Living with Water Scarcity

“Don’t panic. It is easy to live with water scarcity. Use politics to
allocate community water before using economics to ration commodity water,” says author David Zetland.

Scarcity is a perception. Shortage is a fact. Most of us deal with
scarcity every day. We spend our time going places, doing things and
seeing people. We spend our money on products and services. We
wouldn’t mind a bit more time and money, but at least we get some of
what we want.

Shortage is worse than scarcity because you can’t get any of what
you want, even if you have time or money.

Increasing water scarcity is forcing us to choose among competing
wants. Some lucky people do not face these choices, but an increasing
number do. Those people need to manage scarcity if they want to
avoid shortage.

This book is not about measuring scarcity, a perception that changes
from one place to another and one community to another. This book
describes appropriate solutions for living with—perhaps even thriving
with — water scarcities in both quantity and quality.