The Water Crisis | National Geographic

The following program is paid content for Finish.

Fresh water—we can't live without it, but it's running out fast. We call this the bathtub ring, and the reservoir has dropped 120 feet in the last 20 years. Now I'm tracking down innovators who are trying to turn the tide.

We're here in the trenches, right in a desperate fight to change our water-thirsty ways. Laser leveling our field helps us be very efficient with our irrigation, but we can't just rely on the experts to bring us back from the brink and wait until after the water is already down the drain. We all need to make changes in our daily lives.

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Can we strike a balance between the comforts of modern life and the health of the planet? Can we hang on to the fresh water we so desperately need?

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Before we use up the last drop. Los Angeles, California—this is a city I am very familiar with, a sprawling urban jungle home to more than 10 million people who together use almost one and a half billion gallons of water every day. Two decades of drought have made the supply of fresh water critically low. Water shortages are happening all over the world. Agriculture and industry waste way too much water. There are ever more people on the planet, and the weather is getting hotter and drier. We have to do something, if not for ourselves, for the generations to come.

If you want to make a change in the world, sometimes the best place to start is right here at home. Just imagine all the water across Los Angeles wasted on lawns that no one ever even uses. I want to see just exactly how I should adjust my life, even in the smallest ways, so I can stop being a part of the water scarcity problem and start being part of the solution.

Here to help me is Christa Guerrero from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. First, she checks if all the faucets, toilets, and showerheads in the house are fitted with water-saving devices. Then it's time for her to put my habits under the microscope.

Uh-oh. So how often would you say you run your dishwasher?

So, I like to do my dishes, but I use the dishwasher when usually I have a lot of guests.

And do you rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher?

Uh, yes, I do.

I feel like that's the wrong answer. You actually use less water when you use a dishwasher than you do when you wash by hand. The new ones are about three and a half gallons every time you run them. That's like so little, and they still have the high pressure that you would want in order to not have to rinse your dishes beforehand.

Got it, thank you.

Absolutely. How many showers would you say you take a week?

Seven.

And do you know about how long you shower for?

Um, a few minutes, probably.

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You just want to get in, get it done, and then, you know, get the coffee. Do you know if the shower head is low flow?

I don't believe so.

An average shower length for most Americans is about 8 to 10 minutes long, and that's about 20 gallons of water for that entire shower.

Oh, okay.

And how often do you run your sprinklers?

They're on a timer.

Okay, the sprinklers that you have—each sprinkler nozzle puts out about the same amount of water as an average American shower. So, if you think about having 20 sprinklers in your yard that all go off at once, you're so much shame right now. Your lawn is taking 20 showers at once.

So, this is the process in which I'm facing my demons, and we're going to make things better, right?

Okay, so the calculations that I have—your indoor water use is about 83 gallons per day. The average American is about 88, so not too bad.

Alright.

Your outdoor is at about 213 gallons per day, and that's mostly because of your sprinkler system. The average there is about 112, oh, for most Americans. Sorry.

And so, that brings you to a total of about 296 gallons per day that you're using around your home.

My daily water use is much worse than I expected, especially in the yard. It's time for me to make some changes at home. Averting a water crisis requires changes outside the home too. Agriculture, manufacturing, energy—these are all massive consumers of water.

I'm Shannon Switzer Swanson, a National Geographic Explorer and marine social ecologist. My work takes me all around the world to study how fishing communities deal with environmental challenges like pollution and climate change. But now, I'm investigating a major ecosystem that's under threat right on my own doorstep: the San Francisco Bay.

I'm heading out into the bay with John Rosenfield. He's the senior scientist with the non-profit organization San Francisco Bay Keeper.

We're the watchdogs of the bay—the little boat that could. We use drones and airplanes to monitor the largest polluters and bring them into court if we need to.

So John, tell me what's going on in the bay here?

Well, we're witnessing an ecosystem collapse, really. San Francisco Bay is home to six species that are officially endangered, including two unique forms of Chinook salmon and two kinds of smelt. The orca whales are also endangered because they cannot get enough food, and they specialize in Chinook salmon.

So, is that because of pollution caused by people?

