I know we need to conserve water and such but why? Doesn’t it eventually flow back into the ground or evaporated and rained back down regardless of how it’s consumed, so it’s a cycle? Do we lose a bit per cycle?
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Its not water in general that we run the risk of running low on, its easily-accessible drinking water. There’s tons of water on the earth, but most of it is in a place that is not easily accessible or in a form that is not readily drinkable.
One reason that not all of the usable drinking water is being cycled back into the system is that we’re doing stupid stuff with it. For example in Texas they’re taking fresh drinking water out of the aquifers and then mixing it with a bunch of chemicals to make it undrinkable and injecting it into the ground to fracture the rocks to release natural gas deposits. We can’t get the majority of that water back and if we could it has been made toxic to humans. That means the water didn’t go back into the cycle to fall as rainfall and replenish the aquifer, removing it from the fresh water cycle that we rely on for drinking water.
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