True Blue....

A few weeks ago our good friend Aaron from One Drop posted a eye-opening blog about the future of water. Did you know that just like you can calculate your carbon footprint, you can now also caluculate your water footprint? We just did it this morning - the results are actually quite embarassing. Just like everyone else, before we didn't even consider how much water we were using & wasting. Now that we live in Guatemala, where clean drinking water, let alone running water in your home, is a luxury, it is a whole lot "easier" to keep ourselves in check by simply using the way locals do.

Recently we heard about a new documentary that premiered in 2008 at the Vancouver International Film Festival - Blue Gold: World Water Wars. Since we're not exactly in a place where we can get our hands on the latest and greatest, we haven't been able to see it, but are dying to do so as soon as we can. Have any of you seen or heard about it? What did you think? Is it going to be another An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore documentary on Global Warming that we love)? If you've got a copy and you're done viewing it, we'd love for you to share!

Below is some blog love for One Drop - thanks for bringing up something that has been on our minds lately too Aaron!

blue is the new green

i can't claim that phrase as my own - blue is the new green - but its something we've said around our office quite a bit lately. with all the attention given to the environmental or "green" movement over the past several years, it will probably be dwarfed by the attention that water will get over the next 10 years or so. This article seems to confirm that - A wake-up call on water use | csmonitor.com

in that article there is a link to a website that helps calculate your water footprint. i went through the extended calculator and was a bit shocked at how much water i use every year - about a half a million gallons. so in the course of two years i would go through this whole water tower:

what about you? what's your footprint? Do you think it matters?

its interesting to me that the meat products i eat account for almost more than my actual water consumption at my apartment. its crazy to think how its all connected - the energy and water to make the grain to feed the cows to run the slaughterhouse to transport it to the store to keep it in my freezer. its a kindof hard for me to think about how my consumption here affects people in developing countries, but when you start connecting all the dots it really does make sense. and talking about water being put to good use - Healing Waters International just crossed a significant milestone- 75 million gallons of safe drinking water distributed to the poor! so to put that in perspective - it would almost fill the rose bowl (which holds 84 million gallons).

i know that interesting fact thanks to the LA county wastewater website (which also informed me that if all LA's wastewater was diverted there it would fill in 3.8 hours. now that would be a disgusting sight!)

i'll finish with a bit more of a pleasant thought -this all reminds me of a bumper sticker i used to have on my VW bus - "Live simply so that others may simply live"