Water Water Neverywhere

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(Image CC-by-NC-3.0, GFDL-1.2)

You don’t often see an online headline like “Thirsty West: Why Californians Will Soon Be Drinking Their Own Pee.” Okay, you probably would never have seen it had Slate not explored the topic a couple of day’s ago. The article focuses on the California drought and how the state is attempting to cope with it. In San Diego, for example, which gets almost all of its water from snow melt and the much-contended-for Colorado River, they are now building a $1 billion dollar desal plant. If and when finished, it will supply just seven percent of the area’s water needs. That seems ridiculous, opines author Eric Holthaus. He goes on to note that recycling wastewater is a much more efficient way of increasing available potable water.

Eric then cites National Journal regarding one of the major obstacles to the recycling approach:

The problem with recycled water is purely psychological. Despite the fact the water is safe and sterile, the “yuck factor” is hard to get over, even if a person understands that the water poses no harm. In one often-cited experiment, researchers poured clean apple juice into a clean bedpan, and asked participants if they’d be comfortable drinking the apple juice afterwards. Very few of the participants agreed, even though there was nothing wrong with it. It’s forever associated with being “dirty,” just like recycled wastewater.

To demonstrate how silly this fear can be, Holthaus points out how the city of Portland (Oregon) nearly drained a 38 million gallon reservoir because one teenager was caught whizzing into it. His article ends with this line: “If the West wants to get serious about water, there are many things they can start doing right away, like drinking their own pee.”

I think we can safely substitute “world” for “West” in that sentence. Water, as you may rarely think about, is that clear, pellucid (great word!), transparent fluid that forms the streams, lakes, oceans, and rain. It is the major constituent of the fluids of living things. We can’t survive without it and yet we treat it, ironically perhaps, like dirt. As National Geographic observes, we waste tremendous amounts of clean water, especially in the developed world. One hamburger, for example, takes 630 gallons to produce. By 2025, NG posits, two-thirds of the global population will be living in water-stressed areas. (See the publication’s Freshwater Stories website for more info.)

Fortunately, we don’t have to build any huge facilities to start saving water by imbibing our own urine. (Remember that old phrase for taking a leak: “Making water”? Boy, is that coming back to haunt us!) To solve the shortage, we just need stillsuits, those geeky latex full-body personal recycling outfits from the science fiction world of Dune. The way things are going we may end up there. So I guess it’s not too early to start thinking about rubberizing our wardrobes. If this makes us all look as good as Julie Newmar or Michelle Pfeiffer or yes, even Halle Berry did as Catwoman and keeps us from a pandemic of terminal dry mouth, I’m all for it.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings