By Shermakaye Bass

When legislators cross party lines and governors publicly plead for water reform, you know the country’s water crunch has reached a new degree of direness.

And yet, some conservationists ask, who’s really listening?

In late July an Opinion column appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers. In it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and senior U.S. Senator, Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, attempted to jolt water-hoggers into acknowledging that their state is in a full-blown water crisis.

The unlikely duo delivered frightening news: California’s largest reservoir, the Shasta Reservoir, is operating at only 48 percent capacity this year, and the state’s second largest water storage reservoir, Lake Oroville, has less water to spare than it has in three decades. California’s multi-year drought has allowed wildfires to gobble up more than a million acres this year. And job-loss has become a major factor, they say, noting that in two of the past three years, the Pacific salmon fisheries (which impact tens of thousands of jobs) have shut down because there just isn’t enough salmon for fishing.

In light of those facts, you have to scratch your head over why Americans, who consume two to three times the amount of Europeans daily, still squander water, the most essential thing to life itself.

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