Part 1 (1/2)

BLUE REVOLUTION.

Unmaking Americaas Water Crisis.

Cynthia Barnett.

Chapter 1. The Illusion of Water Abundance.

During Americaas retreat to the suburbs in the 1950s, large home lots, disposable incomes, and a nifty concrete spray called gunite gave families a new marker of success: the backyard swimming pool. For the rest of the twentieth century, residential pools symbolized upward mobility and offered a sense of seclusion not possible at city pools or even private clubs.1 The following decades redefined our relations.h.i.+p with water itselfa”from essence of life to emblem of luxury. By the time of the twenty-first-century housing run-up, even the plain blue pool had lost its l.u.s.ter. Adornments were needed. Aquatic affluence meant floating fire pits, gla.s.s portholes, and vanis.h.i.+ng edges, which create the illusion of never-ending water.2 The amenity to envy was no longer the diving board. The must-have, now, was the waterfall.

No community glorified the trend like Granite Bay, California.

Granite Bay is nestled on the north sh.o.r.es of Folsom Lake, commuting distance east of Sacramento. The upscale suburb is named for the Cretaceous age rock that underlies this region in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. But during the housing boom, Granite Bayas developers were determined to upstage the areaas natural geologic outcroppings.

In Granite Bayas best backyards, rocky waterfalls cascade artfully into boulder-lined swimming pools, set off with grottoes, swim-up bars, and built-in hot tubs. Thick bushes and trees bearing flowers and fruit adorn the watery wonders, making a place naturally dominated by needlegra.s.s and sedge look more like Fiji. Precisely groomed lawns, a quarter acre and larger, complete the sublimely unnatural tableau.

On Waterford Drive, a beige ranch home with a trim green carpet out front only hints at the tropical excess out back: a pair of waterfalls flow into a clear-blue lagoon, with large rocks positioned for sunning and for diving. This is one of the more subdued motifs. Sacramento landscape architect Ronald Allison tells of a two-and-a-half-acre residential design in Granite Bay with a waterfall, a grotto, a cave, six fountains, a pool with a bridge and an island, and a ninety-foot water slide: aItas fun for the grandkids.a3 Such fun has helped push average water use in Granite Bay to among the highest on Earth. Its residents use nearly five hundred gallons of water a person every daya”more than three times the national average.4 Even when drought conditions cut federal water deliveries to California farmers and closed the stateas salmon fisheries, Granite Bay residents continued to consume water as if it were as plentiful as air. After three consecutive years of California drought, Folsom Lakea”actually a reservoir created by a dam on the American Rivera”was so dry, it looked like a moonscape. As water levels plummeted in summer 2009, officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the lake, ordered all boats removed from the Folsom Marina.5 Yet the San Juan Water District, which supplies Granite Bay from the reservoir, informed its customers that summer they would have to endure no mandatory water restrictions.6 Spectacular squander in the middle of a water crisis is not much of a shock in the United States, where we use about half our daily household water bounty outdoors. The dryer the conditions, the more we tend to pour. What is surprising, however, is to find some of the worldas worst waste in the Sacramento metropolitan area. Thatas because Greater Sacramento has become a national leader in finding solutions to Americaas energy and climate challengesa”and in working to solve other problems brought about by suburban growth. Sacramento glitters with all things green. But when it comes to water, the city represents a national blind spot.

Somehow, Americaas green craze has missed the blue.

Californiaas capital likes to call itself aSustainable Sacramento.a The progressive munic.i.p.al government is spending heavily on light rail and constructing only green city buildings. The utility generates solar, wind, bioma.s.s, and hydro power for customers willing to pay more for renewable energy. Sacramentoas citizens choose to do so at some of the highest rates in the nation.7 The city is so green, it provides organic food to public school children, bike racks to businesses, and free trees to residents who want to cool their homes with natural shade.

But with water, Sacramento isnat so enlightened. The metropolitan area, which lands regularly on lists of top green cities, smart cities, and livable cities, also has earned this startling ranking: it squanders more water than anywhere else in California. That distinction makes it one of the most water-wasting places in the United States. And that makes it one of the most water-wasting places on the planet.8 Residents of the metro region use nearly 300 gallons of water per person every daya”double the national average.9 By comparison, the equally affluent residents of Perth, Australia, use about 75 gallons per day. Londoners tap about 42 gallons per day. The water-rich Dutch use about 33 gallons daily.10 Grottoed communities such as Granite Bay arenat solely to blame. Some of the same politicians who forged the new path for energy in Sacramento fought for the cityas right to keep to the old road for water. The city is one of the last major metro areas in the nation to hold on to flat rates that charge residents the same no matter how much water they use.11 In 1920, Sacramento had amended its charter to declare that ano water meters shall ever be attached to residential water service pipes.a Only an act of the state a.s.sembly, which requires the measuring of water use statewide by 2025, has the city installing meters these days.12 Sacramento is by no means unique. Even as our green consciousness evolves, we often manage to ignore water not only on a global level but also in our own backyards. The Copenhagen climate accord, negotiated by the United Nations in 2010, did not mention the most immediate threat from a changing climatea”the worldwide freshwater crisis.13 Across the United States, we give little thought to our water use even as we replace lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and SUVs with hybrids.

The conscientious consumer who plunks down $25,000 for a Prius may still wash it every weekend in the driveway. The office manager who rallies every department to recycle paper is unaware of the millions of gallons of water a year that could be recycled from the buildingas air-conditioning system.

How is that?

One part of the answer is the illusion of water abundance. When we twist the tap, weare rewarded with a gush of fresh, clean water. Itas been that way since the turn of the twentieth century, when Americans perfected munic.i.p.al waterworks, indoor plumbing, and wastewater disposal as a response to diseases like cholera or typhoid fever.

