Only a Revolution in Our Thinking Can Save Us From a Water
Crisis This article was produced in partnership with
GlobalPossibilities.org. We like to flush our toilets. A lot.
Our flush figure for the U.S. is at 5.7 billion gallons a day in
our homes alone. It's one of the great examples of American
excess -- people across the world don't have enough clean
drinking water, and yet we're happy to send it down the drain.
Of course, the last laugh may be on us. As we head into the fall
nearly half of U.S. states are experiencing extreme or
exceptional drought. Lack of rainfall is the easy culprit, but
the truth is we don't manage our water resources well enough to
deal with times of shortage. Just ask Atlanta, which went nearly
bone-dry in 2007 or Las Vegas, which is working on an
engineering a pricy $15 billion water pipeline to supplement its
dwindling stocks. We can't blame it all on our flushing frenzy
though; power plants and agriculture suck up the vast majority
of our water. Not to mention the fact that indu