It’s the most important time of the year!

No, not Christmas or back to school - Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. Don’t forget, guys! The fact I’ve neglected to remember the importance of the day for the past five years got me thinking about something else we often forget. 

You guessed it, this post is about how easily we forget our obligation to conserve water. 

North Vancouver is built on the side of a mountain. Driving around here, where Perimeter Drainage is based, it’s easy to forget how important water is to our way of life. It freely flows down the street, after all. It threatens our basements during the winter, so it’s easy to forget how valuable it is once the sun is shining for a month straight and our grass starts to turn brown. 

Money

The easiest reason for people living in the lower mainland to conserve water is directly associated with the costs they’ll save. Last week we wrote about what water harvesting could look like on your property, and it was mostly in reference to the money you’ll save by storing water over the porous winter months.

We might not like to admit it, but we love money, right? Or at least the freedom we’re offered when we don’t have to worry about it?

Sure we do, so let’s go in another direction. 

Easing the Pressure

One thing we couldn’t live without is the way of life with which we’ve become accustomed. We enjoy our sports, the activities in which our families participate, and we’d have a hard time figuring out our next steps if suddenly that was all lost to us. 

Look, I know we’re risking coming off a little thick here, but when was the last time you stopped to remember the fact that there are places in the world that don’t enjoy the luxuries we do?

Luxuries such as clean running water. If we can cut back on our water consumption, we’ll ease the pressure on local utilities and ensure there’s plenty of the wet stuff to go around all year long.

Teaching the Next Generation 

We’re a simple neighbourhood drainage blog, but just because you occupy a relatively small space in the world doesn’t mean you can’t have a big impact. Remembering to cut back on your water consumption isn’t as hard as remembering to buy flowers for your wife (or husband), and surely it will have a greater long term impact on things that are more important than your utility bill. Things like the ability, in the future, to turn that local water conservation into a solution for a place that doesn’t have the option to conserve their water. 

This is unlikely to happen in our lifetime, but it could happen in the lifetime of the next generation. There’s probably nothing else in the world that matters more than your children, so this Valentine’s Day, give them the gift of knowledge, awareness and empathy. 

And sure, some candy, too.