Not feeling guilty enough already about thrashing the environment like an out-of-control T-Rex heading for extinction? Then take a quiz to calculate your "water footprint," a new look at your impact on the Earth.

Dutch scientist Arjen Y. Hoekstra, the scientific director of the Water Footprint Network, introduced the concept in 2002. Defined simply, it is the amount of fresh water an individual, community or business uses to produce or consume products and food.

The main goal, said Robin Madel, research associate for the organization H2O Conserve, is to understand that "virtual water" is different from the stuff flowing out of the tap.

"It's the water that goes into making that piece of meat on your plate," Madel says. "It's in gasoline. When you turn on a light bulb, you're using water."

Both H2O Conserve and the Water Footprint Network offer helpful calculators. The network has a quick calculator that combines where you live, your gender, your diet and your annual income to make a quick judgment. A more detailed questionnaire has a bar graph showing where your footprint is biggest.

A middle-class American woman who eats an average amount of meat consumes 3,245 cubic meters of water each year in her diet, according to the Dutch quick calculator. If the same woman is an ovo-lacto vegetarian (who avoids meat, but does eat eggs and dairy products), her footprint drops to 2,514 cubic meters -- more than twice the global average of 1,243 cubic meters.

"People have no clue about how much water goes into an egg or a glass of milk," says Bountiful resident Thomas Rodgers, a former dairy farmer now a proselytizing vegan.

Meat and dairy consumption contribute most to an average person's water footprint. The "virtual water" varies across the globe, but in the United States, according to H2O Conserve, it takes more than 1,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef.

"Food, energy and water are all connected," Madel says. "How we conduct ourselves with any one of those things impacts the other."