The Water Issue

This Is A Turn Off: The GOOD Guide to Reducing Your Water Use

Siobhan O'Connor — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:01:00 PDT

We use more water than we need. Here's how to reduce your water footprint to fewer than 75 gallons per day. Read the introduction below or jump straight to sections on using less water in the bathroom, outdoors, and in the kitchen.

According to UNICEF, humans need about five gallons of clean water a day to survive.

In America, we can easily use 400 gallons per household, per day. That's two to three times more water as other developed nations. With landscape irrigation estimated at more than 7 billion gallons per day, the per capita numbers get even crazier. Why? Much of our waste stems from unsustainable planning and policies and a deep sense of entitlement: we want what we want when and where we want it. We grow crops and build cities on former deserts that require irrigation, which means diverting water from streams and rivers. And that much ballyhooed corn-based ethanol requires approximately 1,700 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced. Which means that even our great green gas isn't water efficient.

But it's not just big business and government that are to blame. We live in bigger houses than Europeans, drive bigger cars, have more clothes that need frequent washing in water-guzzling machines, and we pitch too many things into the trash instead of fixing them. All of this uses lots of water.

So while the public looks optimistically to the current administration for cues, it's a little busy, and we can't hire a lobbyist to rewrite U.S. water policy. What we can do is make some important choices. All it takes is a little bit of thought.

Why 75?

A few words about the number: We do not expect very many of you to convert your toilet into a compost bin with a seat on it, nor will we ask you to forgo your daily shower. However, the average American uses more than 151 gallons of water per day. And there are a lot of Americans. In the spirit of a slightly more equitable use of resources, we're asking you to turn off the tap.

We realize that the idea of halving your water use might deter too many of you. If you want to go crazy, we applaud you (and please let us know how it goes). If you want to start with baby steps, see what you can do about getting it down to 75. Once you realize how easy that can be, add on some other steps.

To help guide the transition, here are some explanations of where you're unknowingly hogging water, home hacks you can perform, and tips that might force you to alter your daily rituals, but won't have you living like a woodsman. Good luck!

Conventional Gallons, By Use*

Toilet: 3.5 to 6 gallons per flush for a conventional toilet

Shower: 2.5 to 4 gallons per minute for a conventional shower head

Bath: Up to 60 gallons per bath based on standard tub size, full

Dishwasher: 4 gallons per load if it is Energy Star rated, 6 gallons without

Running faucet: 2 to 7 gallons per minute for a conventional faucet

Watering your lawn: 5 to 10 gallons per minute for a running hose

*Water flow depends on your water pressure, obviously. These numbers reflect conventional water use and conventional tub and sink sizes, on average, without aerators, low-flow attachments, etc.

Take action! Read more from the Good Guide to Reducing Your Water Use:

Part 1: The Bathroom

Part 2: Outdoors

Part 3: The Kitchen

Americans vs. Europeans The average per-capita water use in the United States is 151 gallons per person per day-more than any other country in the world. The French, for example, get by on 71 apiece. The British, a paltry 37.

Ocean Motion

GOOD — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:00:00 PDT

Not all hydroelectric power has to come from dams.

Today, about 20 percent of the world’s power is hydroelectric. Nearly all of that water-generated energy is made by forcing rivers to flow through dams. But rivers make up just a small percentage of the water in the world. The ocean, however, occupies two-thirds of the Earth’s surface and is constantly moving. That motion can spin turbines to create power, the ocean is full of potential energy just waiting to be tapped.

Waves
The first major “wave farm” opened in Aguçadoura Wave Park off the coast of Portugal last year. Made up of worm-shaped devices that generate energy from the up-and-down motion of the waves, the farm produces enough energy to power 1,500 houses in Portugal with only three wave-energy devices (expansion is planned). Other wave parks, off the coasts of Scotland and Oregon, for example, are still in the planning stages.

Tides
Early tidal power functioned the same as damming rivers, and could seriously damage to the environment. Today, tidal power operates much the same as wind power, creating power as tides push water back and forth past a turbine. Tidal-power generation of this sort was tested successfully with six turbines in New York’s East River, and may soon start appearing in other rivers around the world.

Currents
The Gulf Stream flows at a rate of 8 billion gallons per minute—50 times more than all of the rivers in the world put together. Researchers at the Center for Ocean Energy Technology in Florida are working on a prototype turbine sturdy enough to withstand the rough underwater conditions, which they hope to test by this fall, though full-scale power generation could be as much as a decade away.

LEARN MORE Check out GOOD’s interview with Matthew Simmons, an oil investor turned wave-energy advocate here.

Wave Goodbye

GOOD — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:00:03 PDT

Matt McClain, a veteran surfer and environmentalist, looks back at his first love.

I was initially drawn to the ocean by the lure of waves. My youth was spent waiting for those moments when storms would send thick gray slabs marching down the coast, stacked upon one another like corduroy, all the way to the horizon. When the waves came, my desire to ride them eclipsed everything else in my life. School, work, family, and relationships all took a backseat. And though I'm sure those closest to me were not always happy about it, they all appeared to understand my obsession well enough to live with it.

The feeling of catching and riding a wave is something I lack the profundity to articulate to anyone who hasn't done it. Emotionally, it spans the gamut from pure joy to absolute horror. Then there is the physical challenge-every break, every swell, every wave is different. Add to that the ephemeral nature of tides and weather and the variables become too great to calculate. In the most simplistic terms, the act of surfing can be defined as going from a static state to trying to catch and literally ride a pulse of energy.

Perhaps it is for this reason that despite our petty squabbles over equipment and territory, we surfers consider ourselves a tribe apart from the planet's inhabitants who do not surf. There is something at the core; a shared experience among surfers, no matter where they are or what their level or ability.

Eventually, I began to see beyond the waves. I became aware of how much of a role the ocean played not just in my own existence, but in the lives and work of nearly every person I looked up to. Celebrated in story and song, the sea was at once a muse for musicians and a magnet for adventurers. It was a source of inspiration for both poets and painters, all drawn by its beauty and by its secrets.

However, the more I studied the ocean, the more attuned I became to the peril in which we have placed it. I now work full time to protect our seas, waves, and beaches. I do it to honor my father, a native Hawaiian who introduced me to the sea when I was very young, and to honor all the others who have come before me. I do it for the benefit of those who will come after. But most of all, I do it to in some small way repay all the gifts that Mother Ocean has given, and continues to give.

Matt McClain is the director of marketing and communication for the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit organization that fights to protect the world's waves and beaches. Matt's writing has appeared in Thrasher, Transworld Surf, Surfing, Happy, and Powder. Become a member of the Surfrider Foundation at surfrider.org.

Photo by Abigail Sample

Hope Floats

GOOD — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:30:20 PDT

The legendary scientist Sylvia Earle explains why we need to take care of the ocean that takes care of us.

Perplexed, I drove back and forth along a stretch of Highway 1 in the Florida Keys, looking for a place I had been to many times, a shallow bay of clear water bordered by red mangroves. With mask and flippers, I had prowled through channels to reach a reef where staghorn coral, lavender sea fans, and giant barrel sponges were anchored on limestone. I was particularly interested in checking up on the slippery red algae and brush-like seaweeds that I had found there before, and looked forward to seeing the Nassau groupers that were always there, curious and watchful.

