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Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. If current trends persist, by 2025 the demand for fresh water is expected to rise 56 percent above the amount that is currently available. --Maude Barlow

The psychophysicist Mark Changizi has a simple evolutionary explanation for why water 'doesn't taste of anything': he thinks that the human taste mechanism has been calibrated not to notice the taste of water, so it is optimally attuned to the taste of anything that might be polluting it. If water tasted like Dr Pepper, it would be easier for sensory overload to drown out the hint of 'dead sheep', which would alert us to the fact that a car-cass was decaying in a pool five hundred yards upstream.

Our body is calibrated not to notice the taste of pure water, because it is valuable in evolutionary terms that we notice any deviation from its normal taste.

Dehydrate a muscle by as little as 3 percent, for example, and it will lose 10 percent of its strength and 8 percent of its speed. Inadequate hydration also compromises concentration and coordination.

To make a T-shirt requires using seven hundred gallons of water.13, 14, 15 It makes a big difference where that water comes from. It could come from reservoirs that dammed up a river, stopping the migration of fish and displacing hundreds or thousands of poor people. Or it can be grown in an area where there is adequate rain.