Marc Reisner: "The West's Water Crisis...Can Be Summed Up in a Single Word: Livestock"
The quote in this graphic is from a 1989 New York Times article, as cited here:
"Western Water Crisis –
For further understanding, one can also read authors such as Marc Reisner, former staff writer at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the author of the highly acclaimed Cadillac Desert, a history of water and the American West. (PBS made a multi-part documentary series of Cadillac Desert.) Writing in the New York Times in 1989, Reisner wrote: “In California, the single biggest consumer of water is not Los Angeles. It is not the oil and chemicals or defense industries. Nor is it the fields of grapes and tomatoes. It is irrigated pasture: grass grown in a near-desert climate for cows. In 1986, irrigated pasture used about 5.3 million acre-feet of water — as much as all 27 million people in the state consumed, including for swimming pools and lawns…. Is California atypical? Only in the sense that agriculture in California, despite all the desert grass and irrigated rice, accounts for proportionately less water use than in most of the other western states. In Colorado, for example, alfalfa to feed cows consumes nearly 30% of all the state’s water, much more than the share taken by Denver…. The West’s water crisis — and many of its environmental problems as well — can be summed up, implausible as this may seem, in a single word: livestock.”
Luckily, we each have the power to create real change by switching to a plant-based diet today.