What is “responsible” use of water? How much is it ethical to use and for what purposes? Is a swimming pool a good thing? How many swimming pools, how big, serving how many people, and at what cost? Americans use two to three times as much water per capita as Europeans. Is that ethical? Maybe even the Europeans are using too much. Africans use far less, particularly West Africans living in the Sahel.
Food produced by industrial methods of agriculture has a much higher total water “footprint” than food produced by small-farms and marketed locally. Coal that is mined through “mountain-top removal” or gold that is mined and processed with water-polluting methods, or electricity produced by dams that have severely altered water ecosystems are examples of indirect consumption of water. When we use the products produced with water, we are using water. Read more
Loading ...