[jerf]

"Water conservation discussion need to be very localized."

I live in Michigan. Tomorrow my car is going into the dealership to be examined to see if the flood it was in last week damaged it in any subtle ways, then it needs to be cleaned up since I wasn't quite able to get it dry enough to avoid it smelling.

This snapshot gives you a reasonably accurate idea of our relationship to water around here. (I'm smart enough to live where it won't flood, unfortunately my work office is built in a flood plain, albeit on stilts so the main office won't flood, I was out to lunch, bit o' rain pops up, bam.)

[jvdh]

I live in the Netherlands, we have an abundance of water here.

The point is not the availability of water, it is the availability of fresh water. Most of the time it takes a lot of work to treat water in such a way that it suitable for consumption. And then there's the waste water processing. You can't just dump your waste water in nature, it has to be processed first, which takes some effort as well.