How much
water does a strawberry cost?
Do
you care? Should you care? Maybe it is kind of
important to think about how much water, or clean air, or healthy ecosystem,
things cost.
Water is valuable. It is important to make conscious choices
about how we spend it.
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Before you read further – if you are reading this to get an answer to that question you should stop now. You won’t get it. If you want to (maybe) get pushed to thinking about it a bit differently, then you might enjoy the next 500 words…
But,
you won’t get an answer… You may find a
new way of thinking about cost though.
What
do you think when you hear How much water does a strawberry cost? Does it sound weird?
Wait,
think about it. Water is one of the most
important things on this planet. It is
finite. Shouldn’t we want to know how
much water it takes to produce something?
If
you think this irrelevant go to California’s Central Valley, indeed all of
California and watch the struggles for the declining amount of available water.
Almonds, strawberries, people, lawns, fish (yes, fish) and many more interests
all ‘need’ water. Some will get much
less than they ‘need’.
Suddenly,
strawberries that cost less water will have a competitive advantage, and
consumers may become interested in how much water a strawberry costs.
It
isn’t just water. Our planet has a
finite amount of a lot of things that our lives depend on. And a finite amount of ecosystems and other
resources that make our planet able to support so many billions of us.
We’ve
proven remarkably incapable of managing them prudently. Far beyond the California water
situation. Check out what Berkeley based
Global Footprint has to say.
Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources
we use and to absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and
six months to regenerate what we use in a year. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
Not
good management, especially if you think some of the other creatures on the
planet deserve something too.
So,
what does that all have to do with How much water does that strawberry cost? If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage
it.
So,
maybe we should know how much water something costs?
How
much water does your designer jacket cost?
How much carbon?
Your
iPhone? Your Xbox? Your favourite TV show?
What about education? How much water does a degree cost? The list goes on.
What about education? How much water does a degree cost? The list goes on.
Even
to How
much water does that beer cost?
Beer can cost a lot of water.
But, some companies are taking big steps to manage it. Some aren’t.
Would you like to know How much water your beer costs?
Some
companies are measuring things like this.
I was pleasantly surprised this week, while reading the sustainability report
of Eldorado Gold, a Canadian gold mining company that is not recognized as a
sustainability leader. Yet, they tracked
water usage around gold production, and have made impressive steps at managing
it.
I’m
sure other companies are doing similar, with water and other important natural
capital inputs.
Wait,
what is natural capital? There are a few
definitions that people use. I like to
think of natural capital as those resources the planet provides for us and
which people and industry are not really paying the full price to use (or
abuse).
Things
like water, like clean air, like ecosystems.
For the most part we use and abuse water and air and such at the cost of
acquiring them. As water gets more
scares it costs more to acquire but is the price really a market price? Are we paying the full ecosystem cost of
taking that water from nature?
Same
with abusing air. Industry (and individuals,
for those of us who occasionally want to point at others as the problem) are
starting to pay some cost for managing how much we mess up the air and the
atmosphere. But, not nearly the true
cost.
This
is a long debate and we won’t try to resolve it here, even though it is
important.
Back
to how
much water that strawberry costs…
Do
you think we should know how much? Or
should we even care?
Do
you think it important to know how much of our earth’s ecosystem resource are
used by the different things in your life?
Do
you trust industry and governments to manage these resources without measuring
them in relation to outputs?
If
you answered these questions like I do then you may want to ask How
much water does that strawberry cost?
And
keep asking until it becomes not weird to ask because everyone knows that we
should know how much of our planet’s ecosystem is used for the products and
services that we buy.
…remember…
How
much water does that strawberry cost?