But I finally realized that the mangroves had been torn away, and the undersea meadows and reefs were smothered by gray torrents of water belched from a dredging platform. It was 1958, and the Florida Keys were experiencing a building boom that was transforming the lightly populated islands into a crowded mecca for visitors and thousands of new residents. To make way for them, former residents would perish: jewel-colored reef fish, great pink conchs, spiny lobsters, lumbering sea cucumbers, silver-sheathed barracudas, and billions of small plants and animals that together form the matrix of life in tropical reef systems.

The features that attracted people to the Keys in the first place-clear water, abundant wildlife, beautiful reefs, clean air, ineffable qualities of peace and plenty-somehow slipped away. Must it be that way? An ethic of caring for terrestrial ecosystems has developed in recent decades, gradually securing a network of protection for watersheds, forests, wetlands, and the wild creatures they embrace.

But what about the ocean?

In the 19th century, it became obvious that while space must be made for people to live, farm, build cities, and otherwise do what people do to prosper, certain places are so special in their natural state that they should be kept that way for the enduring benefit of humankind. As a consequence, the forests, wildlife, and unique geysers and boiling pools of Yellowstone became a park; the Grand Canyon was saved from commercial development. The National Park System has been called "the best idea America ever had." Nearly 400 such areas, places of natural, historic, and cultural significance, are now within the U.S. National Park System, and thousands of similar areas have been established around the world-13 percent of all the world's land is now protected.

As population grew and demands for use of land, water, and wildlife increased, a new (and vitally important) role for protected areas came into focus: Parks were seen as havens for depleted and endangered species, and a source of critically important resilience in the face of swift changes in climate, weather, and planetary chemistry. They also serve as vital measures of how intact ecosystems function, providing us with models for the restoration of damaged areas as well.

Many question the need to protect creatures and ecosystems that appear to have no immediate practical value. They then readily transform pristine rivers into open sewers, entomb gopher tortoises alive in their burrows in their haste to put up new shopping malls, or convert shrinking prairie grasslands into monocultures of corn. It seems, at the time, to be the smart thing to do. But what serves short-term interests, financial or otherwise, can bring on catastrophic losses.

Concerned about the radical changes in 20th-century land, waters, and wildlife, Aldo Leopold asks, in his book Round River, "If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."

Natural systems are central headquarters for the cogs and wheels, the living assets, the genetic treasury that can easily be destroyed, but never replaced. In recent decades we've taken care of parts of the land throughout the National Park System, but the same cannot yet be said of our oceans.

Among the most important discoveries of the 20th century is knowledge that the ocean is fundamental to all life on Earth. In short: no blue, no green. Water is the key. The ocean holds 97 percent of Earth's water, but it is the fact that the ocean's water is alive-with large, medium, and mostly very small organisms that shape planetary processes and chemistry-that makes it possible for us and the rest of life on the planet to survive. Half of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by phytoplankton that also extracts much of the carbon dioxide from the air. With every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, you are connected to the living sea.

There is a widely held perception that the ocean is so large, so vast, and so resilient, that nothing humans can do can make a difference. However, another great discovery of the 20th century was that the ocean, like the land, is suffering from the impact of human beings, and we are suffering the consequences. Since the 1950s, 90 percent of the commercially exploited species of fish, crabs, oysters, and clams have been taken. Half of the world's coral reefs have disappeared, and hundreds of coastal dead zones have developed as a consequence of the flow of pollutants from upstream sources.

For the ocean as well as the land, networks of protected areas can make a difference-not just for marine wildlife, but for the prosperity, health, and security of humankind as well. Presently, less than 1 percent of the ocean has some form of protection. The bad news is that more than 99 percent of the planet's blue heart is open for a wide range of uses that put all of us at risk. The good news is that nations worldwide are beginning to understand the critical importance of protecting the sea.

In 1972, legislation authorized the creation of National Marine Sanctuaries in the coastal waters of the United States. By 2008, more than 18,000 square miles of ocean were included in 14 marine protected areas, including most of the waters surrounding the Florida Keys.

Since 2006, the United States has protected 340,000 square miles of ocean in the Pacific as national monuments, places where the fish, lobsters, and shrimp are secure. Other nations have taken action, too, from Australia's protecting the Great Barrier Reef to New Zealand's protecting its fjords to the island nation of Kiribati's securing more than 150,000 square miles of ocean around itself. Although most of the national monuments are small, more than 4,000 places in the sea now enjoy some form of special care. They have different names-"sanctuaries," "reserves," "marine protected areas"-but to me, every one of them is a "hope spot," a place that inspires a vision of what can be done to take care of the ocean that takes care of all of us.

There is time, but not a lot, to secure overarching policies and a major network of protected places in the water of various nations as well as in the high seas-the 64 percent of the ocean that lies beyond national jurisdictions. One way or another, all of the ocean needs to be cared for as if our lives depend on it, because, well, they do.

Learn about Sylvia Earle's TED wish at tedprize.org/sylvia-earle.

Freight Escapes

GOOD — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:36:03 PDT

Hopping a freighter to travel the world isn't just the stuff of fiction.

Freighter World Cruises offers sea travel, the old-fashioned way. You can hitch a ride to the fjords of Norway on a mail ship, or go around the world on a massive cargo vessel for as little as $90 a day. We talked to Joycene Deel, the company's president.

GOOD: So who goes on freighter cruises?

Joycene Deel: Flexible people. A lot of retired people. The departure dates for these ships aren't guaranteed. The dates can change, the ports can change. People have to have an open schedule. Freighter travel isn't cookie-cutter. You hear about these cruises: "We went to the Caribbean, blah blah blah." Freighter travel is for more self-sufficient types that don't need to be babysat.

G: What would an average day be like on a cargo ship, in the ocean?

JD: Your time is your own, except for mealtimes, which are set. It's not like a cafeteria, where you can wander in anytime and get food. These are working cargo ships, so there are only a few cabins and limited accommodations, but it's a really intimate atmosphere. True freighters only have about 12 cabins. You get to know the officers and crew.

G: What kind of activities are there?

JD: There are some people that don't want to play bingo on a big cruise ship. They don't want people pestering them with "Hey, let's go to the costume party!" There's no organized entertainment on a freighter cruise. So you'd probably read, or work on hobbies. You bring whatever you want to be doing. One woman brought her sewing machine and ended up fixing the crew's clothing for them. They were sad to see her go.

G: Did she get a discount?

JD: No, but she probably should have.

G: I'm assuming you've been on some of these voyages. Where have you been?

JD: Oh, gosh. I've been to South America, through Europe, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, the fjords of Norway.

G: On big container ships, can people just wander around freely?

JD: The only place you can't go is to the bridge, unless it's by invitation. Officers need to have their entire concentration. There's usually an invitation to the engine room at some point during the voyage, and if you want to go more than once you can ask and they might arrange it with the engineer.

G: If we stop in a port city, how long might I be there before we leave?

JD: Most port stays are short, around 8 to 12 hours. Sometimes you're coming in at midnight and leaving at eight in the morning. It's not the norm, but it does happen, because technology has improved and it doesn't take long to load and unload cargo. You're also not coming into the tourist ports, you're arriving at real shipping ports with freight terminals.