That's running into the bay and the delta. Pollution is part of the problem, but there's really a bigger problem: what we take out of the bay before it reaches the bay is fresh water. We take that out of the rivers that flow into the bay; it gets diverted to agriculture and to urban uses.

How much fresh water are we taking out of the bay in a typical year?

We take out 50% of the water that would flow into the bay before it reaches the bay, and in some years, we take out as much as 70%. On today's patrol, we meet up with a fish research vessel from the University of California, Davis.

I'm excited to see what they caught.

What are you catching?

It's a really nice halibut.

Oh my gosh, how amazing! Beautiful!

Are you catching any longfin smelts?

No longfin smelt to date.

Okay, and this would be their habitat?

This is definitely their habitat, and we're trying to understand why their abundances are so low and whether there's anything we can do to help save the population. Nowadays, because we divert so much water upstream, this is salt water perpetually throughout the year. In the winter and spring, normally this water that we're on top of would be fresh; you could drink it.

Does that really make a huge difference to the health of the ecosystem?

It makes all the difference to an estuary, so it's really the mixing of fresh water with salt water from the ocean that creates this nursery habitat that the fish depend on.

Are we taking fresh water out to a level that isn't gonna work for much longer?

It's definitely not sustainable. I mean, the evidence is really clear.

Wow, yeah, I really had no idea how many ways freshwater affects the marine environment. As well as a marine social ecologist, what's happening to the bay is really troubling to me, but also as someone who wants to start a family in California, it's critical for me to know if there's a way to address this water crisis.

I just found out that I'm expecting a baby. That gives me a brand new perspective on living in a state that's partly desert.

So I'm heading out to the American southwest to explore where our water comes from and whether we can save enough of it. Does it make sense to put down roots in a place where the water may be about to run out? From Florida to New York to California, fresh water supplies are running critically low. As a UN goodwill ambassador on the environment, I'm passionate about protecting ecosystems around the globe.

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And now that I know just how much water I'm wasting around the house, I'm making some changes in my daily habits. Not rinsing the dishes before they go into the dishwasher is a no-brainer, and there are a few simple fixes that I've been meaning to do for a long time.

Okay, by changing from a toilet model that uses 1.6 gallons per flush to 1.2 gallons, I can save up to 2 gallons a day. In the shower, you can add a flow reducer to the shower head; for an eight-minute shower, this would save up to 10 gallons of water per day. In the kitchen, an aerator does a similar job, reducing the flow by two and a half gallons per minute—you wouldn't tell the difference.

And I've started collecting the water that usually just runs down the drain every day while I wait for the shower to heat up. So I'm setting myself a personal goal at home to cut my water consumption by 30%. If everybody in the United States did that, we'd save eight and a half billion—billion with a B—gallons of water every single day. That's more water than flows through the Grand Canyon each day.

So what do you say? Want to save a river?

The first stop on my journey through the American southwest is the mighty Colorado River. It's the number one renewable water resource for Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. Here on the Nevada-Arizona border, the steep rock walls of this canyon created the perfect site for building what was at the time the largest concrete structure in the world—the Hoover Dam.

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I've come here to meet John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico, to find out how much longer this river can sustain us.

Every time I come to Hoover Dam, I'm struck by how important this place is in the growth of the western United States. It's the water supply for 40 million people, 5 million acres of farmland—the lettuce you eat all winter, the alfalfa that feeds the cows that make your burgers and your pizza cheese. So much depends on this river, and Hoover Dam is at the heart of the system. It's the dam that we built that made all of that possible.

Wow, 40 million people is a lot of people, and I keep hearing that we're running out of water— is that true?

Yeah, so we're not exactly running out of water, but we're headed in that direction because we're taking more water out of the river than nature puts back in every year. From its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River snakes its way 1,450 miles down toward the Gulf of California.

On route, more than a dozen dams, reservoirs, and some of the longest water canals in the world serve seven states in the U.S. and two in Mexico. But a long and severe drought has put this entire system under stress. It's been going on for almost 20 years.

Is that right?

Twenty years of dry flow on the Colorado River—among the driest 20-year periods, like this, you know, maybe in 500 or a thousand years.

Wow, so that's a really long time.

It is.

Is there any thought about whether or not we will get back to normal again, or is this just a new normal?

