Residents and businesses in Los Angeles counties were told this week that they would have to limit outdoor water use to one day a week, starting June 1. This is the first time water officials have applied such a strict rule.
“This is a crisis. This is unprecedented,” said Adele Hagehalil, general manager of the Southern California Water District. “We have never done anything like this before and because we have not seen this situation happen this way before.”
The great American lawn has historically been a symbol of status and is depicted as a place of relaxation and comfort. But they require excessive amounts of water to maintain – water that drains quickly.
Grass is the largest irrigated “crop” in America, surpassing corn and wheat, according to a frequently cited study by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It notes that by the early 2000s, grass turf – mostly in front of lawns – covered about 63,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Georgia.
Maintaining all of this grass on the front lawn requires up to 75% of water consumption per household, according to this study, which is a luxury California cannot afford as climate-induced drought pushes reservoirs to historic levels. low levels.
In Southern California – dotted with mansions of wealthy celebrities and pristine green courtyards – the availability of conventional lawns simply won’t work anymore as the effects of climate change intensify, said John Fleck, director of the University of New York’s Water Program. Mexico.
“You want to have a little space in your backyard where your kids can play, so a little bit of grass isn’t terrible,” Fleck told CNN. “It’s just that the large lawn area – which isn’t really used except” because it looks beautiful “- has to go. This is what we can no longer have.
“We just can’t afford the water for that,” he said.
Water pigs
America’s grass crazing can be traced back to 17th-century England, Fleck said, where carefully maintained lawns have become a “symbol of status and wealth” because of the high cost of maintaining them.
“This idea of lawns as a demonstration of status has really taken root in the horticultural culture of this country with British colonialism, so it somehow traveled west with us and took on all this work,” Fleck said.
In the United States, lawns have expanded and thrived on the East Coast, “where it rains all the time and you don’t have to add a lot of extra water for irrigation,” Fleck said. And as the Americans marched west, they took with them “a landscape that was familiar and comfortable to them.”
“The big problem is that we’ve brought grass into this climate in the southwest that comes from wetter places,” Fleck said. “The classic example is called bluegrass in Kentucky.
Kentucky bluegrass, which is native to Europe and Asia but grows particularly well in parts of the eastern United States, requires much more water than the West can offer.
The water does not stay long in the dry southwest. The hot dry air evaporates the water quickly, which in turn increases the amount needed to saturate the grass. This effect becomes even greater on hot summer days – warmer air can absorb more – which is also when it was most difficult to find enough water.
In California, the amount of water needed to maintain a lawn varies; the state is home to almost a dozen subclimates that range from humid and cool to hot and dry.
So a 1,500-square-foot lawn in Crescent City on the North Shore may need 22,000 gallons of water a year, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
But further south the demand is increasing dramatically. The lawn of the same size in Los Angeles will require 43,000 gallons a year. An hour east of that in Palm Springs, it jumps to 63,000 gallons a year.
Now consider the fact that the average size of grass in California is more than 5,500 square feet, according to HomeAdvisor, and you can see how grass maintenance in the West can begin to make up a significant portion of a household’s water budget.
About half of California’s urban housing use is used for outdoor landscaping, mainly due to low humidity and hot summers, according to the Department of Water. The average indoor water consumption in California is about 51 gallons a day – or 19,000 gallons a year – according to the agency.
Weed mowers, manure
In addition to water-intensive use, gas-powered mowers emit pollutants that can cause cancer and global warming, which in turn contributes to the region’s climate crisis and drought.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, gas-powered lawn and garden equipment emitted more than 22 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2018. Each year, the agency estimates that more than 17 million gallons of petrol are spilled when refueling.
The grass also has a harder time accessing and absorbing water when it is fertilized, which means more frequent watering is needed. Fertilizers enhance the growth of the plant, which increases its density both above the ground and below. The roots can become compacted, which ultimately reduces the soil’s ability to retain water.
Scientists have linked the use of fertilizers to increased evapotranspiration, the process by which water moves from land to air. In the West, the lack of rainfall and rising demand for evaporation – also known as “thirst for the atmosphere” – are the two main drivers of the region’s water crisis. Higher temperatures increase the amount of water the atmosphere can absorb, which then dries out the landscape.
What you can do differently
Fleck, who lives in a suburban home without lawns in Albuquerque, said that if there really is a lawn, it will probably require the same amount of water that a “frugal indoor water user” consumes in one day.
“If you’re going to have outdoor landscaping, the biggest blow to your water dollar is the trees, not the lawns,” he said. “Trees give you a cooling effect on an urban heat island, save energy from shade air conditioning, and in an urban area that struggles with air quality, as Southern California does, trees help clean the air.
Some cities are already tackling water oversupply by offering to buy out homeowners to replace their lawns with alternatives, such as native plants or photocopying. One of San Diego’s key water conservation programs is paying homeowners to tear up yards full of bluegrass in Kentucky and other grasses – $ 4 a square foot – and replace them with much more water-efficient desert plants. Since launching the program, the city says it has successfully replaced 42 million square feet of lawn. Last year, Nevada passed a bill to ban ornamental grass, requiring the removal of all “non-functional grass” from the Las Vegas Valley by 2027. The Colorado River, which provides water to much of Nevada, is shrinking at an alarming rate. Recent efforts to protect the state would save about 10 percent of the annual distribution of water in the Colorado River Basin region.
“Native landscaping makes sense and can be really beautiful,” Fleck said. “One of my favorite western cities is Tucson, and it has adopted this local aesthetic of landscaping and it’s just a gorgeous city and just uses a lot less water for that.”
Fleck said he expects the “brown lawn to be a mark of honor” soon.
“It’s like contributing to the well-being of our community in this time of crisis by not watering my lawn,” he said. “And I expect that to become a status symbol.”
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