G: Is there a chance I might experience a big storm?

JD: There's always a chance. We hope it doesn't get too exciting. These ships have the most sophisticated radar. And they don't want anything to happen to their cargo, so that tends to keep the people safe, too.

G: If I wanted to bring a driver and hit golf balls off the bow of a giant cargo ship, would that be allowed?

JD: Well, that would probably depend on the individual ship. And situation. But possibly. I can say possibly.

Photo by flickr (cc) user engrey

Ship in a Bottle

GOOD — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:26:49 PDT

Don't treat it like trash, and plastic becomes a lot more interesting.

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and a crew of five men crossed the Pacific Ocean on the Kon-Tiki, a craft comprised of natural materials and modeled after ancient Incan rafts. This summer, David de Rothschild, the banking scion and the founder of Adventure Ecology, is embarking on The Plastiki Expedition, for which he's setting sail on a vessel comprised almost entirely of repurposed plastic bottles. The journey will take him and his crew from San Francisco to Australia's Sydney Harbor, passing through the North Pacific Gyre, in part, to raise awareness about our reckless consumption of plastic.

"We're producing two hundred million tons of plastic a year, much of which is single-use, throw-away," says de Rothschild. "There's roughly 100 million tons of plastic in our oceans. The important point to convey is that it's huge concentrations of plastic across our entire oceans, not just in one area."

He and his team of engineers have spent countless hours attempting to transform thousands of water bottles into a seaworthy vessel. It's his hope that doing so will give the material new value.

A successful Plastiki journey would speak to the resiliency of a material that should be treated as precious, not simply problematic: "If we can take that energy that we use to vilify it to understand it, then we might be in a smarter position. I think the knee-jerk reaction to plastic is that it's the enemy. But we're trying to both beat waste and showcase waste as a resource," he explains. "It's a lot more versatile than we originally thought, and also a lot stronger."

Plastic bottles might seem flimsy, but the boat builders found that plastic is nearly three quarters the strength of fiberglass, even though it weighs half as much. A new perspective on plastic could have repercussions far beyond the Plastiki trip. Says de Rothschild: "What we're learning isn't just about using repurposed or cradle-to-cradle plastic in the boating industry."

Rendering by Peter Rubin.

An earlier version of this story appeared online here. This is the version that ran in the magazine.

Eureka!

GOOD — Fri, 7 Aug 2009 06:00:00 PDT

Don’t call him a treasure hunter.

Greg Stemm heads Odyssey Marine Exploration, one of the most successful shipwreck-exploration companies in the world. In 2007, it discovered a shipwreck site that yielded a haul of coins that some estimates value at $500 million. The site's location is a closely guarded secret, and what the name and nationality of the ship might have been is being debated in court: Odyssey calls the site the Black Swan.

GOOD: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve seen in your explorations?

Greg Stemm: In 2007, when we discovered the Black Swan site, it was unlike any other deep-ocean site we had ever seen—there was no shipwreck structure at all, just piles and piles of coins scattered over an area the size of six football fields.

G: Do you come across a lot of garbage in the water?

GS: Yes. Many sites contain quite a bit of modern trash—from beer bottles and plastic containers to socks and electronic equipment. Many sites are also draped with fishing equipment. Destruction caused by marine construction, fishing, and “grab bucket” [explorers] who have no concerns for archaeology is of grave concern to us.

G: There must be companies out there that are just looking for money.

GS: There are groups that tear up shipwreck sites, and this gives serious and responsible explorers a bad reputation. Some archaeologists use the bad apples in the field to suggest that private-sector companies and good archaeology are incompatible. Consider that most advances in medicine, biotechnology, and geology are funded by the private sector. If you can trust your heart surgery to a private-sector hospital, there is no reason that great archaeology can’t be done by a for-profit company.

G: Speaking of which, you showed an increase in revenue in the first quarter of 2009 as compared with 2008. Is shipwreck exploration recession-proof?

GS: With oil prices dropping our costs of operations are down. At the same time, I believe that there is a real possibility that with the threat of inflation, we will see a significant increase in interest in our primary products—namely gold, silver, and collectibles. Our business plan is simple. For centuries seafarers have lost billions of dollars’ worth of fascinating and historically significant cargoes that now lie on the ocean bottom. We have the technology to find and recover these long-lost treasures.

G: I understand “treasure-hunter” is derogatory. What’s the biggest misconception about your work?

GS: Some people in the archaeological community [think] we don’t conduct proper archaeology on shipwreck sites. This criticism comes from people who have never been aboard our ship during an expedition, nor taken the opportunity to visit our conservation lab or study our publications. Our approach is long term and based on extensive research; world-class archaeology, conservation, and documentation; cutting-edge science and technology; and a multilayered plan to share what we find with the world.

G: What has been your biggest success since you started exploring?

GS: The SS Republic was a Civil War–era shipwreck, which was lost in a hurricane in 1865, 100 miles off the coast of Georgia. We recovered over 51,000 coins from the site, as well as more than 14,000 artifacts. The Black Swan site, which we discovered in 2007, constitutes the largest historic deep-ocean treasure recovery to date, with over 17 tons of silver and hundreds of gold coins recovered. Then, in 2008, we discovered the long lost HMS Victory. This was the mightiest and most technically advanced vessel of her era. The Victory went down in a severe storm in 1744, and disappeared with all hands, leaving the world in shock and everyone guessing for centuries.

CORRECTION: The first paragraph of this article has been corrected, the uncorrected paragraph is here: The original Greg Stemm heads Odyssey Marine Exploration, one of the most successful shipwreck-exploration companies in the world. In 2007, it discovered a shipwreck that yielded a haul of coins that some estimates value at $500 million. The name of the ship and its location are closely guarded secrets, to protect it from looters and to prevent whoever once owned the ship from claiming the treasure: Odyssey calls it the Black Swan.

For reports on shipwreck sites, visit shipwreck.net.

Depth Charge

Zach Frechette — Thu, 6 Aug 2009 05:45:00 PDT

Don Walsh has been deeper in the ocean than any other living person. He explains how shallow our oceanic knowledge really is.

In the late 1950s, a team of marine scientists approached the Navy with a bathyscaphe— a device capable of diving much deeper than any submersible then in existence—named the Trieste. With the goal of testing the limits of human ingenuity and furthering scientific knowledge of the ocean, Lieutenant Don Walsh and the scientist Jacques Piccard descended 35,798 feet from the surface of the Pacific into the Marianas Trench, the deepest spot in the ocean. The chief of naval operations at the time speculated that the accomplishment might “mark the opening of a new age in exploration of the depths of the ocean which can well be as important as exploration in space has been in the past.” That was 1960. And no one’s been back since. We asked Don Walsh, the remaining member of the two-man crew (Piccard died in 2008), why.

GOOD: How come no one ever went back?

DON WALSH: There’s no machine that can take humans to that depth. In fact, the deepest [manned] diving machine goes to 22,000 feet. After we did our deep dive, in January, 1960, the Navy decreed that we could not dive any deeper than 20,000 feet, even though it was all the same equipment.

G: Was that a safety issue?

