, it drives me nuts when Glen turns on the shower and walks out of the bathroom for a few minutes to check his email or make a phone call. You can save 2 gallons of water per minute the faucet is off, so let's say 10 gallons of water saved per day as a conservative estimate.
(2) Take shorter showers. You can get yourself perfectly clean in five minutes, and you can get in some relaxation in ten minutes. If you are taking 20 minutes showers, you are using up to 160 gallons of water per shower! Even with a water-saving shower head, you are using up to 100 gallons of water, which is how much the average American uses each day for all of their domestic water needs. I found myself lingering in the shower because I dreaded the rush of cold air as I opened the shower door to reach for my towel. Keeping a bathrobe within finger's reach of the shower has solved that problem and kept me toasty warm.
(3) "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." I once had a fellow greenie friend at my apartment, and she asked if I minded if she didn't flush. I usually skip on the mellowing when guests are over, but I was happy to oblige. A little weird but also cool.
All of the salty water held in the vast oceans is not usable to us, and freshwater does not just magically appear from the faucet. Europeans use less than 40 gallons of water per day for their daily water usage. Americans use 100 gallons. We can easily do better.
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