When Dawn and I were in Kenya, it was an interesting thing. For about 2 hours every day, the local deep well near an oasis would be pumped into cisterns all around the area. It was often difficult to get the local people to allow the cisterns to fill before they turned on hoses to water the trees. There was enough water to do both, but in their minds the trees had priority over their own drinking needs.
In our world, we sometimes blind ourselves to the limited nature of our environment.