DW: Well, maybe it’s not that safe. Consider the floor of the world’s oceans—98 percent of it is at 20,000 feet or less depth. So this means that if you can design and build something [safe] for two-thirds the maximum depth of the ocean, and you can look at 98 percent of the seafloor, that’s a lot. That’s a nice trade-off. With respect to the 2 to 3 percent of the seafloor that is off-limits right now for manned vehicles, unmanned systems have been and will go down. But I’ve looked at all sides of that, and I just think there is still room for the presence of man, physically—putting the trained minds and the trained eyes at the appropriate place in the oceans rather than working off a remote sensor. You don’t, as a geologist, grab some guy on the street and say, “Here are the keys to my Jeep, go and get me some rocks.” But that’s what we had been asking people to do in the ocean for many years.

G: Do we really care what’s in that remaining 2 percent?

DW: Close to a thousand people have gone into space, and Mount Everest: 2,000 to 4,000 people have been up there. And only two people have ever been in the deepest part of the ocean. If you’re on land and someone said you couldn’t go to the top 2 to 3 percent of the peaks of the highest mountains, people would think that was nuts. By the way, that 2 to 3 percent of the seafloor is about equal to the total area of Alaska, the continental United States, and about half of Mexico. So it’s not trivial.

G: Why do you think that there hasn’t been as much effort to continue looking at the deepest part of the oceans?

DW: I think it’s a matter of national will and national interest, and lack of national investment. And it’s not just the U.S. All major maritime powers don’t make the kinds of investments in studies of the ocean that they should. Marshall McLuhan once said that here on spaceship earth, there are no passengers, we’re all crew; Buckminster Fuller said it’s too bad spaceship earth doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We need to learn about this place and we hardly explore our oceans.

G: So you would advocate continued exploration of the ocean as a way to better understand the complete picture of life on earth?

DW: I think “advocate” is too weak a term. I would exhort exploration. The whole idea of exploring our planet sometimes goes awry, because we don’t know how to separate adventure from exploration. To me, exploration has purpose for mankind; it creates information that can be used for the betterment of mankind. It is the first step in the scientific method. I’d define exploration as curiosity that you act upon. But you get plenty of adventure on some explorations, no question about that.

Photo by Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS

The Evolution of the Squirt Gun

GOOD — Thu, 6 Aug 2009 05:30:07 PDT

A visual history of the water gun, by Jason Polan. Click here for the full size image. For more content from GOOD's Water issue, click the banner below.

Lost City

GOOD — Tue, 4 Aug 2009 06:00:26 PDT

Atlantis never sank-it just became Cuba.

The fabled city of Atlantis was first mentioned by Plato in two of his dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. Plato tells of an island nation outside the entrance to the Mediterranean that several thousand years earlier had attempted to invade Athens before being destroyed in a giant cataclysm. Today, the general consensus among classics scholars and archaeologists is that Plato's story was purely fictional; no such city ever existed. While some believers still maintain that a historical city of Atlantis was real, its location remains an open question.

According to Andrew Collins, the author of Gateway to Atlantis, the Caribbean is the obvious answer. In the late 1960s, a stone formation was discovered off the coast of the Bahamas. It's called the Bimini Road, and it convinced Collins that an advanced civilization once lived in areas of the Caribbean islands that are now covered with water. "The sunken area of Atlantis was the area around the Bahamas and part of the Caribbean," he says. "And the flagship of it was Cuba. Everything that Plato said about what he referred to as the central island of Atlantis fits very well with the geographical description of Cuba." Archaeologists and geologists, on the other hand, insist that the Bimini Road is a natural formation.

Collins, who has been writing about Atlantis for more than a decade, can anticipate criticisms: "People might say, Hold on, I thought Atlantis sunk. Well, you know, no. It was quite obvious that there were sunken parts of it. But some of it, obviously, would have remained after the waters rose at the end of the last ice age." And what about the archaeological record, which doesn't show any signs of habitation in the Caribbean at the time Plato claims Atlantis existed, around 9500 B.C.? Well, Collins thinks that archaeologists aren't too happy to have nonprofessionals tell them they're wrong about everything: "Marine archaeologists have refused to take part in any work, and when they have, it's just been to put down the works of the amateur divers and explorers who claim that they've found stuff. In some cases, it seems like [the archaeologists] virtually made up or fabricated evidence to try and show that these amateurs are deluded."

Collins cites the work of a psychic named Edgar Cayce as evidence for his claims about Atlantis (Cayce predicted that Atlantis would rise again just before the Bimini Road was discovered), and says the people of Atlantis were like any other Stone Age civilization, though to build structures like the Bimini Road, they would have had to be far more advanced than the hunter-gatherer cultures that the archaeological evidence says existed in 9500 B.C. "There would have been some kind of high culture going on," he says.

"The chances are that there were settlements that were quite evolved for their time. And unfortunately, if they were wiped off the face of the earth, we might never know fully how far they developed." Or if they were ever there at all.

Nothing Dune

GOOD — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 11:06:56 PDT

In the book, futuristic suits let people live in the desert-but would they really work?

As you might guess, Frank Herbert's seminal science-fiction novel Dune takes place in an arid environment. In fact, the fictional planet Arrakis is so strapped for water that the people who inhabit its open deserts wear elaborate full-body water-reclamation systems, called stillsuits, which keep them hydrated and cool. With a well-tuned stillsuit you would lose only a thimbleful of water a day, even in the worst conditions. Or so the story goes.

1. The skin-contact layer: The inside layer of the suit is porous and pulls away evaporated perspiration for reclamation.

2. The outer layers: The outer layers of the suit "include heat exchange filaments and salt precipitators" to reclaim the salt in sweat.

3. Forehead, hands, and feet: The stillsuit covers the forehead, the feet, and the palms of the hands-all areas with a high concentration of sweat glands.

4. Kinetic power: The suit is powered by kinetic energy from the body's normal movements-especially breathing.

5. Water reclamation from, uh…excrement: As Herbert explains, "urine and feces are processed in the thigh pads." Both are mostly water, so this is possible in theory.

6. Face filter: The suit has a face mask with filters over the nose and mouth. The wearer breathes in through the mouth and out through the nose, where moisture from respiration is captured.

7. Drink up: Reclaimed water collects in catch pockets. A drinking tube clipped to the neck of the suit provides for an easy drink.

Would it work?

Probably not. While the water reclamation is possible in theory, there's an inescapable problem of thermodynamics. In Dune, an ecologist named Liet-Kynes says that the suit allows for a "near normal evaporation process," but it's unclear whether that's possible. If normally sweat evaporates to cool you off, then the suit would need a cooling mechanism to condense the sweat vapor back into a liquid, and it's unlikely the body's normal movements could provide enough power for one. If sweat is wicked away from the skin as a liquid, on the other hand, then the body isn't cooled by its evaporation off the skin, and you would cook in the suit.

Illustration by Will Etling

Red Tide

GOOD — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:00:28 PDT

What we can learn from water on Mars

The question of whether there is water on the red planet has kept scientists curious for decades. James W. Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University who has worked with NASA on the Apollo program and several missions to Mars, says that water on the planet might indicate the discovery of life, but what's more important is why there is hardly any water at all.

GOOD: What's so interesting about water on Mars, at a basic level?

