What benefits are there to using less water besides saving on your utilities?

Question

What benefits are there to using less water besides saving on your utilities?

Answer 1

This depends a lot on where you live, but Most of the US has water problems right now.

Here in Southern California, Much of our water comes from hundreds of miles away. For example, the Owen's Valley, where there used to be a lake, but now it is mostly dry due to being drained by cities like Los Angeles. The eco-system in that area has suffered greatly. And when the summer winds blow, mineral dust from the dry lake bottom fills the air and causes a high incidence of lung diseases in people who live in the area.

The colorado river is also being drained significantly by much of the south-western population. The flow at the mouth of the river is a fraction of what it naturally would be. This has untold effects on the ecosystem.

Almost nothing that we consume is without consequence. Even water, which seems to flow so freely that it will never end.  There are limits to everything, and as the population goes up, the share available go each person goes down.

Answer 2

Fresh, potable water is increasingly scarce as human population increases.  Much of it is pumped from underground reserves that are not being refilled by nature as fast as we are depleting them.

It is for the very survival of our civilizations that we should avoid over-taxing our fresh water supplies.  The Maya civilization ended when a brief drought caused their overtaxed water supplies to fall below what was needed.  End of story for them, let's not make the same mistake.

In addition, water drawn from rivers and the ocean (for desalination) contains lots of chemicals we don't want to ingest, including estrogen from 'the pill' and other screwy stuff.  Once our clean water is overtaxed, we have to rely on insufficiently cleaned other sources and the chemical effects on our bodies are not so good.  There are whole tribes of Inuit in the North who are having no more male children, thanks to the birth control pill's residue accumulating in sea food.

Answer 3

producing less wastewater and thus saving the country energy and resources and not overloading sewerage and waste plants, and also helping the planet maintain it's rather limited water supply.

Answer 4

you would be putting less strain on the environment.

Answer 5

Water is designed by nature to flow from the land into the sea via rivers.  Taking this water from rivers and dams sand bypassing the river has dramatic effects on the ecological functioning of rivers, estuaries and the coastal ocean.  Low flow conditions in rivers result in loss of habitat for fish, aid in siltation and can result in lower levels of reproduction in fish.  Estuaries and the coastal ocean rely on organic matter from rivers to drive productivity by providing food for the zooplankton and nutrients for the phytoplankton which are the basis of the oceanic food chain.  When we use this water for home or industrial use we add nutrients which enhance the growth of undesirable phytoplankton such as toxic algae or nuance algae that clog rivers and reduce food for zooplaknton and therefore fish.  

Overall reducing our use of water reduces our impact on the environment and natural ecosystems.