Recently, as in more than 24 hours ago, a friend who lives in Minnesota sat in a garden chair and cheerfully had himself doused with ice water. It was all captured on video: a long slow pour, surely a refreshing bracer on what appeared to be a hot summer day. He whooped and brushed his face and laughed and challenged the camera to do the same, as is the practice.

In just a few months, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has proved enormously profitable for the ALS Association. With donations topping $100 million it’s safe to say this has been one of the most altruistic chapters in the big book of internet. It’s a good hearted joke undergirded by an excellent cause. In Minnesota, where lakes and ice run the geological show,  ice water is a plentiful resource. Not so in drought-stricken California. With even the most optimistic estimates placing California in the third year of exceptional drought, the menacing prospect of a completely dry state is beginning to skew more toward reality than possibility. So when the California photographer Brittany App received her Ice Bucket Challenge, she balked at wasting even one drop. “I told my husband, ‘I can’t do it! I can’t dump a bucket of water on my head. I’m not even letting my plants use it.’”

A self-proclaimed “true-blue California girl,” App has spent the bulk of her life in San Luis Obispo County, a coastal county defined by its rolling, crinkly-grass hills, inland lakes, and Mediterranean climate. “I grew up here, a beautiful town with trees and grass and water and stores and friends and schools, so how could I ever think to myself ‘well, this shouldn’t be here, because there’s not enough water’? Because in my brain, there’s always been people here and they’re happy and healthy, but if we’re not really careful with the resources we’ve been given…” Her voice trails off, but the implied follow-up cuts through: “then we’ll run out of water.”       

Equal parts compassionate and ebullient, App has held water issues close to her heart for decades. In 2010, she biked across the United States to raise money and awareness for Water Aid International. Her itinerary took her through the nation’s southern tier, tumbleweed country. Though the marathon ride emphasized water aid in developing nations, it opened App’s eyes to the extant water problems here in the U.S. “I felt like this water issue is sort of ‘if we cannot see it, then it’s not real.’” That out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude demanded a simple redress: bring the drought to people's eyes.

App’s brainchild campaign “Where There Once Was Water” pivots on stunning, arguably horrifying, portraits of the dried lakes that punctuate San Luis Obispo.

“I don’t know how to describe how it feels to stand in the bottom of what was a huge lake and to be able to spin 360 degrees on earth that looks like desert and know you would have been 20 feet underwater or 40 feet underwater or 60 feet underwater, and it’s all gone. As a lake dries up, as the mud dries, it kind of cakes into these pillars, with these chasms between them. If it’s not completely dry, it’s still kind of squishy under your feet, but not squishy like quicksand. It’s dry enough to walk on, but you can feel it squish under your feet. Once it’s completely dry, no more squishing, it’s just dry desert. When you actually see it, it’s terrifying.” Aerial shots complement the ground level experience and provide perspective on just how arid the Golden State is these days. Here is the dam at Lake San Antonio:

On August 7, when App took this photo, the lake sat at just 4% capacity. Compared to that, Lake Nacimiento is a veritable oasis:

Yet, it sits at just 17% capacity and dropping. There was a trove of evidence for California’s dire situation, just waiting for someone with App’s passion and technical skill. Her efforts are garnering some serious and encouraging attention. There has been fresh traffic on the campaign’s Facebook page every day for at least the last month. It has become a viable community resource for concerned Californians. “People are sending me stories now, and sending me their own photos and they’re talking about it, which I was hopeful for, that we could just start a conversation about water, because I couldn’t see that we were talking about it before.” In this case, App started the dialogue and found plenty of willing ears and minds.

Still, as the saying goes, we trust our ears less than our eyes. So, with several months of work on Where There Once Was Water in the bank, App hatched a visual alternative when her ALS Ice Bucket Challenge inevitably came through. Instead of dumping water onto her head and the parched dust beneath her feet, App and her husband Steven would live off five gallons of water for the entirety of one day (“because that’s about as much as a young girl can carry across the desert”). They donated to ALS, and two other cherished charities. They would film their experience in the hope that it would inspire others to do the same. Hence, the Five Gallon Challenge was born.

And a challenge it was, “but totally doable!” App laughingly points out. The difficulty emerged almost immediately. Even the most reflexive activities adopted new gravitas. App rattles off the several new steps the challenge interjected between her and her morning coffee, “I walked outside with my bucket. I filled up the bucket. I carried this forty pounds of water around the corner back to my front door (not a long walk mind you). I filtered it and then I made our coffee.” For her husband’s part, App guesses the most difficult aspect came after a long day fixing bicycles in his shop. That’s thirsty work. Sweaty, too. “Steven did want to take a shower at the end of the day. He used one gallon of our five gallons. He’d pour it bit by bit into his little cup and soap and rinse. He had a quite effective, thoroughly satisfying, feeling-clean-afterward one-gallon shower!” In other words, App and her husband had to think about every activity throughout their day. And that’s the point.

The timing of the Five Gallon Challenge could not be more opportune. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’s dominance of social media feeds, and thus the public consciousness, wanes more and more as the foliage turns. There’s a vacuum in the realm of viral stewardship, a realm created and occupied until recently by the Ice Bucket Challenge. As App puts it, the Ice Bucket Challenge proved that “we as humans are capable of incredible amounts of good and incredible amounts of care.” There’s no reason we can’t channel all that benevolence to another worthy cause, and another, and another after that. “We just need to slow down enough to present our best selves to each other and to the earth,” muses App. A resolution to the metastasizing water crisis lies somewhere at the intersection of prudence and desperation. It’s from that point that the Five Gallon Challenge and Where There Once Was Water materialized. It’s from that point that we can take the mantle of online altruism and apply it to our daily lives.