Modern Culture and Water

ANT160-001Cultural Diversity in the Modern World

Robert Whittington 4/11/2012

Water use in the United States Water is the single most important substance for life but many people today in the United States take for granted their easy access to clean water. There is no aspect of our lives that water does not play some role in either directly or indirectly. There is an alarming trend in how the Unites States population uses its water; this trend is the excessive miss use of water through the public and private sectors. This paper is going to focus on three key questions that arise when looking at water use in the United States. Where is our water coming from and how much is left? How does the United States population use water and how much of it is wasted? Can the current trends of water use be stainable in the long run? These are the questions that will be addressed in this paper. Where the United States gets its Water Where the United States gets its water can be broken into two categories ground water and surface water. Surface water sources are ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and artificial collection basins. The United States population two hundred and seventy billion gallons a day from these surface sources. Most of the United States has an ample supply of surface water with its roughly thirty major rivers, five great lakes and a near countless number of tributaries and minor lakes. Even with this vast water network there is still a notable region without adequate access to them. A map of the river and lakes along with this notable area can be seen in appendix one. Ground water sources are simply aquifers, large bodies of trapped water below the surface. The United States is also rich in ground water resources, having many large aquifers such as the Ogallala under the central planes, Edwards under central Taxes, and Mahomet under Illinois.

The United States population withdraws seventy-nine billion gallons a day of ground water from these aquifers. Locations of aquifers can be seen on the map in appendices two. Water use in the United States The United States population uses three hundred and forty-nine billion gallons of water a day. This is a tremendous amount of water roughly equivalent to 1.58 cubic kilometers in volume. This volume comes from two types of sources, surface water and ground water. Surface water in the United States is by far the most used source accounting for two hundred and seventy billion gallons a day. Ground water usage is much less than that of surface water only accounting for seventy-nine billion gallons a day. Though the ground water usage is much lower than that of surface water, it has a much more prolific effect on the United States water supply. This is due to the extreme difference in how quickly water can be replaced in each of these systems. The United States population water usage can be broken down into five main categories; thermoelectric power, irrigation, industrial, public supply, and loss through crumbling supply pipes. The largest use of water in the United States by far is for thermoelectric power accounting for about forty-nine percent of our total water use or two hundred and one billion gallons (Kenny,39). Thermoelectric power uses a burning fuel source to heat water and turn it into steam which runs through a steam turbine which powers a generator and in turn produces electricity. The water used in these systems is either emitted into the atmosphere in the form of steam or is condensed back into a liquid and returned back to the water body. Where above ground water is used such as rivers and

streams this is also a large concern for what is known as thermal pollution, which can drastically affect the ecosystems of these rivers and streams. Looking past this aspect the sheer volume of water use has become a large problem in recent times due to factors such as population growth and population location. The problem is that there are large populations requiring vast amounts of electricity in areas where there is little water available for this consumption rate. An example of this is in Los Angles, California where there is an extremely large population with little available fresh surface water. In the cases study Water in California: A Case Study in Federalism Megan goes over the miss allocation of water within the state causing a strong competition between water demands in the area (Mullin, 1-2), which force the Los Angeles Department of water and power to use ground water and storing of water during non-peak times to supplement its needs to supply power in its natural gas power plants (Willam).This practice of storing water at non-peak times will become a large problem once the populations demand on water supply requires this same process, causing the thermoelectric to rely on another mans of getting cooling water. This is also discuss in Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley. With this use of the ground water which is already be taxed by the local agricultural and utilities of California become a large problem. This problem is being address currently by the Colorado River Aqueduct which divers a large portion of the Colorado River to the southern California area. This can be seen in appendix three. This is not a solution to the problem because this diversion of water is reaching its limits of supplying water to southern California.

The next largest use of water in the United States is the agricultural industry in particular the irrigation of crops. In the United States we use one hundred and twenty eight billion gallons of water a day in irrigation of crops (Kenny, 24). While this use of water is a very important one in sustaining the United States food supply, many of the practices used in irrigation are extremely wasteful. The problem is that in the United States the majority of crops are grown in the Midwest, an area that is not conducive to low water farming. The Midwest has low rainfall, high evaporation rate, and does not have prevalent surface water supplies to manage. While these factors add up to an unfavorable place to grow crops, there are two reasons that the United States does grow there and they are that the area is extremely flat and there is a large ground water source to exploit, i.e. the Ogallala aquifer. According to Ramon Llamos the Ogallala aquifer is being pumped at fourteen times the rate at which it can be replenished (Llamos, 262-264). Growing of crops in this environment requires nearly constant irrigation of the fields; many of the farms of the Midwest use what is known as Center pivot irrigation. This method is where a well is drilled into an aquifer and water is pumped out through an overhead sprinkler system along a quarter mile long pipe that pivots around the well site. These are what produce the green crop circles visible as you fly over the Midwest. This can be seen in appendix four. Since this system uses overhead sprinkler systems the water used is extremely susceptible to evaporation. The extreme volumes of water that is taken form the underling aquifer has many long-term affects that will be discuses later in this paper. Unfortunately aquifers are sometimes managed (or perhaps more accurately, not managed) with little thought to the future consequences and foregone opportunities (Llamos, 262).