The climate is getting drier as greenhouse gases rise and Earth's temperature rises. We're seeing more evaporation, and we should not expect it to just bounce back at some point.

That's a bit scary.

It is a little unnerving, yeah. Looking at the river here, touching it even, doesn't give me the sense that the Colorado is in jeopardy.

But when John takes me to see the reservoir on the other side of the dam, the depth of the crisis hits home.

We call this the bathtub ring; it's minerals left behind as the lake drops, and that shows the lake has dropped 120 feet in the last 20 years.

Why is that happening?

Less water coming in from upstream, more water going out downstream because we're using it for our farms and our cities. You know, you can stand here and get this visceral feeling of how much water is gone. The largest reservoir in the U.S. is half empty. Another couple hundred feet is what we call deadpool—when you just can't get water out of the lake anymore.

And that would be an absolute disaster for millions of people downstream— that is a calamity that we cannot afford to let happen. And that's sort of what I'm dedicating my life to—is trying to help us work through these problems.

The Colorado River's water supply is critically low.

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And just down the road is a fast-growing desert city famed for its culture of excess—Las Vegas. I'm here trying to understand something that's really puzzling me: with over 42 million tourists every year, how does this city stay hydrated during a mega drought?

Former water manager for Southern Nevada Pat Mulroy may have some answers. Not many people have had to face water scarcity on the scale that she has.

So Pat, you've managed Las Vegas water for about 25 years—that's a very long time. And as it's grown, then have those challenges changed over the years?

When I came here in 1974, none of this was here. It was truly a weekend gambling town. It was in the early 90s that the little weekend gambling town started to reinvent itself as a full-scale metropolis. We were going through the first big growth bubble, and we were seeing water usage increase 17% annually, which was pretty daunting.

And then in 2002, the drought hit. It was one of the driest years on record. Pat remembers the morning her deputy broke the bad news.

When she came in and said, "We've got problems," we had huge problems. There had been virtually zip snowpack in the upper basin, so obviously conservation was the bedrock. We sat down with all the communities in Southern Nevada and had to change their building codes, landscaping codes—everything. A new home could only have a quarter of their backyard grass; the front yard could have no grass whatsoever.

And we were paying people to start ripping grass out. By the time 2004 hit, we had cut our use by a third. It was phenomenal.

That is also very impressive that you were able to bring all these different conservation efforts together and people together.

We didn't have time to fight; you know, failure was not an option. This whole community would have disappeared.

It seems to me that managing this unpredictability requires an extra level of resourcefulness, and on a tour of the resort's golf course, I'm intrigued to find out why this one hasn't been torn out like most of the others.

You're on probably the oldest golf course in Southern Nevada; that goes back to the '40s, and it has been transformed through applying technology with soil sensors and weather stations. It uses only as much water as it absolutely has to have at the right time, and every drop has been recycled.

So when you say I can combine a really water-efficient historic open space with state-of-the-art technology to where it uses absolutely the least amount of water possible— to me, that's a success story.

Thirty years from now, two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live in a city, and as our cities get bigger and thirstier, it won't just be desert cities like Vegas taking drastic measures like ripping up lawns.

I'm on my way to Arizona, one of the hottest states in the U.S. The innovators who are finding ways to thrive in this desert could be the pioneers our dry planet so badly needs.

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In the average California home, most of the water use isn't in the house; it's in the yard, and this house is no different. It's time I did something about that.

This is your blank slate.

I love a blank slate!

I've enlisted the help of Jackie Serber, an expert in sustainable gardening.

There's a lot of existing elements that I think are good for conservation. These pipes are connected to a system that brings the water off the roof and waters this area, which I think is good.

It is good that it's back here, but when you have a lot of water coming out of a small pipe onto just bare soil, that's a situation where runoff can start to occur and erosion. So we want to find a way to slow that water down and sink it into the soil.

By the time we're done transforming it with compost and mulch, we're going to build a swale—a rain garden. So, when you have a rainstorm and there's a surge of water, we're creating a place for that water to go, and then over time, it will slowly permeate into the soil, and the plants around it are going to take up that water.

Can I help?

Yes, if you can dig!