JAMES Head: There are a couple of compelling questions about Mars that drive a lot of the exploration and interest. [One is] the origin of life-is there any evidence on Mars for life?-because it does have many of the conditions, like the presence of water, organic material, stuff like that, that could lead to life. That's one big deal. The second is simply what's going on with the evolution of water on Mars. We see Mars now as an extremely cold, very arid desert. And then we see in the geological record huge channels, floods across the surface, maybe even oceans in the northern lowlands.

GOOD: And what made it go from a place where there were oceans and rivers to the environment that it has now?

JH: That's actually what we are studying right now, because somewhere about a billion years into the history of the planet, something changed very rapidly, and led to it being a cold, hyper-arid desert. We go to Antarctica a lot because it has the most Mars-like conditions on Earth. It's really cold, and windy, and extremely dry. How did Mars go from looking more like Earth to looking like an extreme environment today? That is another part of our search for water on Mars: so we can study climate change. We don't know the answer yet, but it is pretty compelling. Considering what is happening here on the Earth, it's like, Hmm, I wonder if this could be happening here.

GOOD: So what does it mean that there is water on Mars? Why is it important?

JH: One reason is, again, the origin of life and the conditions that lead to the formation and evolution of life. We don't have a clue. The second is climate change. Surely humans are inducing changes in the [Earth's] climate, but how extreme do things get? What happens when you really stress out a system? Does it modify a little bit, or does it really go through a major irreversible change, for example? And so by studying Mars, we are really looking [at] changes in ubiquity, because they are so extreme. It's like performing an experiment you wouldn't want to perform on the Earth.

GOOD: And we've found ice under the surface of the planet, right?

JH: Yes. And a lot of that ice is sequestered in different ways at different latitudes, and that provides us with an opportunity to go look at 200-million-year-old ice. What was the atmosphere like 5, 7, 8 million years ago? If you can find a piece of ice that old, it will have bubbles in it which will have captured the atmosphere, so that's what we are trying to do down there.

"If you can find the liquid water-and maybe it is below the poles-maybe that's where life is."

GOOD: And what would it mean if we found liquid water under the surface? How does that change what we know about Mars?

JH: Well, I think the biota that evolves in liquid water is much different than the one that evolves in ice. In ice, organisms can live but they are a little bit more in stasis. But if we can find that there is a global groundwater system that still exists today, I would bet big money that if there is ever life on Mars, that is where it is going to be. So if you can find the liquid water-and maybe it is below the poles-maybe that's where life is. We find it in extreme environments in Antarctica. It's incredible.

GOOD: What's next?

JH: In 2011, there is a Mars science laboratory which is going to be a huge, very sophisticated rover, which is going to have a lot of instruments on board, like mass spectrometers and other types of things that can help to detect the gases and other things that are indicative of life, and understand the mineralogy a lot better.

GOOD: So when are we going to go and drill through the ice caps and see if there is water under them?

JH: Well, we're trying to interest NASA in such a mission. We have a mission that would deploy a drill onto the ice cap and would make measurements. One of the things about the NASA community is that the investigators have a lot of input on the next missions coming up, so we're currently in the process of arguing about what ought to be the missions in the next 20 years.

Take Us To Your Water

GOOD — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:00:20 PDT

If we ever find aliens, they'll be thirsty.

We all know that people need water to live, but the universe is a big place, which raises questions: Would alien life need water, too? And how much water is out there, anyway? To get a broader perspective, GOOD talked with Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI).

GOOD: Why is water so important for life?

Seth Shostak: Imagine taking your old chemistry set out and dumping it onto the living-room floor. Not much happens, except maybe your mom gets upset. Now, if you bring over a pail of water and throw it on top, then something will happen. Water is great for life for that very straightforward reason: It's good for chemistry.

G: Couldn't you just use another liquid?

SS: Yeah, in principle. But if you actually look at the kind of things that would be liquid, and that might be on planets you can imagine, water still comes out as the best fit. One of the reasons for that is that water is liquid over a very wide range of temperatures: 33 degrees to 212 degrees Fahrenheit. These other liquids you might find-ammonia, methane, those sorts of things, maybe even liquid hydrogen on the surface of Jupiter if you had that-they're only liquid in a very small and unfortunate range of temperatures.

G: So how much water is there in the universe?

SS: Hydrogen is the number one element in the universe. Three-quarters of the universe by weight is hydrogen. And the third most popular element in the entire cosmos is oxygen. There's a lot of H and a lot of O, and when they get together you get water. So there's a lot of water out there.

G: Do we know where it is?

SS: Water vapor-you'll probably find that in any planet that has an atmosphere. But liquid water? If you send Bruce Willis to Mars with a bunch of roughnecks and have them drill down a couple hundred feet-maybe not even that far-you'd probably find liquid water. We're not 100 percent sure, but that's one place it's likely to be. The second place is Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. It's covered in ice. But the odds are probably 90 percent that if you send a probe or something and melt it through the hard ice that's covering that moon, you'd find a big ocean underneath with as much water in it as the Atlantic and the Pacific added together times two.

Callisto and Ganymede, both additional moons of Jupiter, probably have liquid water oceans. Even Titan might have some liquid water occasionally. Another moon of Saturn, called Enceladus, has these big geysers coming out. So there's some water. In the atmosphere of Venus-if you get away from the surface, which is really much too toasty for life, and go up a couple of miles where it gets cooler-maybe there are some water droplets up there.

So there are seven other worlds just in our solar system that might have liquid water. And water must be pretty common in interstellar space, too, by the way just molecules hanging around. So you expect a lot of water. There's no shortage of water. Except, you know, in Israel.

"There's a lot of H and a lot of O, and when they get together you get water. So there's a lot of water out there."

G: And San Diego, among other places. Can you imagine life without water?

SS: Well, it's hard. There are people who have imagined life without water because in the end they say, what is life, really? The answer to that question is "we don't know." There's no good definition of life. And every 10th grader would disagree with you because they've read their biology textbooks and they'd say, "You know, life: It has a metabolism, so it takes food and it excretes something and it reproduces and it moves around," and they've got this little laundry list of things. But the fact is, you can always find exceptions. Fire reproduces but it's not alive. Mules don't reproduce but they are alive. So we don't really know what life is. And people have been ingenious in thinking of ways in which we could have organized activity that everyone would say was life even though there wasn't any water involved.

But I think that if we find extraterrestrial intelligence, there's a very big chance that that's not biological at all. The reason is that once a civilization invents radio, and we can find it with our SETI experiments, within 100, 200, 300 years, it creates artificial intelligence.

In terms of the great scheme of things, that's essentially right after you invent radio. It just seems statistically very likely, if you pick up a signal, that it's coming from a society that has already gone through that quick stage, and has moved on to artificial intelligence. And if you have artificial intelligence, maybe you don't need liquid water anymore. My computer doesn't need liquid water. In fact, it doesn't even like liquid water. I put it in the bathtub and it refuses to function.

Big Fish Eat The Little Fish

Patrick James — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:00:00 PDT

A guide to the best and worst choices for fish consumption.

Any sardine will tell you that all fish were not created equal. Of course, they’re not caught equally, either. Overfishing is a serious problem around the world, and many ocean advocates say we need to stop catching and eating fish all together. But since people demand their sushi, we at least must start making responsible purchases, or we’re simply going to run out of sea life. Follow this guide, and you can help ensure that we have plenty of fish in the sea for years to come.