The third largest use of water in the United States if the is for public water supply. The United States uses forty-four billion two hundred million gallons a day accounting for roughly eleven percent of the total water usage in the United States (Unknown, 17). This is the largest direct use of water that most people experience every day. Public water supply is the water that you drink, use for sanitation, wash vehicles in, water lawns, etc Many people do not think about or care about how much water they use in a day which leads to many wasteful practices. On average every person in the United States uses ninety-nine gallons a day (Kenny, 17). When comparing this to the averages of other countries the United States uses the most and more than double that of seventy percent of the other countries. In recent years the US has started to try to lessen each persons water footprint by implementing water saving devices such as the low flow toilets and efficient shower heads. This has almost leveled out the public water supply usage between the years of two thousand and thousand and five. This focus on saving water that each person uses in a day is a step in the right direction but the effect that is has is the total water use of the united States is quite small considering how much water the top water uses use. The fourth largest use of water in the United States is for Industrial applications. This accounts for eighteen billion two hundred million gallons per day or roughly five percent of total water use (Kenny, 33). Industrial water use includes water used for such purposes as fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, or transporting a product; incorporating water into a product; or for sanitation needs within the manufacturing facility. Some industries that use large amounts of water produce such commodities as food, paper, chemicals, refined petroleum, or primary metals.

(Unknown, 1) Every product that you use in a day uses water weather it looks like it does or not. Some of the largest uses of water in the industrial field are in the production of cotton clothing and paper. The paper industry uses on average twelve thousand gallons of water per ton of product (Unknown 2,1) and the United States produces two hundred and thirty thousand tone of paper products a day. These are thing that people dont consider when they are thinking about how much water they use and can often rival the amount used in public water supply. The fifth largest use of water is not really a use but strictly a waste; it is the loss of water transported through water supply infrastructure. The United States has the largest water supply infrastructure in the world. The problem is that much of this was built before or immediately after World War two. Many if not most of the major supply lines are severely leaking while this generally does not affect the water quality it however does waste a lot of treated fresh drinking water. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that seven billion gallons of water is lost each day to this crumbling infrastructure (Unknown, 1). This only accounts for two percent of the water usage in the United States; however unlike the aforementioned water uses this one is strictly a waste, serving no purpose. This is not just a problem of water loss but the security of the United States drinking water. The ASCE estimates that it would cost more than eleven billion dollars to just replace the pipes that are near the end of their useful life (Unknown 1, 1) Water sustainability in the United States Can the current trends of water use in the United States be sustainable? This is a heard question to answer due to the complexity of the answer needed to fully represent

what is happening. The sustainability of the United States water supply can only be determined at locations not as a whole since there are locations that can sustain their water use and others that cannot. For each area it is a balance between the available water, be it surface water or ground water, the rate at which that water is replenished and how much is being used. There are two major areas that are positioned to be in a serious water supply issue in the future, the central planes and California. In the central planes there is a low population which puts little stress on their water supply. However in this case much of the population is cultivating large farms which demand large quantities of water to irrigate these fields. Due to the scarcity of surface water in the area the farming community has begun to exploit the underling Ogallala aquifer. This exploitation its self does not make it unsustainable until you take into account how much water is actually being taken out compared to the aquifers recharge rate, currently it the water is being removed at fourteen time the rare at which it is being recharged. This gross miss uses of water is only accelerated by the wasteful center pivot irrigation in this extremely low precipitation environment. This can be seen in appendix five. Unfortunately when this area begins to experience the severe water problems it will not just be a local problem but a national on since much of the United States food is grown there. In California the problem of water sustainably is mainly in the southern sections of the state. In southern California there are three major consumers of water; utility water supply, hydrothermal power supply and agriculture. Southern California has very little in the way of water supply and has drawn its water from outside of its borders, this severely limits the amount of water that the is location can receive. This problem is being handled by the federal and states governments along with the Los Angeles

Department of water and power to mitigate the effect that the fifteen million people in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles feel. Looking at the United States as a whole there are several parts of the country are consuming water much faster than could ever be sustained, while much of the county is actually using water in amounts that could be sustainable. Even though much of the county is not currently having problems with water sustainability they soon could be. With the current Unites States population growth projections showing close to thirty-five percent population gain over the next fifty years many areas will find it much harder to only withdraw a sustainable amount of water. Conclusion In conclusion the United States water uses is dominated by five main uses thermoelectric, irrigation, public water supply, industrial processes, and finally loss through crumbling supply pipes. These processes use vast quantities of water which is collected from surface water sources, which are far more stainable than the water collected for aquifers. However the vast portion of irrigation is done with ground water in areas where the environment makes these activates extremely wasteful. The United States water consumption as a hole is currently stainable though several places are already felling the problems associated with not sustainable using water. While others will possible begin feeling theses same effects quite soon with the increasing population of the United States.

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

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Appendix 3

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Appendix 4

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Appendix 5

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Bibliography

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William L. Kahrl, 1982. Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley. University of California Pr.

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