Interesting post Greg
It's a long and complex subject, but far more awareness now than there ever has been - and covering everything from water shortage, electrical power, gas blah blah.
The prime place I've ever seen almost all aspects of "conservation at work" in real life was here in Costa Rica at
http://www.earth.ac.cr/ing/index.html (the website is total shit and needs proper maintenance/updating).
Literally everything has a use and recycled for sometimes weird uses - but the end result is they are totally self-sufficient and the whole campus - probably around 15,000 acres in total (including experimental land), does not take any power or water from the national grid. It's also surprising how inexpensive it is to create self-sufficiency - their fruit washing and packaging plant only cost around $10K in investment to power up and provides recycled clean water to handle the produce from around 7500 acres.