Water is essential to all life on earth, and experts predict that by 2025, our water supply will be dangerously depleted.

Popular Science published an article saying that over the last 100 years, the U.S. has depleted enough of our groundwater to fill Lake Erie twice. Between 2000 and 2008, has been the fastest depletion of water in our history.

“We think it’s serious,” Leonard Konikow, the U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who performed the study, tells Popular Science. “It’s more serious in certain areas.”

Art for Water projects educate and promote creative self-expression, collaboration and activism. By bringing children and adults together in the making of public art, Art for Water fosters stewardship of an essential natural resource. And, it inspires advocacy for those living without basic needs.

Experts predict that the demand for clean water will exceed the supply by 56 percent by 2025. Imagine life without water – it is estimated that every American uses between 100 – 150 gallons of water per day. As if the supply will never run out. But there is no way the earth’s clean water supply can sustain the growing population, unless drastic changes are made.

People in underdeveloped nations, such as Africa, have very little access to clean water, and their water consumption, on average, is about 2.5 gallons per day.

Art for Water draws attention to the global water crises. Their projects are designed to promote dialogue that is focused on the shrinking water supply, due to climate change, access and commercial exploitation.

With water supply threatening depletion, so goes our food supply.

Yale Environment 360 states: In an assessment of water supplies in California’s Central Valley and the High Plains of the central U.S. — which runs from northwest Texas to southern Wyoming and South Dakota — University of Texas researchers found that in many places water is being used faster than it can be replenished, and that some regions may be unfit for agriculture within decades.

Ms. Destrempes is the head of Art for Water, a program begun in 2007 and sponsored by the nonprofit arts service organization Fractured Atlas.

Through Art for Water’s projects, Destrempes is hoping to inspire change. Participants have told her that they are making efforts to run their dishwashers or washing machines only with a full load or that they have stopped buying bottled water, which uses an additional gallon of water to produce each bottle.

“These projects are planting seeds in people’s minds that this is something they should pay attention to,” she says. “[A clean water supply] is going to become a really huge issue.”

Becoming aware of the rising critical situation, using as little water as possible and spreading the word about the potential water crisis is something that all American’s could do to avert or even slow down this life-giving but dwindling resource.

Image via USGS