People who have lived in Colorado their entire lives, such as myself, often take the water resources of this state for granted. We water our lawns at noon, run the tap while we’re waiting for the water to cool down or while we’re brushing our teeth, and generally take all the fresh water we use for granted (and I’m sure Coloradans aren’t the only ones).
Does it strike anyone else as wrong that we use potable water to flush our toilets? To water our lawns? I don’t mean to sound (too) patronizing, because I’m just as guilty of these things as nearly every other American, but we are all incredibly privileged and most of us don’t even realize it (myself included).
Why don’t we do something about this, like use gray water to water our lawns and flush our toilets? I suspect there are two reasons. First, we just don’t really think about it a lot of the time. It’s just how it is, and we take the status quo for granted. Second, it really would take an extraordinary amount of infrastructure (re)development to re-route gray water from your shower drain to your toilet. Right now, we just don’t have the infrastructure or the will to do it.
It will probably take a significant water crisis, maybe on an order of magnitude similar to the Dust Bowl, to convince us that it’s silly to keep wasting all this fresh water.
Speaking of the Dust Bowl, I live on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, which means I also live on the east side of the Continental Divide. In Colorado, 80% of our rain falls on the west side of the Continental Divide, and only 20% on the east side. So, a significant amount more water flows down the west side of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean than down the east side of the Rockies, to the Atlantic.
But eastern Colorado is where the vast majority of the farming in Colorado is done, because that’s where all those “fruited plains” are. In the early stages of Colorado’s settlement this wasn’t a problem, but during the Dust Bowl, farmers east of the Continental Divide (not just in Colorado) began to covet all that wonderful fresh water out west that they couldn’t use.
So began a little public works project called the Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C-BT). It was authorized in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and completed almost 20 years later. Upon completion, the project supplied fresh water to 33 cities, including Fort Collins, Boulder, Greeley, Loveland, and Estes Park, as well as farming in 7 Colorado counties. It includes 10 reservoirs, 18 dams and dykes, six hydroelectric power plants, and the Alva B. Adams tunnel.
The technical skill and perseverance required to build the entire C-BT project, and the Alva B. Adams tunnel in particular, continues to astonish me (remember, this was 70 years ago). The tunnel is 13 miles long and goes all the way under the Continental Divide and Rocky Mountain National Park. It was built from 1940 to 1944, in the middle of a world war. Much of the impetus for its construction was the hardship suffered by Americans, farmers in particular, during the Dust Bowl.
If this astonishingly hot, dry summer (and a little report from the UN) are any indication, Climate Change is here to stay. Ignoring it will not make it go away, despite what certain politicians seem to believe. Colorado, as well as much of America’s farmland, has faced drought conditions every summer for the past several years, and we desperately need to save as much clean water as we can for its best possible uses. (I’ll give you a hint – it’s not to flush your toilet.)
We need another large-scale water project. This time not to build dams, reservoirs, and tunnels, but to make more efficient use of the water we have. The Federal government can’t even find the political will necessary to pass a budget without shutting down the government, let alone undertake the massive infrastructure investment that would be required to mitigate another Dust-Bowl-like drought. We need that kind of investment to do things like re-route gray water from our shower and sink drains to our toilet bowls and lawns.
I’m afraid we might end up waiting for another Dust Bowl before we do what’s necessary.
This post was inspired in part by my newly begun master’s studies in Agricultural and Resource Economics, where I recently took a tour of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District (NCWCD) headquarters. The NCWCD is responsible for administering the water resources for northeastern Colorado, including the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.
September 4, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Reblogged this on evolvESustain.
September 6, 2012 at 12:05 am
During drought conditions here in San Diego, the water districts have an interesting motto: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” The first time I heard that I nearly died.
I’ve been a conservationist since before it was wise, or even though of, as a way to be. My wise old grandmother used to chastise us all the time after leaving the water running, or the lights on, and would follow us around the house turning things off that we had left on. By the time I had graduated from high school in 1973, I knew how to conserver anything and everything.
September 8, 2012 at 12:22 pm
If only more Americans had been raised the way you were. Water in this country is so cheap that it’s not surprising that many people don’t really consider how valuable it is.
September 8, 2012 at 9:45 am
Great post! This building at Stanford ought to be a role model for new or renovated business/industrial/university buildings in Colorado: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/march5/y2e2-energy-030508.html
September 12, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Well said. I have seen plumbing that will take shower drainage water and redirect into the toilet water supply. And, I did see where Bill Gates has a challenge for contestants to design a scalable waterless toilet for dry African and other regions. They had a few winners, but the key is to make them affordable. Water is the new oil and we cannot waste it. Frackers fighting with farmers over water. Water has to be considered in any eco-energy plan. Thanks for highlighting.
October 23, 2012 at 4:01 pm
I’m currently reading “Blue Gold: the Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water”, and I agree with you that no one will take action until there are some very obvious, measurable, in-your-face adverse consequences affecting the uppoer middle class and the wealthy. There are already multitudes of small-scale and large-scale water crises all over the world; millions of people have died because they don’t have access to clean water, because their settlement happened to be in the way of a new dam project, or because their local food supply was decimated due to water diverted for irrigation of industrial farms.
As long as the wealthy continue receiving almost free, subsidized municipal water, they will continue to water the golf courses instead of preserving this precious resource. They will also continue their so-far-successful attempts to classify water as a commodity as opposed to a human right, so they may proceed with selling it for a profit.
On a more positive note, there are many things we can do today to preserve the water. Personally, I stopped watering the lawn and can’t wait to install this sink on all my toilets soon – http://www.squidoo.com/ToiletSinkCombo.
October 25, 2012 at 1:30 pm
Anna! Hi! I’m going to assume this is the Anna I know, because I think the odds are pretty astronomically tiny that there are two Anna K.s that read my blog…
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I can only hope that an Obama re-election will ensure that we have a favorable voice in government on issues like this. But after listening to his debates and the near-complete lack of so much as a mention of climate change and environmental concerns, I’m feeling a little less hopeful.
October 23, 2013 at 12:54 am
I’m fanatic about turning lights off, and that kind of thing. Water conservation not so much, but then the rain is pounding against my windows (again!) so it’s always “someone else’s problem”.
It always amazes me that with the brains and resources we have at our disposal we can’t make better use of our world, and treat her more kindly.
October 23, 2013 at 11:07 am
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m bad about letting the water run when I don’t need to. With things like potable water in our toilets, that’s not even something that we can really prevent, short of spending tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit our homes. We need to get some tax incentives for projects like this, but sadly it seems we lack the political will in the Western world.