1. No dishwasher
2. Full loads of laundry
3. Simplified cooking
4. No lawn
5. Overly sedentary lifestyle

[1] is taken further with the same pre-rinsing even dishwasher owners do; that combined with soak-scrub rinse will also conserve water, with practice.

[2] is easier for me since I work freelance and thus can stretch out the interval between laundry days without offending anyone.

[3] is a lot easier and attractive if you’re single; I can get away with eating from of the hardware I use to cook meals, but a father of two sure as hell can’t.

[4] is a function of circumstance, but my grandparents live in circumstances that are opulent next to mine, and they use almost no water on their lawn - xeriscaping is not only good for conservation, but it’s low maintenance, too.

[5] is bad and unintentional.

I suspect that the 137 L figure includes averaging, so that commercial users are part of that benchmark. That changes the conservation math from every conceivable perspective.

I also wonder what my other inputs are. How much water did it take to make:

The electronics in this apartment?

The paper I use?

The restaurant meals I eat?

…To say nothing of clothing and public infrastructure, both of which require non-trivial amounts of water to make.

There is a mountain town in Tennesee where their water source is gone. they drive a 1960’s firetruck to another town and fill-up about 12 loads back and forth so they can turn the water on for 3hrs/night, 3-days/wk.

You know that the kicker is, though…people are still playing golf on lush courses. People are watering their own lawns. This is happening here - locally - in the US - one of the largest, wealthiest countries around.

You never hear about dual-flush toilets or on-demand water heaters or rain barrels or grey water systems unless you’re in the movement. People need to wake up and giddy up.

I like Cleantech

See

www.cleantech-europe.com and www.spirofrog.de

Thomas

My name is jodie and i am a year 10 student at school. We are currently doing an assignment on water conservations and the restritcions of it. I would just like you all to tell me what it is like to be in water restrictions and why this plan came into action and what effects does it have on you socially. If you could reply to this and post a comment that would be great. Thanking you.

Unfortunately, though, the current crisis is not so much of environmental origin as of an absence of appropriate infrastructure planning on the part of the Queensland state Government. Specifically, the south-east region of Queensland (roughly the south-eastern 100 miles of Queensland’s coastline, centred on Brisbane) has been undergoing a population boom averaging 750-1000 new people per week for much of the past 5 years.

The current water storage system was designed for a population roughly two-thirds what it is now, and no foresight or planning for new systems had been done for the previous 20 years (prior to the commencement of the recycling, desalination, and new dam projects about last year — indeed, previous water provision projects were thrown out as politically unpalatable in the 90’s).

Yes, the drought is exacerbating the problem, but the problem itself is fundamentally that of a lack of infrastructure & foresight, combined with a population which exceeds the ability of the local region to provide water.

Rainfall levels are below the long term average, it’s true, although not especially so: the average rain deficit for the catchments affected by this drought is on the order of 30-40% (which, while high, is not unusual for a country of extremes such as Australia).

It’s now at the point where, if we don’t have an excessively wet summer (i.e. double the long term average rainfall for that season), the region faces the very real risk of running out of usable dam supply late next year. The dam system provides approximately 85% of our potable water needs, which shows the enormity of the situation.

Having said that, the government’s response — primarily desalination, wholesale water recycling, water restrictions, and a new dam in a (shallow) river basin north of Brisbane — leaves a lot to be desired; not only is it rather late in planning, but it relies on energy intensive and/or environmentally destructive methods for collection of water.

we think of California as this vast, verdant farmland
except that most of that water
which causes all those crops to grow
is brought in from points further (farther?) east
frequently to the detriment of places downstream
from where the water is diverted.