Actually, my favorite thing to do.

Okay, great! Put me to work!

We will. Jackie’s design features native plants that not only need very little water, but they also support local populations of insects and birds—bonus! By remodeling this yard, I'm going to be reducing my water footprint by a lot.

And yards are where homes use the most water, and I'll be capturing rainwater where it falls. That rainwater nourishes tree roots and ultimately replenishes aquifers very deep underground.

I feel really good doing my tiny part directing groundwater back into the aquifer. These underground layers of porous rock store vast volumes of ancient rainwater, but all across the U.S., cities, farmers, and industry are extracting this vital water reservoir far faster than nature can replenish it.

About 30% of the water once stored beneath Kansas is already gone; some freshwater springs in Florida now produce less than half the flow they used to. Climate change appears to be making droughts longer and drier.

There you go!

So I want to do everything I can to conserve water.

Okay, so this 60-gallon barrel will fill up in one day of heavy rain—it's a gift from the sky!

Can't wait for it to rain!

Now tracking rainfall over time is essential to understanding drought patterns, but with something as infrequent as a mega drought, how do you know what's normal?

I'm heading southeast from Vegas toward Tucson to meet a special kind of meteorologist—not one who looks at radar and satellites, but one who looks at ancient trees.

Connie Woodhouse from the University of Arizona is taking me to Mount Lemmon, just north of Tucson, to collect some tree ring samples.

We're looking for the oldest tree that we can core because the oldest trees are going to give us the most information, and then once the threads engage, it's just a matter of turning it all right.

And this doesn't hurt the tree; it's kind of like getting a shot, you know? The hole will fill up; it's healing, and we want to get the spoon upright, and then we'll pull it out.

There it is—so there's the core.

Connie’s tree ring research lab contains half a million tree samples.

Okay, so here's what the core looks like after it's sanded down, so you can see it's much clearer.

Yeah, that's really beautiful.

Yeah, here's the bark again. Can you show me the dry and the wet years on here?

Um, these little rings here—the 1930s drought—here's the 1950s drought.

Is it tiny because it's from a drought year?

Yeah, it’s tiny because it’s super, super dry.

But the crown jewel in Connie's collection comes from a tree that started growing 900 years ago.

Alright, so here's a piece of the Colorado River; actually, this site, Trail Gulch, is right in the headwaters. This is pinyon pine, and the inside date on this tree—about when it started growing—was in the 1100s.

Do you think that these droughts that you're seeing in the past are any different from this drought we're currently seeing?

Based on the record of tree rings from the Colorado River, you know, 20 years of drought is a pretty long drill. However, if we go back to the 1100s, we see a drought that's about six decades, and so that's really quite a bit longer than what we've seen, at least to date, in the recent drought.

The drought in the West is already having dramatic effects in California, with some rivers running dry. Industry and agriculture have been drawing billions of gallons of water a year from underground aquifers—so much that NASA satellites have detected the ground sinking by up to two feet a year.

And cutting back on this water usage is a huge challenge because most of the time we don't even know we're using it.

I'm working on trimming my daily water use by around 100 gallons.

That's great!

But I recently heard a shocking statistic: every pound of beef we eat takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce, so the most water-saving action we can take is cutting down on meat.

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But getting people to do that can be really hard, so I'm going to make it a little easier.

I'm taking a trip across town to meet Chef Babette Davis, owner of Stuff I Eat in Inglewood. She's been preparing vegan delights for the last 30 years.

Voila! Her food is so hard to resist!

You started with dessert, and you started without me?

You put yum in front of me; I'm gonna have some! Come on!

Hmm, okay, so what do we got here?

So right here you've got a little farro, you've got black beans, enchilada pie.

You like it?

It's amazing! Are you kidding me? I'm from New Mexico.

Oh, okay, this is very similar— is it?

Yeah, to what my mom used to rock. We call it enchilada pie.

How long have you been vegan?

Since 1990. I was turning 40. I'll be 70 in December.

Get out of here! No!

Are you serious? I can still do a four-minute plank.

I don't think I could do a four-minute plank.

Probably can't!

Boom!

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It's the best thing I ever did. We've got to do something because the planet can't sustain itself with the way that we're behaving.