Catfish GOOD

Catfish caught or farmed in the United States is a great option (just make sure it is, in fact, U.S.-caught or -farmed).

Caviar MAYBE

Eschew caviar from wild-caught beluga in favor of some from U.S.-farmed fish and you can keep enjoying your pricey treat.
Health risks: Mercury, PCBs

Chilean Sea Bass BAD

Delicious? Maybe. Overfished? You bet. Consider the less glamorous striped bass or mahimahi as alternatives.
Health risks: Mercury

Cod BAD

Stay away from the insanely overfished Atlantic cod (also known as scrod or whitefish). Instead, try U.S.-caught Pacific cod, or opt for bass (not Chilean Sea Bass) as a cooking alternative.

Crab MAYBE

Once again, buy American. As long as you steer clear of the imported stuff, there are plenty of crabs in the sea.
Health risks: Only for some blue crab (Mercury, PCBs)

Halibut MAYBE

Wild-caught Canadian and American halibut (from the Pacific Ocean) is okay, but any Atlantic-caught—sometimes sold as flounder, sole, or hirame—is a no-no.
Health risks: Some mercury

Lobster GOOD

Whether it comes from the United States or Australia, lobster is plentiful and delicious. Just avoid spiny lobster from the Caribbean.

Mackerel GOOD

Also sold as cavalla, kingfish, hog, sierra, spaniard, aji, or sawara. Mackerel is always a safe bet.
Health risks: Spanish and king mackerel can have high levels of mercury.

Salmon MAYBE

Worldwide farming of salmon has plenty of environmental problems (and the product doesn’t taste very good), but wild-caught Alaskan salmon is a great choice.
Health risks: None, if it’s from Alaska; other-wise, mercury

Sardines GOOD

Sardines. So hot right now—and bountiful. Learn more about these tasty little guys below.

Snapper MAYBE

Yellowtail caught in the United States is fairly abundant, but red snapper… not so much.
Health risks: Mercury—limit servings to one or two a month

Tilapia MAYBE

Tilapia is cheap and widely sold, but the ones from China are probably a bad idea. Stick to U.S.-farmed.

Tuna BAD

Bluefin is severely overfished, as is just about all yellowfin, with the exception of U.S.-caught Atlantic tuna. Canned albacore is a decent alternative, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
Health risks: Mercury

Shark BAD

Shark is indescribably overfished, and its demise might be worse for the environment than the loss of fish, so don’t even think about shark-fin soup. Pacific halibut can be a good cooking alternative, though.
Health risks: Mercury

Mussels GOOD

Mussels are, by and large, responsibly farmed, so feel free to get moules frites as often as you like.

Oysters GOOD

Oysters are mostly farmed (as opposed to wild-caught) and rightly so. They’re fine to eat.

Shrimp BAD

Americans eat more shrimp than any other seafood. Sadly, worldwide shrimp trawling accounts for the most bycatch—when fishing vessels catch and kill species they’re not trying to catch—of any commercial fishing practice. However, U.S. Pacific shrimp is a bit better, and pink shrimp from Oregon or British Colombia can actually be a good choice.

Gone Fishin'

Easy ways to cook with little fish.

This we know: Fish are good to eat, and good for you. We also know that the smaller the fish, the better for the environment. But those small fish can be pretty daunting to use, so we asked two chefs to come up with some recipes that someone could easily execute in their home kitchen to get the right kind of fish into their diet.

Baby Beet and Grilled Sardine Salad, Serves 4

From Amy Eubanks, chef de cuisine of BLT Fish, New York City

12 baby beets, peeled
1 cup olive oil
12 sardine filets (from your local fishmonger)
1 bunch watercress
¼ cup candied pistachios
Frisée for garnish

Cover the beets with the olive oil and cook over low heat until tender in a large saucepan. Grill the sardine filets until done. Place beets in a medium bowl and toss with the watercress and the candied pistachios. Lay the grilled sardines on top of the beets, garnish with the frisée. Suggested dressing: a honey-rice wine vinaigrette.

Tuscan Kale Caesar Salad with White Spanish Anchovies, Serves 4

From Shana Pacifico, chef de cuisine of Back Forty, New York City

2 egg yolks
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
¼ cup lemon juice
3 cloves garlic
3 cups grape seed oil
1 cup grated Parmesan
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
12 white Spanish anchovies (from the jar)
Tabasco sauce

To make the dressing:

In a food processor first add yolks, mustard, lemon juice, and garlic. Let ingredients puree for a minute. Add oil in a slow steady stream, and then add the Parmesan, Worcestershire sauce, six of the anchovies, a few dashes of the Tabasco, and salt and pepper to taste. The dressing should be a loose creamy consistency. If it’s not, add water a tablespoon at a time. Adjust seasoning to taste.

To make the salad:

Lightly grill or sauté two bunches of kale. Let it cool and toss with dressing. Top salad with a bit more shaved Parmesan and the additional anchovies.

To-go Bag

Andrew Price — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:01:25 PDT

One water transportation technology that doesn't float (yet)

From the Roman aqueducts to modern-day pipelines, bulk water transportation hasn't changed all that much. But as places like Southern California and Melbourne, Australia, get thirstier, forward-looking entrepreneurs have tried to imagine new ways of making money from water transport.

One of the stranger ideas involves towing water behind modified tugboats in colossal bags. In 1988 the Canadian engineer Jim Cran started developing what he called medusa bags. Named after the jellyfish, not the gorgon of Greek mythology, Cran's creations were monstrous nonetheless. The largest plastic bag made by Glad for use in your home has a volume of 49 gallons. Multiply that by three million and you'd have a small medusa bag.

It's this incredible capacity that makes medusa bags attractive. A supertanker can only carry about 100 million gallons of water. A medusa bag could, in theory, hold many times that volume-developers estimate a bag's costs would be around 2 percent of those of a ship. Cran's Medusa Corporation created designs for a bag that would hold nearly 400 billion gallons. It would be five and a half football fields long and more than a football field wide. While his practical tests were with much smaller bags, Cran posited that a capacity of 800 million gallons was possible in principle.

The bags themselves were made of woven polyester and coated with plasticized PVC. One would simply fill up the bag at sea from an offshore terminal that connects to a freshwater resource-a river, for example-in a water-rich area. Then, once it's full, just bring in a tugboat, and tow the bag to wherever water is most needed-or commands the highest price.

Medusa bags have already been put to use in perennially drought-stricken areas of the Mediterranean. In the late 1990s, a company called Aquarius Water Transportation began towing water to the Greek islands in 500,000-gallon bags. Nordic Water Supply used bags 10 times that size to transport water from Turkey to Cyprus. That venture ended up costing the company $1.5 million in the first half of 2001, and after a failed attempt to branch into other regions, the company went bankrupt two years later.

The use of medusa bags has been proposed in the United States as well. In 2002, Ric Davidge, an Alaskan businessman and the economic developer for the city of Wasilla, tried to gain water rights to rivers near Mendocino County, California, with the idea of bagging the area's fresh water and selling it to San Diego.

