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To: Gary H who wrote (30358)	3/29/2003 3:46:30 PM
From: Moominoid	Respond to of 74559

As far as water supply goes the biggest use is agriculture but we only need to use that much because most grain etc. is fed to animals which are then subsequently eaten by people (or milk etc. drunk). We could use a lot less water or support more people on the same water with a shift in the food mix. My point is these things aren't so fixed. The total amount of water embodied in people and animals is small - a few large ponds more or less. That's not so important. Other big uses of water are cooling for power stations and urban irrigation/sewage use. The former doesn't use up a lot of water but does heat it up and so is environmentally disruptive in that way. Urban irrigation can be cut by using more appropriate plants in urban areas. Urban sewage by water conserving methods (in Israel for example recent toilets allow you two levels of flushing same in Australia) and recycling/purification etc. I'm an environmentalist. Just pointing out that some constraints aren't as hard and fast as some people may think. It is also worth knowing what the most important constraints/impacts actually are. Population densities in India are not much different to the more densely populated parts of Western Europe like Britain and Germany. So it is not neccessarily a recipe for poverty. Everything is pointing to World population stabilizing some time this century at a couple of billion or so more than now. In some countries this will be due to the desire or policy to have fewer children. In others due to disease (AIDS). Only question is what is going to stop population growth in Arab countries where there is so far little sign of it happening.... David