6. Go vegan...80% of wheat and 90% of soy produced in this country goes to feed animals instead of people. So all that water used in agriculture is wasted on a luxury good...meat. Imagine how many people we could feed with the soy/wheat we currently give to animals, and imagine the water that would be saved if we rid ourselves of animal agriculture (which in and of itself utilizes so much water and contaminates local water suppplies everyday).

Then we would all be depressed from such boring eating. Beyond the polluting part, how exactly is water wasted? It doesn't just disappear. If we can control the pollution is water a real worry?

Vegan food can be far from boring.

Water in food is not wasted - water that does not get used to help plants and animals grow or stay health is wasted( ie there are inefficiencies in how the water is used by farmers/etc in the agriculture business)

Making the statement "this sector pays minimal water bills" is fairly stunned - do you want farmers to pay more for water because that means food will cost more. Helping farmers learn about water efficiency and supporting them is a much better way to get the message across.

Oh and then there is the behaviour of destroying some of the best farmland near cities to make suburban developments. Instead of forcing developers to place suburbia on top of scrub land that will not sustain decent farms.

Sorry "Now" writer Wayne Roberts but you frigging urban centric magazine obviously doesn't think about farming very much (or even close to well thought out).

Oh and the absolutely driven vegan/vegitarian slant to that article turns it from a discussion about water and farming into a discussion about the bad "meat-centric" food choices people make.

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Water is the ultimate in recyclable material( unless it is absolutely bound into a solid) water can be cleaned and returned to the earth, but we have to make an effort to give the whole world clean water.

Realistically if we want to slow global warming we will have to take a great deal of H20 out of the oceans. The lessening of the salt ratio in sea water has a vast affect on ocean currents, which affects global weather, which ... well the cascading effect is pretty vast.

water is 100% recyclable. you can not waste or destroy water.

however no one commenting here seems to realize the cost of getting the water to farmlands. the monetary cost of building irrigation and the environmental costs of diverting water from natural cycles.

regarding, "Realistically if we want to slow global warming we will have to take a great deal of H20 out of the oceans." that is probably the best point made during that rant because, if we allow water to make its natural cycle through our environment a lot more of it will be out of the ocean and used by natural ecosystems.

so please there is no point in being rude. no one is trying to offend you. And before you accuse someone of not thinking something through think it through yourself.

Barnaby - the "Now" writer is trying to offend - he's just trying to be politically correct about it.

It's not an op-ed piece, it's a listed on their website as a "news feature" so he's hiding "go vegan/vegitarian" and fear-mongering "water is scarse" slants behind "farming takes up 93% of the water".

Water by itself is not scarce - human consumable "clean" water and the required political willpower to produce more "clean" water is scarce.

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Furthermore I did think it through; I thought - this a repoter - ie he is a professional who is paid not only to write but to think and write well. I even thought about being a little more polite in my original post then I decided that the "article" deserved an unkind rant.

If this document was written by an unpaid amateur or classified as an op-ed piece, then I would have been much gentler.

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Water can be destroyed - the seperation of water into hydrogen and oxygen so that the hydrogen can be used as a fuel is considered destruction of water.

Clean (human consumable) water is wasted everyday in most developed nations.

OMG!!! yall should be ashamed! Troll u have no idea a) what Wayne Roberts intentions are, and b) obviously have no idea who Wayne Roberts is. He's written many books, is on several city advisories, has run multiple green community organizatiosn for ages,and sorry doods but he is knowlegable especially when it comes to food and food scarcity issues.

and the bottom line is that meat especially the way north americans gorge on it is not sustainable. perioid. and yes it uses a sick amount of water. and no he never says go vegan in fact if you knew Wayne you would know that he advocates a change in diest but not necessarily vegetarian or vegan, just sane, i.e. no 16OZ steaks but 1 oz in stirfry like in asia... or is thattoo boring mr. troll, i mean mr jilted...

sheesh talk about taking something perosnally. What wayne is talking about there is true. and yes there is a lot of water on the planet. Freshwatre? Hardly. we're running out of that stuff like mad (some say there's even a war going on now all because of freshwater). And yes there are advancements in desalination but you're kidding yourself if you think that we can ramp up an infrastructure as quickly as is needed, we can't even deal with major cities waste water infrastructure...

dismiss dismiss dismiss, i guess its easier than actually eductaing yoursel!

[quote]Water can be destroyed - the seperation of water into hydrogen and oxygen so that the hydrogen can be used as a fuel is considered destruction of water.[/quote]Yes but when its used, ie burned, it makes water again.

Er we CAN deal with major city waste, it's a matter of money and politics. Look who is taking it personally, calm the hell down. Freshwater may become scarce, when it does we will then start actually conserving and cleaning the water, and desalinizing. WE are a reactive society, not proactive.

I dunno Jilt-- i was at a major infrastructure conference a year ago with heads of most east coast cities, and you could see the beads of sweat rolling down everyiones forhead as they talked about the insane costs to repair overburdened 100+ year old systems that were never meant ot carry as much water on a daily basis. so yes, anything is doable with enough money, but have you considered what the cost is to repair these crumbling infrastruictures, cause teh sweaty nervous guys i watched who had to deal with these issues, not just pontificate, they certainly were aware. and nervous as heck.

thanks for telling me to calm down and all, but no im not takingit personally, i just think its pathetic to watch people say what a stranger's raison d'etre was when they have no clue, and worse yet when they are taking (esp. the diet aspects) totally personally. and thank you but since i am advocating a turn towards a more sane amount of meat eating, while personally i think it's gross, um means at least im being pragmatic, cause if it was personally id tell you all the gory details i have about slaughterhouses jilt. Besides, your rancor is crappy flamebait.

...and if you have to ask "how exactly is the water wasted" Nyou have not been doing your homework at all, Mr. Citizen.

bonus question: where's the Ogallala Aquifer at these days??

water is indeed a scrcity. although abundant in our natural ecosystem, water is not prevalent in a usable form and is most ceratinly NOT equally distributed. as we add billions of people to the earth the strain on this the most valuable resource only increases. if water is indeed wasted everyday in developing nations, needent we take steps towards sustainability in nations where we have the option, therefore leading the way for those less educated?