“Do what you can, with what you have, wherever you are.” — Teddy Roosevelt

Helping Mother Earth to survive the onslaught of pollution of air, soil, and water might seem to be a task beyond the might and means of the lone individual.  But by substituting ingenuity and a “can-do” attitude for feelings of helplessness, substantial results can be obtained, and its worthwhile to do so, for as we all know, Mother Earth is our only home.

Destroy her and we destroy ourselves.

So, where to begin?  Let’s start with fresh water, the primary human nutrient, increasingly in short supply as population increases.  Conserving what we have makes sense, ¹ but how can the lone individual make a difference?

Here is one simple way:  Save a one-quart plastic bottle and cap.  Remove the label.  Rinse out thoroughly.  Refill with clean sand or small stones.  Recap it.  Place it in your toilet tank in the corner farthest from the mechanism.  It will stay in place, displacing one quart of water.  In other words, each time time you or someone else in your home or business flushes the toilet you save one quart of water.

The bottle costs nothing extra.  You paid for it when you bought whatever it contained.  It uses no power.  It has no moving parts to wear out.  It doesn’t corrode.  It just sits in your toilet tank, unmoving because of the sand or pebbles with which you filled it, saving one quart of water each time the toilet is flushed.

A family of four, each flushing a toilet, say, three times per day, saves twelve quarts, or three gallons, per day.  Per year:  (3 gallons per day) x (365 days) = 1,095 gallons of water saved per year.

This is not my idea.  I first read about this and put my “toilet bottle” in place several years ago.  As you can see it was quite a while later that I realized this was a two-step process: First, install the bottle.  Second, talk it up so others can do it.  There are many cheap, simple ways to save a little water.  When you find one, don’t take as long as I did to spread the word.  Of course you don’t have to start blogging.  But somehow share the ideas.

Our ingenuity and a “can-do” attitude.

Saving water needn’t depend on the supposed superior abilities of “experts” or on some expen$ive government program.

We can do it!

This post is dedicated to the yet unborn.

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.”

—African proverb

¹ The United States uses more than 450 billion gallons of water every day.