Cattle farming is responsible for about 90% of the Amazon deforestation.

Ninety? That's ridiculous!

These light green patches are farms that have been clear-cut into the Amazon to raise cows or to grow soy to feed pigs in Asia.

Every cow and every pig eats tons of feed in its lifetime, so when you eat meat, you indirectly guzzle all the water it took to grow all these crops.

A lot of people are saying that eating sustainably or being an environmentalist is a privilege—is that true?

Sweetheart, they sell organic produce at the 99 cent stores. It doesn't cost you much to cook up some beans. It depends on where your head is, where your heart is, and what you want to do.

I introduced this concept called hefetarianism, where you cut your meat consumption by half, so every other day you eat plant-based. It's easier, and you know, arguably anybody could do it.

I'm humbled now to be here eating with you, and you know what? I'm so happy to have you!

Now I have literally ingested your wisdom—thank you!

And it is tasty! I have to say, really, really good!

That's wonderful. I love you for this.

By 2050, we're going to produce half a billion tons of animal meat a year at 1,800 gallons of water per pound of beef—that's an enormous waste of water.

If you really look at yourself in the mirror, and you're honest, I think it's hard to deny that it's time to at least make somewhat of a change towards a vegan lifestyle.

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Livestock farmers in the Amazon don't have to worry about where their water comes from, but in Arizona, the largest reliable influx of water has to be pumped uphill from the Colorado River.

The Central Arizona Project is a 336-mile canal, which delivers water to Phoenix and Tucson and to most of the farms in between.

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As I drive through this parched land, I expect the farmland around me to be growing low-water, desert-friendly crops, but what I mostly see is Arizona's biggest agricultural export: cotton, a notoriously water-hungry crop.

To find out why, I've come to Tucson to meet Brian Wong, a third-generation Arizona farmer.

My grandfather planted his first crop back in 1939, so that's what, 81 years ago? Yes, one of his first crops was cotton, and it really wasn't native to the region back in the late 30s.

But growing here in a hot and dry climate actually allows cotton to thrive a lot more because you don't have a whole lot of bugs, since it's kind of too hot for them to live.

So how is all of this water actually getting to your farm for you to use?

Yeah, so we actually have seven different pump stations on the CAP canals. So, you know, you hear the noise in the background— that's actually our pumps running. We apply the water right out of the ditch into the field, and then it evenly moves across the field and irrigates efficiently.

The way we achieve that is laser leveling our fields and even doing laser leveling in between crops, so that helps us be very efficient with our irrigation.

But the current 20-year drought forced Brian to rethink his family's traditional cotton; he began looking for less thirsty, more desert-hardened species.

One of our very first grains that we started with was called white Sonora wheat. A lot of the Native American tribes south of here used to grow white Sonora wheat, but in the early 1900s, that was kind of pushed out by the more modern grain varieties.

So, you know, we're one of the major producers of white Sonora wheat, and you know, we're very happy to bring it back to this area.

Brian's switch to a traditional desert crop has helped him cut his water use nearly in half compared with his grandfather's cotton farm.

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Some steam, and his grain has found an enthusiastic local market.

Artisanal baker Don Guerra often makes himself a thousand loaves in three hours.

Cheers!

Cheers!

Customers of Barrio Bread often tell him his loaves remind them of the bread they used to eat decades ago.

That is so delicious!

Oh my goodness!

When you realize that it can take more than 700 gallons of water to grow the cotton for just one t-shirt, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to grow cotton out here in the desert.

That's why what Brian is doing is so impressive.

In the face of a punishing drought, he's managed to grow less thirsty crops, and he's been a huge success.

He's truly inspirational.

Growing cotton is water-intensive, and the production process of making clothes out of it uses even more. But I just can't live without my jeans!

I was told that you have some jeans that use a lot less water to make.

Cool!

Yeah, so that's going to be our sea jeans!

Okay!

So these are made out of 100% organic cotton, and they use about 130 gallons per pair of jeans. They also happen to feel really good! If there's any rips or tears or anything, bring them back in, and we'll patch them up and get them all fixed for you.

So you extend the life of them!

Zach, that's great!

Yeah, reduce on the waste!

Exactly!

