A young Argentine, Maria Fernanda Heyaca, made it to the finals with an essay titled “Avoiding Waste to Avoid Wars.” She drove my attention for the first time to the reality of interregional water scarcity and the potential for conflict it commands. I would like now to continue right where she stopped by sharing ideas originally rooted in her work, but on a differentiated scale herein.
I think the power of natural resources would in any ramification be stunted without taking an equally critical look at the issues bordering on water availability for the world’s six billion-plus. Much – and I mean it when I say ‘much’, in fact ‘too much’ – have been documented on “the coming conflicts,” that states will fight a third world war over a resource as innocent as water. While I am in no position to dispute the many scholars, including Maria, who have come to the conclusion that “the scarcity of water will be one of the main causes for war in this century,” I must draw attention to the fact that “battles between two Sumerian city-states 4,500 years ago… over irrigation rights in what is now Iraq was the last time two states went to war over water.” Water has very rarely been the main ingredient in international conflicts, but it is often factored into the problem due to its economic importance.
By no means, however, is that a cause for relief. Existing trends indicate that the 21st century is well placed to shatter that record. Water may have meant anything in the past, but today the value attached to water makes rubbish of supposedly indispensable resources as oil. No matter how addicted the world may claim to be to oil, water is the resource that directly threatens life by its unavailability, or otherwise. Most humans definitely cannot survive three days without water. Turn off the gas supplies or cut back oil exports if you may, man’s ingenuity will still find a way to ensure survival. Do same for water and the consequences take their toll on human life.
Just before Maria’s essay, I would have affirmed that potable water is the one resource that had to be infinitely available. Now it is embarrassing to think that there was a time in my university days when I was as uninformed as to assume that because most of the Earth is water, it couldn’t possibly ever run out. This is what this article is about: updating knowledge of potable water as well as inspiring an attitudinal reorientation towards water as a regrettably limited resource.
Of all the water in the world, as reported by the WHO, 97% is salt water, 2% is locked up in polar ice caps, the remaining 1% includes all the fresh water in all the lakes, rivers, streams and aquifers – and over half of that is polluted! Of the remaining half of that precious 1%, agriculture consumes 70%, 20% goes to industry, leaving just 10% for all other uses we put water to. At this point, we may consider the pressure from a global surging population, and we are left with a situation where we use fresh water at twice the rate it is being replenished by nature. No wonder many believe in the inevitability of water conflicts.
Already, “around one-sixth of the 6.1 billion people in the world lack access to improved sources of water, while 40 percent are without access to improved sanitation services,” as the WHO maintains, “each year, 3.4 million people, mostly children, die from water-related diseases.” As usual, these occur more amongst the less developed, people for whom water is too precious to be wasted as much as the industrialized world is reputed to. An average American is estimated to require 3-7 gallons (12-28 litres) of water for just one flush of the toilet: more than the average person in a developing country has access to all day. But opting to turn off the water while we brush our teeth or wash dishes can lead to savings of about 20 litres a day per person. That makes individual water savings of up to 7,300 litres annually.
Let me place the individual – the “I” – in proper perspective. By individual, I mean any one person; a unit of humanity; you or me. Having done that, we may proceed.
If only I pause to wonder: “will I find a substitute for water when I waste it all?” I will realize that by no means am I permitted to waste water. I must take stock of all I do with water, so I can help in saving some for those babies and less-privileged dying now because they can’t get a bit of what I waste. I will take stock from the very moment I wake up to the time I lay my head to sleep.
First thing I do with water when I wake up is brush my teeth and wash my mouth. I used to need up to 4 glasses (about a litre) of water for that, but now I use only two glasses and I still clean my mouth as well as before. If I continue saving that half litre everyday, by the end of the year I would have saved about 180 litres of water.
I do not like doing the dishes; at times, everything gets so annoying that the mere thought of having to turn the tap off and on adds to my frustration. But I now take my time to turn the tap on only when necessary, and off when required. It turns out the tap stays off for about a quarter of all the time I spend doing dishes. Comparing both outcomes, I realize no less than 5 litres are saved each time I wash plates. If I do the dishes only twice everyday, I will be saving 10 litres daily and about 3,650 litres annually.
