Rinse and Repeat

I've been thinking yet again about trying to live more conscientiously toward the environment and my impact on it. While taking a shower the other day, I read on the back of my conditioner bottle that turning off the water while letting the conditioner set could save approximately 3000 gallons of water over the course of a single year. Being fairly good at any math that's not calculus (I run screaming from any equation that has more letters than numbers involved in finding the answer), I realized that if one person could save 3000 gallons of water in one year, then two hundred-plus million people (a rough guesstimate on my part since I don't know the exact population of the United States, nor how many people within that group regularly bathe...) would save six hundred billion gallons of water in the same time. Being conservative in my estimates, that's enough water to fill one million Olympic swimming pools. Go, Michael Phelps! Go! Put another way, that much water could power the entire country for three days.

So why haven't I started sooner?

I've always been interested in the idea of "living green," but in practical application, my motivation would run out before I'd even really started. What if I change and no one else does?" I'd ask myself. I'd answer that my own contributions wouldn't make a difference, then let my own enjoyment of creature comforts convince me to let my showers run until the hot water was gone. I decided not to separate my trash into recyclable materials and non-recyclable on the basis that getting what I could to a recycling center would cost me more money than was worth the effort. In short, I dissembled the reasons for not going out of my way just a little to help something bigger than myself.

Planning long-term is the easy part. It's following through that's the real challenge, being certain that somehow effort begets benefit, even if the rewards of our labors can't be seen. I've known many people who claimed to enjoy "working with their hands," especially when it came to farm work, or construction. Being able to visualize something in a unique way is what makes statistics so effective; maybe keeping one more statistic in mind will help me stay motivated this time. The amount of water each person would save in a single shower is roughly equivalent to the amount of water they need to drink over the course of ten days.