You know, we shouldn't underestimate as consumers— we have a lot of purchasing power, and we can vote with our dollars.

Did you know that it takes 3,000 gallons of water to make a smartphone?

That's why I haven't upgraded mine in five years or so.

So if you want to save water, I think we just have to kick the habit of constant consumption.

But getting a grip on water is not just about using less of it; it's about putting back the water we've been over-extracting from the ground for decades.

Can we turn a desert into a sustainable oasis?

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Phoenix, Arizona—the hottest city in the U.S.—that gets only eight inches of rain a year.

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This place was built by draining trillions of gallons of ancient water stored in aquifers deep below it. But I'm here to meet someone who's turning this idea on its head—a woman who has helped to create a miraculous oasis in the Sonoran Desert.

Catherine Sorensen was Phoenix's director of water management for seven years.

We wanted to show you the Tres Rios wetlands that basically polishes our reclaimed water after it leaves the wastewater treatment plant. It creates this amazing wetland that is home to dozens of different species of animals and birds.

If you told me this was water from a sewage plant, I absolutely would not believe you!

You know, the technology is really very advanced. We clean the water to very high standards, and then, of course, Mother Nature does her bit.

Basically, you can think of a wastewater treatment plant as a big iron stomach. It works essentially the same way—there are bugs and bacteria that break down the liquids and the solids.

The liquids we then further treat and filter and reclaim, and then we deliver them here to the wetlands. Before this was a wetland, what was here?

Just desert.

Um, and it's taken us really decades to create this and build it to what it is today.

And is that helpful for replenishing the aquifers?

It is. There's infiltration to the aquifers through the riverbed and the surrounding area, and that's important too because we really want to manage our groundwater for the very long term.

Phoenix used to be very dependent on groundwater supplies, and we were basically draining the aquifer, which is obviously not a good water management strategy.

The ability for Phoenix to survive over the very long term is really entirely dependent on how well we manage our aquifers. Over the past two decades, Phoenix has worked hard to replenish its depleted aquifers, not just with reclaimed water, but by banking extra Colorado River water delivered by the CAP canal. It now has enough supply to last for years, even if the rivers were to run dry.

We're here in the trenches, right? This is a desert city, and you can't go through a summer here without understanding that water here is really a life or death issue.

I think this is a good example of how you can meet those challenges and leverage Mother Nature while you're doing it.

These wetlands remind me that smart water management is not just about using less; it's also about maintaining the massive stores of fresh water beneath our feet.

Every homeowner can join this effort too.

I can collect the water into a pipe and direct it to the tanks over there in my yard project.

The job is in the hands of landscape designer Jackie Serber and landscape contractor Salvador Razo.

Perfect! And so then on top of the tanks, we'll install some gravel and then fabric to keep the soil from getting into the tanks.

That's correct!

They're working to make the most of water that falls from the sky.

Wow, this is really coming along!

Walk me through it; what's going on here?

Yes, so it's coming together. This is the beginnings of our swale and our rain garden here. There were two downspouts coming off of the roof, and all the hard surfaces around the property—one of those we've redirected to the swale here, which is this kind of ditch, and one is going into the infiltration pane.

Right, can we check it out?

Yes!

Okay, Salvador, how's it going? Do you want to give Adrienne a little explanation here?

Um, what we're doing is collecting the water that comes from the roof. That's why we did this infiltration tank.

You can see Salvador's adding gravel. The fabric is a barrier between the soil and the gravel, so we're basically trying to maintain the voids so that it can fill with water in a heavy downpour.

In the event for some reason this tank fills all the way up, this little pop-up device will pop up, and then it will flow through the garden naturally.

Yes, through the mulch!

So this is just a great way to get a surge of water into the soil, and then it can soak in, and all these trees can take it out.

Right, surge and soak, and it looks beautiful!

Which is— I mean, I was not expecting it to be as gorgeous.

Yeah, we just want this garden to put a smile on everyone's face that comes through.

Bring in the habitat and everything for you to enjoy for years to come.

And I would argue that happiness is sustainable.

It gives me hope that even a city like Los Angeles, long a symbol of humanity's conquest of nature and concrete and steel, can get back into balance with the local ecosystems, but it starts with water.

