Water makes the world go ’round, but here’s how the water goes ’round the world—and sometimes doesn’t—due to the one-inch smelt.

At one point in Waterworld—the 1995 bomb of a movie about a submerged Earth and a near career ender for Kevin Costner (or was that The Postman? Draft Day?)—his Mariner character declares, “Nothing’s free in Waterworld.” Well, you don’t have to go to the future for that to be true; been to Disneyland lately, Kev? And one of the things people pay a lot of money for is water: in bottles, through pipes, from hoses. Water is not only basic to human life but commercial existence as well, used to manufacture and transport just about everything on Earth, about three-quarters of which is covered in water. A world covered in water? That sounds like a good movie …

1. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond argues that the long-term success of Eurasian culture was due to people in those regions being able to more quickly develop and maintain agrarian societies because of access to water balanced by a dry climate allowing for extended storage. Likewise, access to water has always been the basis of commercial success—or did you think it was just a coincidence that all the globe’s great cities are located near rivers, lakes, seas or oceans?

2. In California, those factors combine to make the state’s agri-business a global juggernaut. Its farmers not only produce nearly half of all U.S. grown nuts, fruits and vegetables but, in 2013, they exported more than $21 billion worth of the stuff around the globe. In a recent and cruel twist, their livelihoods have been threatened by limited access to both water and the global marketplace, however.

3. A recent slowdown/shutdown at West Coast ports hit those farmers hard—citrus growers lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in export sales. Though that crisis was resolved, a more serious and long-term one could be the state’s current drought.

4. The water shortage cost farmers more than $2 billion in 2014 and it looks to only get worse. And what farmers believe is worse is that this could have been avoided if the state had managed its water better. They point to examples of past water distribution plans that were killed because it was feared they would have an adverse effect on a finger-long fish called the Delta smelt.

5. Of course, a lot of California water policy is open to scrutiny. Though residents and farmers have been told to limit their water usage, three of the globe’s biggest producers of bottled water—Pepsi (Aquafina), Coca-Cola (Dasani) and Nestle (Pure Life)—use gobs of California municipal tap water.

6. Bottled water is a $60 billion-a-year industry. According to the International Bottled Water Association, the actual water accounts for very little of the retail price of the item. Figuring an average bottle of water to sell for $1.45, the water makes up only about 16 cents of the price while transporting it costs about 46 cents.

7. Of course, many of those bottles are shipped over water, which remains the dominate method of moving goods globally. Ninety percent of the world’s goods move over water. The world’s largest shipping company, APM-Maersk, as of April 2014, had a capacity of 2.9 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units—or, shipping containers).

8. So many cargo containers are moved over water that one of the biggest threats to shipping safety is the containers themselves. About 10,000 containers fall off ships annually, and while that represents a tiny fraction of the more than 50 million containers shipped each year, they pose a danger to other vessels because some of those containers remain floating just below the water’s surface like corrugated icebergs in some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

9. It’s easy to cast a critical eye at industries such as agriculture and bottled water when it comes to water use, but the fact is that most products require large amounts of water to be created. American industrial facilities withdraw 18.2 billion gallons of fresh water every day.

10. It requires 2.5 gallons to refine a single gallon of gasoline; 24 gallons to make a pound of plastic and 80,000 gallons to produce the steel for the average car.

11. Another iconic California industry, computers, uses a surprising amount of water. It requires 10 gallons of water to produce a single computer chip.

12. How all of that will affect and be affected by the California drought remains to be seen and promises to have a global effect since the state’s economy ranks as the eighth largest in the world.

13. What apparently has not remained to be seen is the Delta smelt. A four-day survey of local waters in April found just one smelt, leading to fears that it is now extinct.