yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Our Water Footprint | Breakthrough


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Water is finite, but our demands for it are not. So in places where we have rivers running dry, what's happening is our demands are bumping up against those limits of the finite supply. Our use of water for agriculture, for food production, for growing cities, and industries is beginning to really max out that water supply. It shows up in the form of groundwater being over-pumped, rivers running dry, and just generally finding that we're sort of running out of the water we need.

A lot of people only think about water when it comes out of their tap, but in fact, our lifestyles require a lot of water. If we're an average American, it takes about 2,000 gallons of water a day to keep our lifestyles afloat, and most of that is in our diet. So we can become more conscious about not wasting food because every time we waste food, we're wasting water. If we want to, we can be more conscious about the kinds of foods we eat, eating more healthily but also food that's maybe a bit less thirsty in terms of the amount of water it takes to produce.

I think there are a lot of ways, just becoming more conscious consumers, we can make a difference. Part of the reason we're in this mess, in a way, with water is that there are so many billions of people now all needing to eat. But if each of us makes decisions, we can begin to scale that back. If we think about our water footprint, about half of it is our diet, and a third of it is our use of energy. All of these daily things that we do involve water, and sometimes quite a lot. You know, it can take 700 gallons of water just to make one cotton t-shirt.

The good news is there are a lot of things we can do to use water more efficiently and to conserve it, which would open up opportunities to restore some water back to nature. For example, in agriculture, there are efficiency technologies combined with information technologies, like sensors, that help us understand how much water we really need to use. That would allow us to get smarter about how we use that water and then, again, return some to the natural environment.

More Articles

View All
Similar shapes & transformations
[Instructor] We are told that Shui concluded the quadrilaterals, these two over here, have four pairs of congruent corresponding angles. We can see these right over there. And so, based on that, she concludes that the figures are similar. What error, if a…
Visiting Iceland’s Newest Wellness Oasis: Forest Lagoon w/ Eva zu Beck | Nat Geo’s Best of the World
I’ve been talking to Nat Geo for the last few months, and they want to send me on a trip. You’re invited to visit Forest Lagoon in Akureyri. I have always wanted to go to Iceland, but the wellness space that’s, I would say, a little bit outside of my comf…
Fisherman With No Fish | Years of Living Dangerously
Through frequent dive trips to Appo Island, Renee has befriended many of the locals. Come over here, John Zenan is a third-generation fisherman who has spent his entire life on the island, living off its resources. He and his son Jory make daily trips to …
15 Mistakes You Make In Your 20s
Hello, Alux! Welcome back. Your 20s are a time of exploration, growth, and learning, right? And with that comes the expectation that you’ll make some mistakes along the way. You are expected to make some of these mistakes, and here are 15 of them that you…
Harry Zhang with Kevin Hale on Building Lob to Automate the Offline World
Today we have Harry Zhang, co-founder of Lob. Lob makes APIs for companies to send letters and postcards. So, Kevin has a question for you. “I’m trying to think back to when you guys applied to YC. You didn’t have almost anything. Like, I would say it wa…
Lecture 18 - Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups (Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy)
General C. Chrisy: “And Carollyn and I are going to talk about uh finance and legal mechanics for startups. Um this is certainly not the most exciting of the classes, sorry, but if you get this right, uh this is probably the class most… So thank you very …