I saw an ad for being vegan saying either don’t flush your toilet for 6 months, don’t shower for 3 months or don’t eat a burger once. But isn’t all of our water basically renewable and no matter if we do any of these things, it just goes back into the water cycle and we’ll reuse it eventually, even if we have to clean it somehow? What’s the big deal?
In: Earth Science
Alright let me try at this. You have the water the cow drinks. Thousands of gallons in it’s life. The water it takes to grow it’s food, again thousands of gallons. The thousands of gallons the farmer uses on the farm to clean anything. The tens of gallons used in the trucks to haul the cattle from the farm to the auction house to the butcher(if not shipped directly). The cleaning process before butchering (depending on even religious doctrines might use more or way less). The cleaning process after butchering. Then again the truck that brings to the store. So they add up the “calculated” amount and divide by the average size of a burger patty.
The key insight here is the *rate* of renewability of water.
For the forseeable future, there will always be water. And there will always be ways that purify water, both by natural means and industrial means. So there’s no real threat of water itself permanently running out forever, like the problem is with, say, fossil fuels. But the *rate* at which the renewing process happens is what’s bottlenecking us.
You could live in a world where there was infinite coffee grounds for everyone to make coffee out of to drink, but if you only have a handful of coffee machines to pass it through, you’d still be limited despite having access to theoretically infinite coffee.
So while 1,300 gallons of water for a hamburger patty sounds like whatever since water is (functionally) infinite and fresh water is renewable, it would become a real problem if you only had access to a billion gallons of water per day, and a million people wanted a McDonald’s hamburger every day.
If you think the threat of using up the entire flow of fresh water isn’t a real problem, consider the Colorado River. That’s the mighty river that cut out the Grand Canyon over millions of years. It used to flow all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But nowadays, it just dries up before it ever makes it there, because so much water is being pumped out of it to irrigate crops. Drying up entire rivers of fresh water is clearly not beyond our capabilities because we’ve done it already.
The call to action in these ads is suggesting that if we do what we can to cut out some of the largest water usage offenders, namely raising livestock for slaughter, we’d free up our limited supply of renewing fresh water to be put to use for other purposes. Or preferably, left alone entirely to allow nature to take its course with it so we don’t end up with ecological disasters.
It means if you’re hitting the bean dagger without a fork you’re going to be spinning on the side of the hohaw without a paddle or any other means of transportation
Cows are usually raised where water is available. If it is not in abundance then that is on the farmer. You don’t grow weed in the desert You shouldn’t raise cattle either.
It’s only really a concern in places that don’t get a lot of rainfall and depend on irrigation most of the year to water crops etc.
In these places it’s a limited resource and you have to choose carefully how to use it.
Like others have mentioned water is renewable but also limited in how fast the natural water cycle renew enough fresh clean water for human consumption.
Also due to climate change, some regions are starting to get less rain and causing drought and water rationing to cities.
You can Google “clean water crisis” to read more about it.
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