A recent study on teh ...

A recent study on teh cumulative effect of overuse of the planet's resources by individuals, including water, can be found here: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/spiekerk/papers/Spiekermann-Small-Impacts-Imperceptible.pdf (Small Impacts and Imperceptible Effects Causing Harm With Others). The conclusion is that individuals should consider how their own actions might cause future harm when seen cumulatively, instead of individually. The old adage 'what if everyone behaves like you do' can lead the way to setting good examples of water use. So the question is how can we let people visualize what their own water use causes on a planetary scale if everyone uses the amount of water that they do themselves. One such initiative focusing on more resources is the ecological footprint calculator: http://footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/ If we want to focus on showing the consequences of water use, we could use this as a model. Here is the first paragraph of the paper: "In an increasingly crowded and interactive world, there are more and more ways to harm people in an indirect way. These “new harms” (Lichtenberg, 2010, 558) are typically caused by many hands (Thompson, 1980). Many people use too many plastic bags, drive their cars too much, eat too much meat or bluefin tuna, drink bottled water, et cetera. Each individual act has a negligible effect, and may, as a singular act, not be harmful—but the same act performed by millions is. This gap between the (almost or perhaps entirely) harmless singular act and the harmful performance of the same act by many spells trouble for the moral evaluation of these acts and for assigning responsibility. "