Mendocino-area environmentalists, outraged with the idea of Davidge appropriating a local resource and disrupting a local ecosystem for personal profit, mobilized. He eventually changed the name of his company to Aqueous and tried the same pitch in Humboldt County. Local activists stopped him again.

Most recently, MH Waters, an Australian company, has been trying to sell the West Australian government on the idea of importing water to Perth. The proposal is currently being considered, but observers think it's unlikely to go anywhere. But neither are our global water problems. As prices-and potential profits-rise, the crazy may become the practical.

Illustration by Jonathan Park

Good Guide to Reducing Your Water Use, Part 3: Kitchen

Siobhan O'Connor — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:00:34 PDT

3A: Do's and Don'ts for Kitchen-Water Conservation

Some basic guidelines to live and wash by.

Compared to bathrooms and your garden, kitchens account for significantly less water waste. But that doesn't mean we're off the hook.

Do add a faucet aerator onto your kitchen sink-they drastically increase water efficiency.
Don't run water waiting for it to get cold; pour room-temperature water into a glass and put it in the fridge.
Don't run your dishwasher unless it's full.
Do use the light cycle on your dishwasher unless you're washing heavily soiled loads.
Don't rinse your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Scrape them.
Do purchase an Energy Star dishwasher.
Don't fill your teakettle or coffeemaker with more water than you need.
Do use water from cooking pasta or boiling veggies to water plants.
Don't run the water to wash veggies. Get an organic food-grade wash spray from the health-food store, spritz, and let them sit in a bowl. Rinse quickly.
Do use a reusable basin sink for all your kitchen-sink water needs.

3B: A Faucet Hack

How to halve your kitchen's water flow in less than five minutes.

For less than $10, faucet aerators are the best way to use less water in the kitchen. Just slip the small metal collar over your faucet head and the aerator's fine mesh grid introduces air into the water stream. This keeps the pressure consistent while reducing the volume of water used. Check the inside of your faucet's nozzle, and if it tells you the gallons per minute, you probably have one on there already. Most modern faucets accommodate aerators easily, so if you don't have one, install one. They can reduce the water flow by up to 50 percent.

3C: Don't Throw Out the Water

A portable sink can make reusing kitchen water a cinch.

Leave it to the Australians, who are suffering from a protracted drought, to invent a solution for water recycling. The Hughie portable dish basin sits in the bottom of your sink as you are washing dishes and rinsing fruits and vegetables. The Hughie can then be picked up, its drain hole unplugged, and the water used for plants. It's made of 100-percent recycled plastic and comes in seven colors. Available Stateside at GreenDepot.com for $22.

3D: Washing Your Dishes the Right Way

Potential water savings: up to 70 gallons per day, per household

Despite what your mother tells you, hand washing dishes is actually the wrong way to do it.

When it comes to washing dishes, the shower-bath rule applies. Hand washing: bad. Dishwashers, even conventional ones: Better. Washing dishes by hand, if you have a 7-gallons-per-minute faucet and run the water for 10 minutes, can use as many as 70 gallons of water. Energy Star dishwashers, meanwhile, use four. There's an intuitive logic to the idea that if you fill up the sink and plug it, you'll conserve lots of water, but a few things to consider: Your sink, plugged up, almost certainly holds more than the four gallons of water a dishwasher will use. You also probably want to rinse them after they've been sitting in dirty dishwater. So while it's better than letting the faucet run for minutes on end, it can't easily beat a dishwasher.

3E: Reuse Your Cooking Water

Potential water savings: up to 5 gallons per day, per household

Meal prep is estimated to use five gallons of water per day, per household. Here's one way to cut that down.

1. If you are boiling water, fill the pot with only as much water as you need.

2. Drain water into a second pot, allow the water to cool, then water your plants with it. If you have more than you need, store it in bottles.

Water for thought

A 30-word Manifesto on German Dishwashers

A 2005 study from the University of Bonn found that dishwashers use one-sixth as much water as hand washing. Therefore, the government should buy all Americans a high-efficiency German dishwasher.

A Four-word Manifesto on Drinking Water

Don't drink bottled water.

The GOOD Guide to Reducing Your Water Use

Intro: This Is A Turn Off

Part 1, Bathroom

Part 2, Outdoors

Part 3, Kitchen

Good Guide to Reducing Your Water Use, Part 2: Outdoors

Adam Matthews — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:00:00 PDT

2A: Lose the Lawn, Water Hogs

Potential water savings: up to 150 gallons per day, per household.

There are much better ways to decorate or shade your turf, and it largely depends on where you live. Here's a primer.

Planting appropriately is the best way to conserve water and not kill your plants. Much of the Western United States, for example, is built on or near deserts. That means that drought-tolerant planting is key. In the Midwest's colder climes, you should opt for hardier varieties of flowers and shrubs. Getting creative can save thousands of gallons per year on outside use.

Since 1960, the United States Department of Agriculture has published something called the hardiness zone map-a road map for planting locally. But it doesn't offer other variables like rainfall, the number of sunny days, and soil conditions. With that in mind, we've created our own map of the country, which shows you what to plant and what not to plant, while using the least amount of water.

Northeast

Climate Because rainfall in Brooklyn, New York, for example, averages a healthy 44 inches per year, with a few tweaks, storm runoff and water recycling can take care of all your watering needs.
Local plants Flowering dogwood, highbush blueberry, wild leek, birdfoot violet
Smart landscaping choice Pennsylvania bluestone. A layered sandstone, it originates in the Northeast and is pretty to look at. Best of all? No watering needed.

West

Climate Sacramento, California, has a Mediterranean climate with winters that are cool and wet and summers that are hot and dry. As in much of the west, water is scarce, so a synthetic lawn would save water.
Local plants California wild grape, elderberry, California black walnut, coyote brush
Smart landscaping choice An ecologically sound synthetic lawn-seriously, it's that bad. If you can't live without real grass go with Eco Lawn, a brand of drought-resistant grasses that require very little watering.

Mountain West

Climate Boise, Idaho, is a city of extremes: hot and dry 90-degree summers and cold snowy winters. As in other nearby cities, rainfall is scarce, so using local plants accustomed to the climate is crucial.
Local plants Western juniper, Utah honeysuckle, prairie junegrass, Rocky Mountain maple
Smart landscaping choice Recycled rubber pavers. A sustainable softscaping option, rubber flooring is easy to install, low-impact, and the recycling diverts it from landfills.

Southeast

Climate As the southernmost city in the continental United States, Key West, Florida, is essentially in the Caribbean, and the same climatic limitations apply. The weather is temperate all year long, but there are dry and wet seasons, and taking advantage of the former is important to keeping your environs thriving.
Local plants Coconut palm, bellflower, Key lime, saw palmetto
Smart landscaping choice Seashell mulch. The mulch functions as a barrier to lock in moisture and prevent evaporation for the dryer season and help prevent excess weed growth.

Southwest

Climate Tucson, Arizona, which lies in the Sonoran Desert, suffers from serious water issues. It rains during the month-long monsoon season, but not much during the rest of the year. More than half the local golf courses use recycled water.
Local plants Fishhook barrel cactus, desert ironwood, Arizona poppy, Parry's agave
Smart landscaping choice Permeable concrete pavers. Rain scarcity makes lawns unsustainable without a ton of watering, and permeable pavers send water into the landscape instead of into sewers.

