Water: The Hidden Cost of Your Food and Drink
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 08.21.08
Yet more wonderful photographs in the Guardian, in a photo essay showing how much water is used for everything from pigs to tea. It is part of a series on water, including an excellent article on water footprints and an editorial that concludes that "All of us need to apply as much rigour to reducing our water footprint as we have begun belatedly to apply to the reduction of our carbon one." ::Guardian
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It's neat to see how much water is used for things that we don't even think about, but this doesn't very well stregthen the conservation argument. Most of the water they are talking about is rain water. Even for the livestock, they say that most of the water being talked about is for feed. Most irrigation water in ag is pond, lake or river water. So, it's neat to see how much water is used, but it's mostly rain water. If the crops weren't there to soak it up other plants would be.
Thanks for sharing this, water is an important, and increasingly so, consideration.
Meanwhile, a very simple and educational way to offset your carbon footprint while at your computer is www.gogreentube.com Basically, it's a green video hub where every video you watch while logged in, you offset a pound of carbon. It's a newer site, but I'm noticing increasing content every week, and they're going to add these cool community components to it soon.