California, as the world knows, is in the middle of an
historic drought. Yes, water is a precious commodity that we don’t have much
of, but we have more than our share of moralists now.
It’s fun for the media to fly over large parcels of
property where wealthy people have green lawns or lush gardens and wag fingers
about the excessive use of water. My own town has many such properties, and the
state wants water reductions of 36 percent. At our town council meeting the
other night, one property owner told the city that he had spent $40,000 or so
on professional landscaping in 2011. He had made several big reductions in
water use since then, but he doesn’t get credit for the ones prior to the 2013
benchmark date. Now he figures that if he adds the new percentage on top of
what he has already achieved, his reduction since the installation of the
system will be closer to 80 percent, and many of his plants will die. But he’s
rich, tsk, tsk, isn’t that too bad.
I used to live in Palm Springs, a lovely target for
moralizers. Swimming pools, golf courses, and yes, those “misters” at
restaurants that make it possible for people to dine outdoors in hot months. So
shut off the misters and close the golf courses, they are just tourist
luxuries, right? Well no. These are revenue-producing amenities. Golf brings in
tourists, who might like to eat a meal in comfort on a hot day. But when you
close one thing and turn off another, you are also affecting people’s jobs as
well as the local tax base. So it all isn’t quite as much of a no-brainer as
outsiders might think.
You can take moralizing back even further. California is
largely a desert and was never intended to support the millions who live here
now. Too bad for us, why didn’t our stupid planners think ahead? Heck, if you
want, you can moralize about green lawns. Where did the need for manicured
lawns come from? Well, maybe the white European ancestors of those who may live
on these properties now brought this notion with them from the Old World (fortunately,
the technology behind fake grass has improved so much that it seems like a
reasonable design alternative now).
Some think California agriculture is getting something of a
free ride. But many farmers have let some of their fields go fallow. Prices
will go up; jobs are affected. And then there’s the beef industry, among the
biggest water users. Shall we check the trash cans or compost pits of the
moralizers to see who has given up steak?
The good news in all of this is that the drought may focus
more attention on real waste: inefficient practices that can be modified. It’s
not usually about whether gardens are watered, for example, but how.
Drought-tolerant landscapes will become fashionable and attractive as we get
used to them. And solutions that seemed prohibitively expensive decades ago,
like desalination plants, suddenly seem like good ideas.
No question, there is pain to be shared here, and plenty of
it to go around, along with attitude-adjusting. But arguments centered on,
“Your pain isn’t as necessary as mine,” just don’t hold a lot of water with me.
