Water, Water, ... Not a Drop To Drink

This morning a blog flickered across AOL so quickly I didn’t get its name down—but I managed to print out its text. It’s news I’ve waited and hoped for ever since I spent the winter of 1973-4 in Los Angeles and its dry, dry environs.
I was raised in Michigan where there are rivers, lakes or streams every couple of miles. Water is as much a part of life as air. When I moved to LA, the first thing I found myself looking for was water. Not the ocean, but potable water. There wasn’t any in sight.
This quickly made me uneasy. I was surrounded by millions of people with no visible means of slaking their thirst. Nothing. Nada. Nowhere. What came out of the tap wasn’t drinkable so I followed the fashion of ordering in purified drinking water by the jug—mounted on a rented stand in the corner of the kitchen.
Water trucks were as common as mailpersons. Existing tap water came via pipe through the mountains from northern California or from faraway sources like the Colorado River. (What happens if an earthquake cuts those pipelines? A lot of people die.)
That’s the whole American southwest. Air so dry it chaps your lips in summer. No serious supply of fresh water anywhere. Millions and millions of human beings dependent on water that simply is not there. Water sucking lawns, parks and golf courses everywhere.
I concluded that we were setting ourselves up for a disaster that will make the Chinese and Haitian earthquakes or the Indian Ocean Tsunami look like traffic fender benders. After all, the whole southwest (and many other deserts on this planet) is dotted with the remains of past civilizations that simply dried up and blew away when the water stopped.
What’s going to happen in LA and the southwest won’t be at all historically unusual. No matter what we do, in a thousand years archaeologists will wander through the ruins of the Mt. Palomar observatory wondering what forgotten god this temple was built for. (Movie lots will probably baffle them completely.) But we don’t have to hurry the inevitable.
So much of the water that DOES get to LA—or Phoenix or San Diego, Bakersfield, Las Vegas and Santa Barbara—is wasted on growing the sort of green grass that was meant for well watered places like Kentucky and Michigan! It is distributed by sprinklers that allow much of the water intended for lawns to evaporate before it even reaches the ground! This is DESERT, guys, DESERT!
Today’s blog offered the best news I’ve heard out of southern California since Clint Eastwood rescued the western movie genre. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in a fit of inspired sanity, is paying customers to rip up their lawns!
You can get as much as two grand if you tear out the grass and replace it with the kind of plants God meant to grow in desert and semi-desert climates, stuff that doesn’t need tons of water. Or you can put in flag stones, gravel and brick walkways.
You can even lay down synthetic turf—if you absolutely have to keep up the illusion that you really never left Ohio. For those who cannot bear to accept the fact that they actually do live in arid Southern California, there are rebates for water efficient appliances, lower pressure sprinkler nozzles and timers on those sprinklers.
This is necessary—vital—throughout the American southwest if humans are going to keep crowding in to lands meant for few people and less greenery. It won’t prevent the inevitable collapse of an overstressed water system, but it might significantly delay the evil day.
How about a slogan for the folks at the waterworks? “Rip up your lawn, Los Angelinos, the life you prolong could be your own.”