And with each one of us changing the way we think about it.

After traveling through the desert states of Nevada and Arizona, following the life-giving water of the Colorado River, I'm back home in the Bay Area—a home where I'll soon be raising a child and needing to nurture that new life with clean, fresh water.

So I'm encouraged to see drought-tolerant yards appearing all over my neighborhood. My local library has cut its potable water use by 90%, and it looks stunning.

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Drought-tolerant yards don't just save water; they protect fragile ecosystems like the San Francisco Bay from polluted runoff.

To live next to this incredible beauty and to know that it can be preserved if we all work together makes me feel like this is a good place to put down roots—we need to spend more time out here; it's beautiful, so gorgeous!

Every person I met on my journey is doing their part to turn the tide on their water crisis, whether it's cutting water use on one farm or for a whole city.

And for all these people, it just started with a change in their mindset, and that gives me hope for the future.

And it's why I feel good about starting a family here in California. We'll be another family that truly appreciates the value of water, and we'll be here to spread that new way of thinking about water.

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Ah, look at this! I mean, looks done!

Yes, it's pretty much done! This is the completed rain garden.

Uh, this is the meadow that we talked about using the meadow grasses that are very low in water needs, and they will get fed by all the runoff from the rain garden.

So water comes from the roof, down through the beds, fills up, and then gets soaked in.

Exactly! So the idea is that the water's sinking in and it's spreading out, and so all these plant roots are able to take up that water, and it's staying in the backyard—not going anywhere!

Exactly! All the water that falls here is staying here!

And, uh, one more thing we'd love to show you if you follow me.

We got a little surprise!

Surprise?

Okay! Do you have any idea what this is?

Not exactly, but I have a feeling it has something to do with conserving water.

Yes! This is a very cool regenerative gardening technique called hugelkultur!

Hugelkultur?

Yes! It means mound culture in German, and it's basically a swale using a lot of logs that you had lying around.

And so the idea is these logs are becoming spongy, and they're breaking down and they're turning into soil.

It's all very... underneath that you can see, now it's just coated with the plants.

It was like a sponge, correct?

So we have herbs; we've brought some strawberries for you to plant!

Yeah! For me to plant?

Yes, I'd be honored!

[Music]

Alrighty, voila! I am so absolutely grateful for you two and for your whole team for coming in here and making this ignored and abandoned wasteland into something useful and beautiful!

Look how gorgeous this is!

We just really hope that everybody that sees this and sees these gardens is inspired to do something in their own home, and slowly but surely, one garden at a time, we can really change the way water is used in landscaping.

When I first met Christa Guerrero from the Metropolitan Water District, I was shocked to discover how much water I've been wasting—even on small things like rinsing my dishes. So I set myself a challenge to reduce my indoor and outdoor water use by 30%.

So now is the moment of truth—we'll see how I did!

So I hear you've been busy—what changes have you made?

Yes, a couple things I did. I changed the toilet from a 1.6 to a 1.2 gallon toilet.

Excellent!

I installed a water-efficient kitchen faucet.

That's great!

I installed a low-flow showerhead.

And I stopped rinsing the dishes before I put them in the dishwasher.

They're just such a good one!

I installed a rain garden.

Oh, I didn't personally; I helped a little bit. We have an efficient MP rotator irrigation system.

Nice!

Swallowing rain barrel, which is pretty cool.

So I did good.

You did great! You want your total number for the whole house?

Give it to me!

Okay, so you remember you were about just under 300 gallons per day originally?

You came all the way down to 136 gallons per day— that's a 55% reduction in your water use!

And again, it was appliances and small changes around the house.

You didn't do anything drastic?

Did it feel drastic?

No, it was no sweat at all!

Excellent! See, so you can absolutely start to put in a little sweat and see how low you can go!

Guys, come on! Join me! Let's do this!

Simple choices!

It's easy to assume there's plenty of water to grow food, to drink, and to live our lives with, but less than two percent of the planet's water is clean, accessible fresh water.

This program has paid content for Finish.

There's enough water on Earth to sustain us, but only if we use it right and don't abuse it. We need to start thinking about our relationship to water in everything we do, before we get down to the last drop.