Water For the Future

I’m going to try to get my blog started again with things that are going on in my life right now.

One of those things is the Climate Justice event put on by the United Methodist Women’s mission u last month. And one of the topics that hit me hard, because I now live in water challenged Arizona, was our overuse of water as a country.

While we are already experiencing water shortages and contaminated groundwater, it is estimated that between two and seven billion people will face water shortages by 2050. Many of us will not be here by then. Our grandchildren will have to deal with the problem. Are we willing to do a few simple things to help them now?

Because I live in an apartment, I concentrated this time on what we can do inside the house. Actually, I hope we are already doing most of these, and I’m sure you can think of others, but let’s remind ourselves of a few simple steps.

We can turn off the water while brushing our teeth.

Showers take less water than baths (unless we take long soaks in the downpour). We can enhance our savings by getting wet, turning off the shower, lathering up, and turning on the shower to rinse. I have the shower running about three minutes doing this.

We can run the washing machine only when we have a full load, and use the reduced load settings when we need to run it less than full.

Used properly, and only run when it is full, the dishwasher uses less water than handwashing. However, that means we don’t use gallons of water rinsing and preparing dishes for the dishwasher. Instead, we can soak or rinse them using the same water in a container several times. Some dishwashers can handle dishes without rinsing at all, only scraping. If we do hand wash, don’t run the water constantly. Use a pan or sink of soapy water and another of rinse water or wash all the dishes before turning on the water to rinse them.

Keep drinking water in the refrigerator rather than running it from the tap to get cold every time we take a drink.

Get food from the freezer early enough to thaw in the refrigerator rather than thawing it under running water.

We can run the tap water only as fast as necessary to wash our hands and for other incidental uses.

Perhaps you can think of other things to add. If so, leave them in a comment. I plan to start using a bucket to catch the shower water while it is warming up and using that water to water plants and flush my toilet.

 An African proverb says: “Many little people, in many little places, taking many little steps, can change the face of the world.”