As a nation, we have become disciples of data. We interview 60,000 families a month to determine the unemployment rate, we monitor how much energy we use every seven days, Amazon ranks sales of every book it sells every hour.
Then there is water.
Water may be the most important item in our lives, our economy and our landscape about which we know the least. We not only don’t tabulate our water use every hour or every day, we don’t do it every month, or even every year.
The official analysis of water use in the United States is done every five years. It takes a tiny team of people four years to collect, tabulate and release the data. In November 2014, the United States Geological Survey issued its most current comprehensive analysis of United States water use — for the year 2010.
The 2010 report runs 64 pages of small type, reporting water use in each state by quality and quantity, by source, and by whether it’s used on farms, in factories or in homes.
It doesn’t take four years to get five years of data. All we get every five years is one year of data.