Could a well-run social marketing campaign encourage enough people to work together to conserve water that it could  dent the drought that has put Atlanta’s golf courses and Georgia’s wildlife at such odds?  I believe so, and here are my back-of-the-envelope calculations to back that up:

According to the Atlanta Water Shortage blog, the federales are draining Lake Lanier to the tune of a billion gallons per day, more or less. 

A well-run campaign to perusade hotel guests to reuse their towels conserves 72,000 gallons of water per hotel per year, more or less.

Finally, according to the Google, there are 84,691 hotels in the state of Georgia, more or less.

Assuming those numbers are all somewhere close to accurate, that means if every hotel in Georgia ran a successful campaign to encourage guest to be responsible and conserve water by reusing their towels, it would save six billion gallons of water per year. That’s six days of outflow from the beleagured Lake Lanier. For good measure, it would save a bunch of energy and prevent a bunch of pollution, too.

Of course, we can’t make the drought go away with this penny-ante conservation, but six more days of water in the lake would be nothing to sneeze at.

Everyday citizens are much more willing to be conscientious about little things like reusing their towels when they think that enough other people are doing it that it adds up to something meaningful. Hey, why be the only one to give up a fresh new towel?