22 ways to think you’re actually helping solve the water crisis in the American West, that is.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis has joined forces with a government-funded organization called ‘Water Education Colorado’ to encourage all of us to use 22 water-saving ideas to save 22 gallons of water per day during the year 2022. The program is called Water ’22. (Pretty clever name, in my humble opinion.)
You can hear the Governor’s inspiring Water ’22 message below.
And you can read inspiring messages from Water Education Colorado on their website, courtesy of the Presenting Partners: Chevron, Coors, and marijuana company WANA. (Three of the biggest water users in Colorado?)
Water connects us all, upstream and downstream, past, present and future. It’s up to all of us to conserve and protect it. We can work together to make sure there’s enough to go around and reduce our impacts on the environment. No matter how you connect with water, it all starts here.
There are easy actions you can take to keep our water clean and save 22 gallons or more every day. That adds up to over 8,000 gallons of savings per year. If every Coloradan does their part, we can save close to 48 billion gallons.
You might think a group that calls themselves ‘Water Education Colorado’ would know a thing or two about ‘water’, and maybe even about simple multiplication. Like, when you multiply 8,030 gallons times 5.89 million Colorado residents, you get about 47 billion gallons, and that is indeed close to 48 billion.
Which probably seems like a lot of water, to the average person who is considering their connection to a load of laundry.
Unfortunately, 47 billion gallons is merely a drop in the bucket (to use a potentially apt metaphor) when we consider the scale of the water crisis in the American West — the bucket, in this case, being Lake Mead, America’s largest man-made water reservoir. Some scientists and mathematicians are less concerned about how many times we water our lawns or flush our toilets, and more concerned with the fact that Lake Mead is only about 34% full. In 1983, Lake Mead held about 26 million acre-feet; today, it holds about 9.1 million acre-feet of water.
So we’re short about 16.9 million acre-feet. About 5.5 trillion gallons. That’s “trillion” with a “t”.
47 billion gallons might seem like a lot — assuming millions of people in Colorado really want to save 22 gallons per day during 2022 — but it’s equivalent to only about 0.9% of the overall problem.
Here’s some information that Governor Polis and Water Education Colorado did not want us to think, perhaps, about during 2022.
It typically requires at least 2,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. (Or more, depending upon the production method. Numbers from University of California Davis.)
Last year, the average American consumed about 55 pounds of beef. (And didn’t feel a bit guilty about it.)
If you have a pocket calculator, you can discover out that it requires more than 100,000 gallons of water per year to quench an average American’s desire for hamburgers and steaks.
If 5.9 million Coloradans stopped eating beef, we would theoretically “save” 600 billion gallons of water, which could (theoretically) then flow downstream to help fill Lake Mead. Which is 12 times more than the 48 billion gallons the Governor and WEC want us to “save” this year with their Water ’22 campaign.
Will Colorado stop eating at McDonalds just to help fill Lake Mead? Not likely. We really like our hamburgers.
Will Colorado do any of the 22 things suggested by WEC and Governor Polis? Not likely. We really like our lawns to be green.
We also like our lettuce to be green, and our cucumbers, and green peppers, and green onions.
We don’t, however, like our hamburgers to be green.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.