We have said before that if you want to see Florida’s future water problems, look to the west. It is not a pretty sight and our dysfunctional “leaders” are incapable of seeing that far, or even trying.
Growing turf for lawns is the main agricultural endeavor in Florida, so eliminating lawns will be a difficult task and one that terrifies Tallahassee to the extent that they will not even think about it.
It is a task though that will indeed come unless radical changes are made from our current unsustainable system.
All the more reason to adopt our new constitutional resolution: floridarighttocleanwater.org.
Read the original article with many photos here in the New York Times.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
In Los Angeles, the Grass Isn’t Always Greener This Year
Southern California residents are beginning to accept that lush lawns are unsustainable when reservoirs and rivers run low in a drought era.
AGOURA HILLS, Calif. — Erin Brockovich made her name decades ago as an environmental activist who exposed corporate wrongdoing that polluted drinking water.
So she felt a bit defensive when a television reporter asked how her name landed on a list of water guzzlers during a dire California drought. At one point last year, she received a $1,700 bill for two months of water and fines.
Ms. Brockovich ultimately decided she had to get rid of her lawn, a central part of the backyard oasis she had built over more than two decades living in Agoura Hills, a suburb of large homes with immaculate yards about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. She replaced 3,100 square feet of grass with high-tech artificial turf.
But as climate change exposes the limits of the water supply, homeowners and water officials say the end of the thirsty lawn may finally be here.
Where residents once looked askance at any yard that resembled a desert diorama, there are now parades of gravel beds studded with cacti, native plant gardens and artificial turf. The change reflects a different kind of neighborly peer pressure, supercharged by stringent new water restrictions that took effect in June.
“Having a lawn up here in the Valley is completely nonsensical,” said Ms. Jessen, 45, as she maneuvered her 5-month-old son, Scout, into a sliver of shade on a recent 100-degree afternoon.
Despite that portrayal, the region has a patchwork of communities with varying landscaping conventions. Many neighborhoods in Los Angeles have yards that would be considered tiny by people in, say, the Midwest, and dirt lots or concrete are hardly unusual.
Still, real grass often reigns in affluent neighborhoods.
In Hancock Park, a historic enclave in the center of Los Angeles, Bill Newby, 65, said that sloping lawns were essential to his community’s identity.
“We see people coming into this neighborhood all the time, jogging through,” he said. “Halloween here is delightful.”
While Mr. Newby said he was working to follow the city’s watering restrictions — two assigned days per week — he found them frustrating.
Experts say that getting rid of lawns alone will not solve the state’s water problem. And there are persistent debates about who should shoulder more painful cuts: residents of California’s cities, where per capita water usage has steadily decreased, or farmers, who say they grow food for the nation.
Southern California’s rise was predicated on ready access to water. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, which opened in 1913, ushered millions of gallons from the Owens River Valley across more than 200 miles to what would rapidly become the nation’s second most populous city — an engineering triumph that defied nature.
Los Angeles’s growth over the following decades coincided with a booming middle class whose aspirations of suburban homesteading trace back to the English countryside. There, lawns were an early means of displaying conspicuous wealth among the landed gentry, said Christopher Sellers, a history professor at Stony Brook University who has written about lawns in the United States.
American horticulturalists developed heartier hybrids of grass designed to survive in warmer, drier climes, though they still needed regular watering. And the lawn made its way west to California, where it took hold as what Mr. Sellers described as “the cultural norm, the expectation.”
The vast Los Angeles region was built on the idea that everybody can own a plot of land with a lawn and driveway. Yet one need only glimpse at nearby nature preserves to see what plants would otherwise thrive here.
“And then we’re seeing the urban environment of the San Fernando Valley,” he said, gesturing to the area in between: dense, varied green textures, broken up by the gray-white of stucco and ribbons of asphalt. Almost none of the plants, he said, “were selected for any other reason than ‘What’s the easiest or what’s the prettiest?’”
Over the decades, the lawn’s supremacy has weathered cycles of drought and rain. Because of climate change, though, droughts have become more frequent and intense.
“The new drought is a hot drought,” said Ellen Hanak, director of the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center. “We have to be ready for it to get acute quickly.”
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, last year pleaded with residents to cut back voluntarily. But water use in some parts of the state actually increased, and Mr. Newsom this year said he would impose mandatory restrictions if water agencies could not get people to conserve. “This is a wake-up call,” Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, said in April when outlining new watering restrictions. According to the district, Southern California water agencies have met and exceeded conservation goals since the rules went into effect. Customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power used 11 percent less water last month than they did in July 2021.
A recent survey by P.P.I.C. found that 51 percent of Los Angeles residents said they and their families had done a lot to reduce water use, the highest figure in the state. Yet 70 percent of Los Angeles residents said people there still weren’t doing enough.
Around the region, landscapers who specialize in drought-tolerant plants and artificial turf say they are scrambling to keep up with demand. “I feel like an analogy is it’s Covid and we’re the only ones with the masks,” said Mitchell Katz, the owner of Camarillo-based Turf Exchange, which has replaced grass with artificial turf for nearly a decade.
Ms. Brockovich was among Mr. Katz’s customers, a full convert to artificial turf, which she said looks and feels nothing like older versions of fake grass, with no unsettling coloring.
While such turf eliminates the need for watering, it must be replaced roughly every 20 years, generating plastic waste. That environmental cost has disqualified it from the M.W.D. rebate program.
At the Theodore Payne Foundation nursery, families browsed the rows of narrow leaf milkweed and sage, herbal and earthy scents heavy in the hot air.
Lorna Estrada, 50, and her daughter, Sienna Kochakji, 13, had come from the Lake Balboa neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley to do some “window shopping,” as Ms. Estrada put it. A fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Estrada said she had taught her students about the drought and climate change. She said she wanted to undertake an outdoor project with Sienna.
So, after 15 years of weighing the idea, she said, “We’re finally letting our lawn go.”
Mr. Meyer said he hoped that someday soon, the San Fernando Valley region would look more like the natural landscapes through which so many Angelenos love to hike. He added the drought is catalyzing the transition.
“A lawn is basically a big, sterile green carpet that uses a lot of water to maintain,” he said. “We’re advocating for a future where our urban spaces blend seamlessly with their natural environments.”
Jill Cowan is a Los Angeles-based reporter for the National desk covering California. @jillcowan
