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Feature from Environmental Building News
September 1, 1997
Water:
Conserving This Precious Resource
I recall quite clearly my first introduction to Amory Lovins. It was 1980, in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Amory was speaking at the annual Life Technics Conference at Ghost Ranch. Amory was then—as he is now—an energy guru, but his message that day was not primarily about energy. He made the point that dealing with our energy woes was relatively easy; it just involved implementing the right energy conservation strategies, which—by the way—also saved a whole lot of money. The bigger, more difficult challenges we face, he argued, dealt with water.
Today, some 17 years later, we can see just how complex these challenges are. We’re sucking the Colorado River and Rio Grande dry, leaving thousands of rural Mexicans without adequate water and destroying vital ecosystems. While the most glaring water pollution problems of the 1960s and ’70s are gone—such as the 300 million gallons of sewage per day that St. Louis pumped into the Mississippi River until 1968, the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in 1969, and a nearly lifeless Lake Erie in the 1970s—there remain more complex pollution problems in our rivers, streams, lakes, and estuaries, which some experts consider to be as significant—problems like mercury and PCB contamination.
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