There is no life without water. And like life, water is something that many people take for granted. While some parts of the United States, particularly the Southwest, face very real shortages, it doesn't look as though we'll be reduced to wearing the water-capturing suits of Frank Herbert's desert-world Done novels any time soon. That being said, freshwater isn't as bountiful as many would think. "It is constantly going to be more expensive to acquire potable water," says Kim Shinn, P.E., LEED AP, principal and division director with TLC Engi-neering for Architecture's Nashville office. While the earth's surface is more than 70% water, less than 3% of that is freshwater, and only a fraction of that is potable and readily accessible to the human population—especially in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas. "We're increasingly putting our buildings in places where there is not an abundance of water, and we're doing it with sort of a blind eye toward that," says Shinn. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Snowmass, Colo., nonresidential consumption accounts for 53% of total water used by U.S. com- munities, and 70% of that is for commer-cial, industrial and institutional use. "We're building and consuming at a rate that's unsustain able," Shinn says. "We've got to match our [water] consumption to make it more equivalent to what the earth's natural cycle can provide us with."
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