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Not since the Civil War has an American presidential Inauguration Day been so fraught with fear and dread (on Feb. 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln traveled to his inauguration under military guard, arriving in Washington, DC, in disguise). The incoming president is the most unpopular of any to assume office since modern polling began. In a single news cycle this past week he managed to alienate allies throughout an entire continent (Europe) during a brief break in a string of petulant tweets intended to persuade his own nation that Saturday Night Live is "not funny ... really bad television!"
Much has been made of the new president's personality and psyche—his narcissism, his germophobia, his irritability, his minimal sleeping habits and his reported inability to laugh (though he does smile). In my view, the most revealing personal characteristic of president #45 may be his complete disconnection from the natural world. Here is an individual who grew up in a city, who sees land only in terms of profit potential, who proudly covers the tortured ground with high-rise buildings, who lives in a penthouse and who walks outdoors only on golf courses. One could make some similar comments about many of his recent predecessors (certainly not Teddy Roosevelt), but in this instance the tendency reaches an extreme.
How can a person so isolated from natural phenomena hope to understand the vulnerability of our planet's climate, water, air and innumerable species to the actions of people (one hastens to add—people much like himself)? How can he appreciate that civilization itself is an organism with a constant need for "food" (not just grain and meat, but energy, minerals and water as well), that is organized by way of hierarchically ordered and interlinked cycles and that is subject to natural limits and ultimately to death?
One could argue that all hubris is tied to human beings' illusion of dominance over nature. Our long withdrawal from wildness surely started with language, which gave us the ability to name and categorize and thus to psychically control and distance ourselves from what we named; it erupted into alienation with the advent of agriculture, cities and most recently fossil fuels. But we never stopped depending on the fabric of life in which we have always been entwined. Even as we unravel the ecosphere's delicate fibers, we draw upon eons of accumulated soil nutrients and minerals, fresh water and biodiversity.
Life implies death—one's own mortality above all. Everything has limits. Wisdom resides in the understanding that we are subject to forces we cannot control and that we must respect and accommodate ourselves to those forces. If we want to have language, farming, cities and energy, then we must make a deliberate cultural effort to maintain an attitude of individual and collective humility. In practical terms, that means keeping the size of our global population low enough so that it can be supported long-term without eroding natural systems, managing consumption so that resources are not depleted and non-biodegradable wastes do not accumulate and maintaining checks on wealth inequality.
Obviously, we haven't been doing these things very well, especially in recent decades. The power of fossil fuels fed our collective megalomania. Like people in previous civilizations, we went out on a limb—but modern energy and technology enabled us to go much further than any humans had before. Still, as all civilizations do, ours has reached the point of diminishing returns, of over-reach. Before us lies the senescence and death of a way of living and of seeing the world. Perhaps the new president's qualities of character are emblematic of these final stages of cultural disintegration.
In the days to come, there will be plenty of opportunities for resistance, protest and, one hopes, celebration. Inauguration Day 2017 is a turning point; for me, it seems a perfect occasion for a walk in the woods.
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Post Carbon Institute
As the human population has climbed past seven billion, and the consumption per person of everything from burgers to blue jeans has risen inexorably, the finiteness of Earth’s freshwater is becoming ever more apparent.
It takes water to make everything, and the explosion of demand for all manner of products is draining rivers, shrinking lakes and depleting aquifers.
Consider this—on average it takes 2,700 liters (713 gallons) to make a cotton shirt and 9,800 liters (2600 gallons) to make a pair of blue jeans. The cotton crops growing in farmers’ fields consume most of that water. A smaller share is used in the factories that churn out the clothes.
On any given day we’re likely wearing more than 15,000 liters (~4,000 gallons) worth of water. And if we slip on a pair of leather loafers, well, add another 8,000 liters (~2,100 gallons). It takes a lot of water to grow the grain to feed the cow whose skin is turned into shoes.
Such figures might not matter if there was abundant water whenever and wherever we needed it—or if water had a substitute. But water is limited, and there’s no substitute for it. We need water to quench our thirst, to grow our food, to cool electric power plants, and to make cars, computers and all those cotton shirts.
And that’s why the size of humanity’s water footprint—and of yours and mine—matters.
In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers Arjen Hoekstra and Mesfin Mekonnen of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, have made the most detailed estimate to date of the scale and patterns of humanity’s water consumption.
This is a tricky and complicated task. Using a high level of spatial resolution, the researchers tabulated all the water from both rainfall and irrigation that’s consumed in making goods and services for the global population. To complete the picture, they added in the volume of water needed to assimilate the pollution generated along the way. They calculated the annual average global footprint for 1996-2005, the most recent ten-year period for which the necessary data were available.
The result is a large number—9,087 billion cubic meters (2,400 trillion gallons) per year. That’s a volume equivalent to the annual flow of five hundred Colorado Rivers.
Agriculture accounts for a whopping 92 percent of that global water footprint. Not only are crops naturally thirsty, we’re feeding more than a third of the global grain harvest to livestock to satisfy our desires for meat and other animal products. Added up, the average beef burger takes 2,400 liters (634 gallons) of water to make.
In fact diets heavy in meat largely explain why the average water footprint for the U.S. is twice the global average. U.S. consumers eat 4.5 times more meat than the global average.
One of the most interesting findings of Hoekstra and Mekonnen is that one-fifth of humanity’s water footprint travels across national borders in the form of “virtual water”—the water embedded in products that are traded between countries. For Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other water-scarce nations, the ability to externalize their water consumption by importing wheat and other thirsty grains allows them to save their scarce water for industrial production and other higher-value uses.
Yet some water-stressed countries export a great deal of virtual water to other countries. For example, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, the Central Asian nations of the Aral Sea basin export 96 percent of the cotton they produce. Large-scale cotton production in this region over the last half century has caused the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, to lose 80 percent of its water. Much of the lake bed is now a salty wasteland.
The U.S., blessed with a vast area of highly productive rain-fed cropland, is the world’s biggest exporter of virtual water, sending millions of tons of grain to countries around the world. Its biggest virtual water imports come from China’s Yangtze basin, which produces a wide variety of goods for the U.S. market.
So what is a growing population to do to live within water’s limits and keep rivers flowing?
The short answer—consumers can alter their diets and buying habits to shrink their water footprints, and producers can use water more efficiently in making their products.
As corporations grow concerned about the risks water scarcity poses to their bottom lines, many are taking a careful look at their supply chains with an eye toward conserving water. Unilever, for instance, has helped Tanzanian tea farmers shift to drip irrigation so its Lipton tea bags have a lower water footprint. Patagonia, retailer of outdoor apparel, has gone a step further. Its eye-opening “Don’t Buy this Jacket” advertisement and its Common Threads Initiative to motivate companies and consumers to reduce, repair, reuse, recycle and re-imagine our world are helping to motivate water stewardship.
There are dozens more examples of organizations offering practical ways to shrink the size of our water footprints—from Meatless Mondays to the Alliance for Water Efficiency.
The movement to live prosperously while reducing our impact on the planet’s precious waters is beginning. The pace at which it unfolds is up to us.
For more information, click here.
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Sandra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project and lead water expert for National Geographic’s Freshwater Initiative. She is the author of several acclaimed books, including the award-winning Last Oasis, a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, and one of the “Scientific American 50.”