Next thing I do every morning with water is water flowers around the house. I stopped using a hose because as long as I watered the plants, the water kept running even while I walked from one flower pot to the other. That made me use up about 40 litres of water every morning on plants alone. Now I use a bucket and bowl to carry and pour the water. I now use less than 20 litres on flowers daily, and if I decide to water the plants only once in two days, they would still be healthy and I could save even more water. In all, I will be saving about 180 litres every week, making 9,360 litres of water I can save yearly.
To wash my parents’ cars everyday, I also used a hose in such a manner that even while I scrubbed the dirt off the cars with a sponge, the water kept running – wasting on the ground. When I started using a bucket and bowl, I could wash for as long as I wanted and the water remained in the bucket. I pour water at my discretion now, saving me about half of the minimum 60 litres I spent on washing two cars every morning. I now also use a rag to clean the cars on some mornings. I don’t actually wash them on 3 days of the week. I now save about 30 litres every 4 days of the week and all the 60 litres on the other 3 days. That makes 300 litres per week and some 15,600 litres every year.
I had a hard time coming to terms with the idea of stretching water conservation to the bathroom. The excess time I spent in the shower was arguably the most refreshing for all day long. But I have now learnt how unsustainable that habit is, and I spend only as much time as I need to clean up in the bathroom. Consequently, I have cut out close to 5 minutes of letting the shower flow, saving about 40 litres of water anytime I have a bath. I used to shower as often as I had the time to (the weather stays hot around my area), now I bath only in the mornings and just before going to bed everyday. I now save 80 litres of water from skipping two shower sessions daily. That makes up to 29,200 litres in annual savings.
I will not compromise my drinking water.
I could go a step further by installing products like low flush toilets and water efficient taps in my house so the entire household consumption can fall by say 15 to 20%. Suppose, according to Maria’s estimates, I require 250 litres per day to lead a quality life, my parents would also require 500 litres, and then adding up for my big brother would bring total household water consumption to 1,000 litres per day. If I actually install new water efficient fixtures in my home, that will lead to saving 150 to 200 litres daily. The resultant yearly water savings I would have initiated within my family will equal about 70,000 litres. Yet this is just a modest estimate as Maria pointed out in her work that “in the city of Buenos Aires about 630 litres a day are being used per capita.” If then I were an Argentine, my family’s water savings would total up to 182,500 litres per year.
So far I have tried to run through most of the daily uses of water I encounter. To prove that these are far from exhaustive, I have made no mention of water for cooking, laundry or such other purposes. For now, if we put together all the results highlighted above from the time I wake to when I sleep, we should find that I – by myself – can save 240,490 litres of water yearly. The last time I checked on the water crises among the poor, that quantity would have been sufficient for over 32 people all year through or for over 12,000 people in a day. If half of Nigeria’s 140 million conserve water like this, we would be saving 16,834,300,000,000 litres of water annually, and that’s only from our own tiny part of the globe! Just imagine how much more astounding the results will look like if we multiply whole country, sub-regional or regional populations by the quantity of water I can save.
Let me begin to conclude by stating that this simple practice is not about cutting back on the essential water we need, rather it is about minimizing the water we needlessly waste. This essay may be flawed for its perhaps Utopian inclinations; weakened by its departure from an absolute intellectual endeavour; and, trivialized as another blanket appeal to “common sense”; yet its strength lies in the concept of individual responsibility.
I choose to believe that I, not the government (as is always conveniently held responsible), can take the initiative to conserve this principal resource which will be a major limiting factor if its mismanagement persists. Availability of safe and adequate water could be as crucial to economic development in the coming years as access to oil was to development in the 20th century.
It behooves me to add that establishing a water-saving society has become crucial, and the participation of civil society will play a critical role in achieving water-saving objectives. In the final analysis, “the fundamental message” I have tried to convey via this reflection “is the profound multiplying effect of small concrete actions.” As natural resources assume center-stage in 21st century calculations, let all break with tradition by accepting an all-inclusive obligation to use water responsibly, else, as Maria’s concluding sentence went, “running water will have already run out in a time when there will still be humans who will not have known what an invaluable miracle it is to turn on the tap and see water fit for consumption.”
« return.