Last week, at dinner with friends, I was asked, “are people really aware of water?” I looked around the table, at untouched—and unasked for—water glasses filled to the brim and covered with condensation, and gave them my best answer….
“No.”
When you’re knee-deep in a profession, it’s easy to forget that the concerns and crisis that you deal with on a daily basis are virtually invisible to the rest of the world. Sure, everyone knows water is precious and scarce. Some people know it can be expensive or destructive or unreliable—especially when a water main break shuts down a major thoroughfare and cuts off water service to an entire block—but they still blithely plunk down $3 for a liter of water while complaining about the high price of gas ($3 a gallon in California).
It’s a lack of situational awareness and an inability to really see the big picture. That’s where efforts like WaterSense, Waterfootprint.org, and even promotions like National Irrigation Month and World Water Day are important. The challenge is to find a balance between education and information overload. Talk too much about water conservation, and eventually the public will tune you out—especially when the tap still flows cheaply and easily. But operating in a vacuum is not the solution: Implementing water resource management programs and enforcing water efficiency regulations and restrictions without public outreach can—and often does—backfire. Just ask the city of Atlanta, which is still cleaning up its water meter PR fiasco. Or take a look at the current anti-AMR “grassroots” campaign percolating in northern California. Acting with perceived impunity often only makes matters worse.
So what do you think? How can we strike a balance between too much and not enough information? Is it folly to attempt to create a water efficiency partnership between water users and water purveyors? And how can we make more folks aware of the real costs—and real risks—associated with water resource management?