2B: Garden Grows

Potential water savings: more than 40 gallons, per household.

A few ways to water your plants and grass without going broke.

First, the good news: There are more tools than ever-like downspouts and 100-percent-recycled plastic cisterns-to harvest every precious drop of water. Now the bad: Not everyone can afford these newfangled products. But don't fret. You don't have to be MacGyver to rig up a low-cost alternative.

A Plant-watering Buy

Watering plants too much is as damaging as watering them too little, especially with dwindling water sources. One option is to buy stackable planters by Stack and Grow, which drain water from plant to plant, making sure each one is adequately quenched. It's also expandable. Just stack up to four additional modules on top of the main unit. They cost around $40 each, and are very nice to look at.

An A/C Plant Watering Hack

Air conditioners drip a little while they're running, which could mean wasted water and damage to your building's façade. All A/C window units have a drain hole, so get a basic funnel for a buck at the hardware store, and tape it to the drain. Then, get thin rubber tubing for a few dollars, and tape that to the funnel tip. Run the tube down and place it in an idiot-proof plant. Mint is a great choice. Now you're watering your plant for free.

A Rain-barrel Buy

For about $100, you can get a Smith & Hawken collapsible rain barrel, which retains up to 35 gallons of water, folds flat for under-bed storage in the off season, and is small enough to fit on a New York terrace. There's no excuse not to recycle rainwater.

A Rain-barrel Hack

Rain is basically free water. It's not the cleanest, thanks to pollution, so you wouldn't want to drink it, but it's perfectly useable for all your outdoor water needs. If you can get your hands on an old drum, great. If not, any 5-gallon bucket will do. Place the bucket underneath the downspout of your home's gutter. If you're a renter, or not near the gutter, just put it anywhere outside. After a nice rain, remove the bucket and save it to water your plants and yard later.

The GOOD Guide to Reducing Your Water Use

Intro: This Is A Turn Off

Part 1, Bathroom

Part 2, Outdoors

Part 3, Kitchen

Water Flowing Underground

GOOD — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 06:00:12 PDT

Robert Bisson spent three decades scouring the globe for oil, gas, minerals, and water. Of those four resources, it's water that he sees as the most precious, especially for the marginalized economies of the world, which will endure the most trauma in what he describes as an imminent global water crisis. But all hope isn't lost. His company, EarthWater Global, was founded on the principle that there's a lot more water below the Earth's surface than we realize-we just need to be smart enough to find it.

GOOD: On your website you describe an imminent "global water crisis." Does EarthWater Global have a sustainable solution to that crisis?

Robert Bisson: It's certainly a part of a long-term solution. I'm not sure if it's the whole answer everywhere, but it's certainly contributory and will make a huge difference for a lot of areas in the world-the marginal regions of the world.

G: What's the principle behind it?

RB: The basic observation on which we built the company is that the Earth leaks.

G: Okay, what does that mean?

RB: It's not something that is necessarily obvious to non–exploration types, but the crustal materials that make up our continents are floating around the world on top of a sea of magma, floating on top of the Earth's mantle in a dynamic fashion-which is called plate tectonics or continental drift. The crustal materials keep banging into each other, scraping each other, and moving away from each other, as do the oceanic plates, which tend to bash into the continents. The rock is brittle and it breaks. So the stuff under our feet, instead of being solid bedrock, is quite often, in effect, shattered. If the rock is all busted up and full of fractures and faults, then fluids can run through it.

G: We're with you, but how is this different from the traditional model?

RB: The fundamental model that is almost always used [to depict groundwater] is two-dimensional; it shows a thin layer of surface water with some groundwater, underneath which is what's historically been referred to as impervious bedrock. What we're saying is that the impervious bedrock is a myth. If you compare [models] of the traditional water system to a yardstick, the total surface [water] and groundwater that is assumed to be there is just one inch. We're interested in the other 35 inches.

G: So you're saying that there's a lot more water running below the surface of the Earth than people account for?

RB: We're saying that the lion's share of water passes underneath all of these established, measured, or estimated surface and groundwater zones. Then it goes through a system that is invisible as it flows out into the ocean or evaporates somewhere-unnoticed, unmeasured, the classic tree falling in the forest and no one observing. There's a very large quantity difference.

G: And these systems of underground fractures and water flow are what you call the megawatershed. You've written that, in many regions of the world, if people harness these megawatersheds, they'd have access to 10 to 100 times their current groundwater estimates, and that it's all sustainable and renewable. That sounds amazing, but don't a lot of scientists take issue with the concept?

RB: It's been interesting over the past 30 years to see the shift in the way the traditional hydrologists, scientists, and engineers have responded to this. They used to argue that there was no water in the bedrock. But the exploration scientists we've been working with all knew there was water in the crust. We were part of the process back when I was working in oil in the 1960s, and doing off- and onshore mineral exploration in the 1970s. We kept encountering water that wasn't supposed to be there. I'd ask where it was coming from and the answer I'd get was that, oh, yes, there's water in the bedrock, but it's fossil water-finite, thousands of years old, undrinkable, and connected with the formation of the crust. But the water we found wasn't fossil, and it just kept on coming-and as answers weren't available in academia or literature, I started asking serious questions to my Earth-science team.

"We went out like good exploration geologists and started looking for real answers."

G: What did you find?

RB: We went out like good exploration geologists and started looking for real answers-not based on some theoretical definition of what a basin is or what a watershed is, but through observational science. We found water flowing over igneous rock at great distances [below the surface], but the rock is heterogeneous; it doesn't lend itself to one-dimensional mathematical models. Traditional assumptions are based on simple, homogeneous mathematical models, and don't reflect complex systems.

G: So how do you harness these complex systems?

RB: We combined satellite imagery with airborne and physical surveys, map surveys, and studies of geographic-information systems to find the parameters for the kind of environments that are favorable for water flowing from rainfall, collecting, and moving through the ground toward the sea or some deep basin. We're looking for vast systems for entire countries, and we've got to know how much water is going into these systems to make sure that it's renewable and sustainable. It's ultimately cheaper and has a lower carbon footprint than desalinization or traditional damming. Really, we have no carbon footprint.

G: We know you've had success developing wells that produce millions of gallons of water a day in Trinidad and Tobago, but don't you also suggest that arid places be transformed into places that can support agriculture?

RB: Absolutely. The greatest examples are the African deserts or the Middle East-we had success in Somalia before [its] civil war. And some areas we've looked at have spectacular opportunities. The amount of water going through the crust in the Himalayan countries, for example, far exceeds the amount of water going through the major rivers of Asia.

G: That's hard to imagine.

RB: It's about going underneath the crust. It's not just a bunch of downhill rivers to the sea. It is a complex natural system, but just because it's complicated, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

G: Can this be a boon to places affected by climate change?

RB: Yes. I've been working in Africa since 1976, and I've seen wars, revolution, strife, and famine. My goal is to prove the point in one or two places with a high enough profile in the near term that leadership sees the promise. If the leaders and people from these countries see the promise, then, instead of looking hopelessly into the future at inevitable failure incurred by climate change and unaffordable alternatives, they see hope.