Water Footprints

Water is an essential and irreplaceable part of life. Even if life on Earth could be mysteriously sustained without water, many of our day to day activities would be disrupted. Water is used to produce meat and crops which we then consume, for bathing ourselves and cleaning objects, in religious rituals, for transportation, to produce industrial goods, and the list continues. In short, without water, there would be no hamburgers, no iPhones, no cars, no tea or coffee, etc...

Source: National Geographic's Water FootPrint Calculator

Source: Water Footprint Network

The amount of water an individual consumes per day/week/year is actually a measurement that can be calculated. The result is called a water footprint. Both National Water Footprint Network and National Geographic have tools that can calculate your water footprint. Each tool uses slightly different information to provide their answers so it's worth visiting both.

Possible Failures of the Data

I am not sure how accurate my results are as I live on a college campus. I personally do not wash my own dishes but a worker for the caf must use water to wash the dishes I used. I don't choose what food is purchased/ cooked but I do have some choices in meals once I enter the caf. I also do not water the lawn but it is possible that Dickinson College does.  However, once could argue that the school would be doing this services for another student even if I never matriculated.

 Another discrepancy I found was expenditure on material goods. I tend to be a careful shopper and buy either second hand or with sales/ coupons so I end up spending less per item. It is possible in the long run that I am a bigger consumer than the average American but my water scores dropped very low when I input my personal expenditure in dollars. I used the year 2014 for my calculation but in terms of travel it is a bit of an odd year for me: as much as I enjoy it I don't typically fly from New York To Istanbul to Casablanca (roundtrip), New York to London to Madrid (roundtrip), from Casablanca to Tunis (roundtrip), from Ouarzazate to Casablanca,  and Philadelphia to Miami to Lima (roundtrip). Nor do I typically take the ferry to and from Spain, or the bus/train around more or less all of Morocco.  I do however, typically do a lot of driving for work during the summer months as I photograph at different universities/ races.  I also wash my hands a lot at my other part time job (hosting/bussing tables at a restaurant) and I included this in my calculations because I work on average four nights a week.

Personal Consumption compared to Others

Using google's converter tool, I converted 1,529 gallons of water per day to 558,085 gallons per year to approximately 2113 cubic meters per year. This is over twice the amount of water calculated by the other tool (980 cubic meters per year). However, according to National Geographic's Measures, I am well below U.S. average  in my personal water consumption.

According to the National Water Footprint Network, the water footprint per capita in Iran is 

1866 cubic meters per year. This is higher than the global average (1385 cubic meters per year). My score on the National Water Footprint Network's calculator was approximately half of the consumption in Iran. According to National Geographic's measures I consume 247 cubic meters per year more than the average Iranian. Averaging my two scores out gives a consumption of 1,546 cubic meters per year which while higher than the global average is still below the Iranian levels of consumption.

Turkey's water footprint per capita is 1,642 cubic meters per year, according to the National Water Footprint Network. Again, my score with the same calculator falls well below this average at 980 cubic meters. My score with National Geographic is 471 cubic meters more per year than the average Turk. Averaging my two water scores places me 96 cubic meters per year under the Turkish average. 

Source: The Economist

There was no data provided for Iraq.

Reflections

In the US though water is considered an abundant resource, there is a lot of emphasize on sustainability and conservation in modern US culture. Dickinson College places a water bottle tax to encourage reusable water bottles. The school caf has a big focus on composting and there are no trash cans in site.Everything is sorted by school workers into appropriate bins. I am not sure if there is this same emphasize in my region of study. Both Iran and Turkey have a fair amount of fresh water compared to the rest of the region but logically water conservation is in everybody's best interest.

Others in Our Community

 I'm part of a small minority at Dickinson: a transfer student. I don't know the exact statistics but when I went to orientation as a transfer there were about 14 other transfers spread across two class years, and roughly 600 freshmen, or first years as they are called at Dickinson.

Orientation was a particularly rough time. The freshmen were very excitable-- after all it was their first time away from home, they were going to make new friends, and participate in all of the extra curricular activities a liberal arts school has to offer. The orientation was designed for the freshmen and aside from the few special programs for transfers, we were completely ignored. During one activity, the school handed out class of 2017 shirts and when I asked them if they had any class of 2015 shirts they stared at me blankly and asked why on earth would I want a 2015 shirt.

Nobody really thought less of me for being a transfer, and I didn't think less of anyone for being a Dickinson student for the entirety of their undergraduate studies. It's just different and sometimes manifests itself in different ways.

As Dickinson is a small school, come junior year, a lot of the students had already formed their friend groups. While I do have some traditional Dickinson students for friends, I ended up spending most of my time with other transfer students. As a transfer student, they room you with other transfer students, most likely due to housing constraints, but it makes it harder to escape that group.

My second year at Dickinson, I opted to live in special interest housing as a way to meet more people. I live in the Global House, and my roommate is a junior and always brings her friends to visit and introduces us. Doing extra curricular activities on campus has also provided me with a chance to interact with traditional students.

Sometimes my friends and I will talk about the differences in our first two years of education. It's a fairly politically neutral topic and doesn't really cause fights. Sometimes, I feel left out, because many of my friends has experiences here that I never had but then I think back about my time at Montgomery County Community College and can't imagine what my life would have been like without my time there.

Edit:

While this wasn't part of my original post, something happened tonight that I think belongs here.

I received a call from an older friend who works for a school district nearby. She had asked me previously to help as a translator for the school district as they had just enrolled an Iraqi girl whose parents spoke very little English.

"Remember that girl I told you about from Iraq? Her father mixed up the time of the parent teacher conference and came in at 7:30 in the morning. I asked him why he moved here all the way from Iraq. It seems strange to go all the way from Iraq to Roslyn, Pennsylvania. He said he wanted to buy a house."

We chatted a bit about moving. My friend was originally from New York and talked about her move from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Pennsylvania. A little while later, she asked me another question.

"Jessica, aren't all Iraqis terrorists?"

Though I was not attacked in this statement, I was offended, and even embarrassed.. As a Middle East Studies major, I spend a great deal of time discussing the peoples, languages, histories and cultures of the MENA region. In my little academic bubble, I don't hear statements like this too often, but I feel they are reflective of a lot of the general American mentality towards people from the Middle East.These statements aren't always made out of hate: most people get their information from news reports, or second hand through other biased informants and can only form their opinions on what information they have available.

I bring this up because fear of the unknown can lead to prejudice. After I told my friend of my good experiences with some Iraqi people, she began to calm down. Anyone can be a terrorist, terrorism isn't a genetic trait or an ethnic trait.

In order to better understand the others in our community, we need to learn about them. In a world where we are ever connected by technology this becomes increasingly important. In the old days where trans-ocean travel was only possible via boat, it was a lot easier to ignore other groups and live with the mentality of "us" and "our land here" and "them" and "their land far over there." With technology and ease of travel, this is no longer the case. "We" and "they" share the same space know.