I'd like it to be a theme of my writing about teaching that I learn as much as any student in my class when I teach! It certainly is a fact. This semester has been huge for me because I'm teaching a subject I don't know much about (sustainability), and because I am teaching writing, which is a first (yes, in 25 years of teaching, I have never taught writing).
A few weeks ago I gave a (writing) assignment to estimate global freshwater needs by computing your own freshwater needs and extrapolating to the world. Then compare with estimates of global usage. My expectation: That a typical American college kid uses way more water than a typical person on Earth, and this would be a lesson about disparity. I wasn't wrong, but I also wasn't right either:
It turns out that global freshwater use is way larger than any estimate of your own personal water use, extrapolated to the globe! Isn't that odd? It's because global freshwater use is not dominated by household uses like laundry and toilets (which, by the way, don't need freshwater). It is dominated by agriculture. If you add in your own share of agricultural water use, a typical American uses way more than the average human! But it is hard to know or estimate this without significant engineering research.
There was one clue, however, in the essays I got: One student included the amount of water used to water a lemon tree in their dorm room. It was a trivial amount of water, so it was almost a joke. But then if you think about how much food we eat relative to the miniscule annual production of that tiny lemon tree, there is a little window into just how much water we must use for agriculture.
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