Nearly 70 percent of world-wide water consumption goes to agriculture while 20 percent goes to industry and 10 percent to home use.

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At present, 1 in 3 people on the planet are facing water shortages. And it is estimated that by 2030, water demands will grow by 1 fourth. By that year, nearly 50 percent of the world's population will be facing severe water shortages.

The United Nations estimates that it would require an additional $30 billion per year to provide clean and safe drinking water to every human on the planet. In 2007, humans spent more than 3 times that on bottled water. The US Government's $787 billion stimulus package would be enough to provide clean and safe drinking water to all of the planet's human occupants for over 26 years.

It has been proven over and again that buying a small home filtration device for as low as $13 can provide tap water that is as clean and safe, and often cleaner and safer, than bottled water—even those from Fiji and France. Instead, water has been privatized and is now a $400 billion industry, making it the third largest industry behind electricity and oil.

US Americans consumed over 30 billion plastic bottles in 2005. That is close to 1000 per second. Only 12 percent of those petroleum-based bottles are recycled. Nearly 50 million barrels of oil are used by plastic bottle producers each year. That is enough oil to fill 3,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. One small, inexpensive home filtration device can provide nearly 200 liters of clean, healthy water before the filtration cartridge needs changing. Therefore, using one filtration cartridge can prevent 400 small plastic bottles from entering production.

Tap water from home filtration devices costs nearly 4 cents per liter. A 1-liter bottle of Fiji water costs $3.20. That is a difference of 8,000 percent. The environmental consequences are also quite severe as the Fiji production plant runs on diesel fuel 24 hours a day. The plastic bottles themselves make the nearly 10,000 kilometer journey from China to Fiji before being filled with water and traveling the rest of the way to countries all over the world. In addition, it is estimated that nearly 7 liters of water is contaminated in the production of each 1-liter plastic bottle. And it is calculated that each 1-liter bottles of Fiji purchased in the US is responsible for 1/4 of a kilogram of greenhouse gas emissions.

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The average American food product travels 2,400 kilometers before consumption. That is nearly the distance it would require to have my grandmother in Rochester, New York send some of her delicious vegetable soup to my parents in Denver, Colorado.

Over 17 percent of all energy consumption goes to agriculture, with 1 fourth of that energy going to the production, distribution, and consumption of fertilizer. In addition, US Americans consume nearly 475 million kilograms of petroleum-based pesticides per year. That is close to 1.6 kilos, or one 2-liter soda bottle, per person per year.

US Americans average 20.6 million barrels of oil per day. It is estimated that if all US Americans ate one local-grown, organic meal per day, it would save over 1.1 million barrels of oil daily. At $44.76 per barrel, that could save Americans over $18 billion per year.


Sources:

Kingsolver, Barbara, Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Flow: For Love of Water. Dir. Irena Salina. The Group Entertainment, 2008.

Getting Off the Bottle. Simple Not Easy. November 23, 2008.
http://suresimple.blogspot.com/2008/11/getting-off-bottle.html.

Herbst, Moira. Water Scarcity: Hidden Risks to Business. Business Week. February 26, 2009.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db20090226_538819.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+%2B+analysis

Trees on Tap. Nature Inc. BBC. 2008.
http://www.natureinc.org/trees.htm

Petroleum Basic Statistics. Energy Information Administration. 2007.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html

Fiji Water. Wikipedia. March, 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIJI_Water

According to a recent study published in Science magazine, if trends in world fishing and climate change continue, seafood populations will be completely decimated by 2048.

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According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there is an estimated 1.38 billion trillion liters of water within Earth's dynamic system. However, only about 3 percent of the world's water is fresh water. Moreover, only about .3 percent of the world's water is usable by humans. With 6.57 billion humans on the planet, that leaves about 630 billion liters per person of accessible fresh water that we must share with the other living organisms on the planet.

The earth's human population grew by nearly 200 percent in the twentieth century and the consumption of water by humans nearly tripled. According to the World Bank, the world's water demands double every 21 years, and about 95 percent of the world's cities still dump their sewage directly into the water system. According to the World Water Council, by 2050 the planet will be short about 17 percent of the water needed to feed the world's population.

In 2003, humans consumed roughly 3.5 quadrillion liters of water. That comes to about 9.6 trillion liters per day, amounting to over 1,460 liters per person per day. China's annual water consumption is roughly 640 trillion liters per year. That comes to about 1,350 liters per person per day, whereas US Americans consume closer to 1,735 liters.

Of all water consumption by humans on the planet, 69 percent goes to agriculture, most to livestock. In the USA, for example, 80 percent of agricultural land is used to raise livestock. And where it takes about 1,000 liters of water to grow 1 kilogram of grain, it takes about 15,000 liters of water to grow 1 kilogram of beef. Water for personal use accounts for less than 10 percent of total water consumption, but is a growing concern as underdeveloped countries urbanize.

China has roughly 22 percent of the world's human population but access to only 8 percent of the world's renewable fresh water. China's urban population uses approximately 220 liters per day per person for personal use, over 10 times that of the rural population. From 1978 to 2004, China's urbanization rate grew to 41.8 percent from 17.9 percent. By the middle of the century, urbanization rates are forecasted to rise to 75 percent. That being the case, China will have to make over 85 billion more liters of water accessible to urbanites per day. A difficult feat considering 400 of China's 660 major cities already suffer from insufficient water resources.

In 2001, the Rio Grande failed to reach the Gulf of Mexico; and due to damning and irrigation, other great rivers like the Colorado and the Yellow at times barely trickle into the ocean while the Mekong and the Nile are in future threat of encountering the same problem—What did the fish say when it ran into a wall... Dam! As a result, desertification is slowly claiming all the fertile lands in Egypt while the Gobi desert creeps at a rate of 3 kilometers per year towards Beijing—now only 160 kilometers away.


Sources

Where is Earth's Water located? USGS. January, 2007.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html

How Much Water is there on Earth? How Stuff Works. January, 2007. http://science.howstuffworks.com/question157.htm

World POPClock Projection. U.S. census Bureau. January, 2007.
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html

Specter, Michael. The Last Drop—Confronting the Possibility of a Global Catastrophe. The New Yorker. Oct. 23, 2006. Pages 60-71.

Livestock Water Use. USGS. January, 2007.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/chickenhouse.html

Livestock a Major Threat to Environment. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. January, 2007.
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html

Global Water Outlook to 2025: Averting an Impeding Crisis. International Food Policy Research Institute. January, 2007.
http://www.ifpri.org/media/water_countrydef.htm

Nation Sets Goals for Urban Water Consumption. China.Org.Cn. January, 2007.
http://www.china.org.cn/english/government/78565.htm

China, Canals & Coal. EcoWorld. January, 2007.
http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=347

China's Urbanization Encounters "Urban Disease." Chinanews.cn. January, 2007.
http://www.chinanews.cn/news/2005/2005-11-18/14441.html

Global Water Shortage Looms in New Century. Arizona Water Res. January, 2007.
http://cals.arizona.edu/AZWATER/awr/dec99/Feature2.htm

Vaknin, Sam. Who Owns the World's Water? The Progress Report. January, 2007.
http://www.progress.org/2005/water27.htm

China Faces Growing Water Shortage. World Politics Watch. January, 2007.
http://www.worldpoliticswatch.com/article.aspx?id=151

China's Season of Dust. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Unesco—The Courier. June, 2006.
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=33187&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html