Why Californians need to lose their 100-year-old lust for lawns
When climate change worsens, your ass is grass
In April of last year, California Governor Jerry Brown stood among the Sierra Nevada mountains, on a dry plot of land typically covered in five feet of snow. This absence of snow-pack, along with historically low rainfall, helped make the reality of the current drought painfully clear. Cities and towns in California, Brown announced, would be required by law to cut water consumption by 25%, the first time officials implemented such a restriction in the state’s history.
California’s ongoing drought is the result of climate change, higher temperatures, and years of low precipitation. But to be fair, many regions of California were never exactly suited to meet modern civilization’s great demand for water. It was really thanks to human ingenuity, starting some 150 years ago, that water began to be stored and transported in large amounts, thus making the American West habitable.
Desert areas of the state, like San Diego and Los Angeles, owe their viability to visionaries and engineers like Harriet Strong. Strong, a thorough badass and polymath, led a life of invention and advocacy that paved the way for the grand water-management projects of the 1930s, including the All-American Canal, the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, and other reservoirs along the Colorado River.
Yet these public works projects, however sophisticated and effective, are at the mercy of three forces: periodic weather, agricultural demand, and urban consumption.
In terms of grand trends in weather and climate, research shows the Southwest United States has a long history of dramatic and volatile shifts. Analyses gathering 3,000 years of data show that overall the 20th Century was one of the region’s wettest periods in the last 1,300 years. And now, things seem to be changing for the drier. And for scientists, it’s impossible to tell if the current droughts will last a decade, or if they augur a century-long period of drought and water insecurity, similar to what the region experienced hundreds of years ago in the medieval era.
In the human sphere, the water-conservation debate has created two main tribes. On one hand, you have farmers, whose output contributes substantially to the national food supply but who consume 75% of the water. And on the other, you have municipal and residential landowners. And though they use only the remaining quarter, critics point out that their water is frequently committed to vanity projects like the upkeep of lush lawns and gardens.
When it comes to lawns, Californians could save more water if only they were more realistic about their environment. The image of the ideal Western garden, the one meant to adorn a valuable, respectable estate (like those found in wealthy California zip codes) comes from England, France, and the Northeast United States — all places with climates markedly different from California’s. The flora that accompany these traditions tend to be temperate deciduous plants, requiring a steady supply of water to survive.
A major water-sink in residential areas is grass. And the taste for grass is in part due to the influential horticulturalist and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing, whose 1841 book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, impressed upon the American middle and upper class the image of a respectable and beautiful lawn, thoroughly carpeted by grass. But Downing and his audience, it pays to note, were Northerners, and were drawing from their region’s native plants, and did not demand elaborate sprinkler or irrigation systems to preserve their lawns.
As California’s population swelled around the turn of the century, the well-off changed their climate but not their tastes. Today some environmentalists, like members of the Theodore Payne Foundation, cultivate plants native to Central and Southern California, and educate residents about how one can establish a beautiful and drought-resistant garden of succulents that doesn’t include prickly cacti. But as long as people are worried about traditional tastes and property values, it’s hard to say how much native landscaping will catch on.
California is no stranger to droughts, and one of the worst in its history happened in the years 1976 and ‘77. During this (at the time unprecedented) water shortage, conservation became the business of the average citizen. Homeowners modified their toilet tanks to cut back on water use, filling them with bottles, store-bought dams, and bricks. Some even went so far as to install special partitions in their bathtubs to keep water use down. Farmers tolerated as much as a 75% drop in their water allowance, and began to build little reservoirs and buy water pumps to re-irrigate their land. The state itself had to overhaul its aqueduct system to supply water to depleted parts of the Bay Area like Marin County.
These measures, which were remarkably collective, mitigated the harm of the drought. And with the help of heavy rains in the spring of 1978, state water levels began to return to normal.
Shortly after the worst of the drought, the Director of the Department of Water Resources reflected on the natural disaster, saying, “We will have to come to grips with the fact that water is a limited resource, and that using less water must become a way of life in California.” While it’s impossible to predict a drought, at least that much is certain.