Water is also our cheapest necessity. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline helped drive consumers to cars that cost them less to operate. Lower fossil fuel consumption and reduced carbon emissions are fringe benefits to protecting our pocketbooks. No equivalent economic incentive makes us think about our water waste. In fact, our water is so subsidized that many Americans pay less than a tenth of a penny a gallon for clean freshwater delivered right into our homes.

aAs a society, from a water standpoint, weare fat, dumb, and happy,a says Tom Gohring, executive director of the Sacramento Water Forum, a coalition of business, environmental, and other competing water interests that work together to find solutions to the regionas water woes. aIn the history of our country, weave had some serious water shortages, but very, very seldom have people been told that they cannot turn on the taps but for an hour in the afternoon, or that they must boil water.

aWater is just too easy to take for granted,a Gohring says. aItas always there.a14 This is true in Sustainable Sacramento, and itas true in the scorched Southwest. The most conspicuous water consumption in America is often found in those parts of the country where water shortages are most serious. Nationwide, we use an average of 147 gallons each day. In wet Florida, the average hits 158 gallons. In Las Vegas, itas 227 gallons per persona”in one of the most water-scarce metro areas of the United States, where water managers lose sleep at night thinking about what will happen when the level in Lake Mead drops below the intake pipes that carry water to the city.

Vegas swimming poolsa”with their gla.s.s walls, underwater sound systems, sus.h.i.+ bars, and stripper polesa”make Granite Bayas look like they came from the Kmart garden department. But in both locales, the extreme illusion of abundance makes it all but impossible for people who live and play there to notice their personal connection to the nationas water crisisa”to understand how wasteful water use in one house, in one backyard, multiplied by 310 million Americans, equals trouble for the generations to come.

Profligate water use today will imperil future generations, the same as profligate use of oil, destruction of forests, and other environmental tipping points will. But water is much more important to our future than oil. Thatas because there are no alternatives to it, no new subst.i.tute for lifeas essential ingredient being cooked from corn, french fry grease, or algae.

Like our other great, national illusionsa”say, the unending bull market, or upward-only housing pricesa”the illusion of water abundance is a beautiful bubble doomed to pop. With petroleum, those $4 gas prices sparked a collective aAha!a moment for Americans. But thereas been no aAha!a in the case of water, even though the largest of our waterworks are beginning to show a few cracks.

Letas put it this way: It will not be fun for the grandkids.

Rising 726 feet above the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada, Hoover Dam stands as a breathtaking marvel of U.S. engineering. Its mammoth hydraulic turbines generate energy for hundreds of thousands of homes. Its reservoir, Lake Mead, supplies water to millions of Americans and another million acres of farmland. The damas iconic symbolism makes a study by the University of Californiaas Scripps Inst.i.tution of Oceanography that much more unsettling. In a grim paper t.i.tled aWhen Will Lake Mead Go Dry?,a marine physicist Tim Barnett (no relation to this bookas author) and climate scientist David Pierce say thereas a fifty-fifty chance it will happen by 2021. By 2017, they say, thereas an equally good chance water levels in the reservoir will drop so low that Hoover Dam will be incapable of producing hydroelectric power.15 Most Americans, including the millions who visit this popular tourist spot each year, donat yet seem to fathom that the largest reservoir in the United States is in danger of drying up, that the famous damas turbines could cease to hum. Even the Scripps scientists say they were astunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us.a A dried-up Lake Mead is only the most dramatically visible of the collapses that scientists say could play out in the seven statesa”Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyominga”that rely on the Colorado River and its tributaries as ever-increasing water use, ever-growing population, and a changing climate shrink its flow. Scientists who study tree rings to learn about long-ago climate now say that the twentieth century, when America built its grand waterworks and divvied up its rivers, was the wettest in a thousand years.16 Now, the wet period is over; the National Academy of Sciences reports it unlikely that the Southwest will see its return. Instead, the region is expected to become dryer, and to experience more severe droughts, than in the twentieth century.17 Trees in the West are already showing the strain, dying off and burning at unprecedented rates.18 Now, people must adjust, too, conclude Barnett and Pierce, to forestall aa major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest.a19 This dry, dusty American future is not confined to the desert. In the Great Plains, farmers are depleting the enormous High Plains Aquifer, which underlies 225,000 square miles of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, far faster than it can recharge. We pump an average of one million acre-feet from the High Plains every day. (Thatas the equivalent of one million acres covered to a depth of one foot.) If that rate continues, scientists say, this ancient aquifer responsible for nearly one-third of all agricultural irrigation water in the United States will dry up within the century.20 Weave even managed to tap out some of the wettest parts of the United States. Florida has so overpumped its once abundant groundwater that the hundred-thousand-square-mile sponge known as the Floridan Aquifer, one of the most productive aquifers in the world, can no longer supply the stateas drinking-water needs. The Atlanta region has come within ninety days of seeing the reservoir Lake Sidney Lanier, primary water source for five million people, dry up.

But hereas the confounding thing: practically every scientific study that describes these catastrophes and the gloomy future they portend also concludes that it doesnat have to be this way. In the Southeast and in the Great Plains, and even in the arid states supplied by the Colorado River, itas possible to reverse the parched path weave set out for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, not to mention ourselves. Conserving water and changing the way we manage water would aplay a big part in reducing our risk,a says Kenneth Nowak of the University of Colorado at Boulder, coauthor of a recent study that shows the likelihood of depleting the Colorado Riveras ma.s.sive reservoirs depends on human actions.21 America needs nothing less than a revolution in how we use water. We must change not only the wasteful ways we consume water in our homes, businesses, farms, and energy plants but also the inefficient ways we move water to and away from them. This revolution will bring about the ethical use of water in every sector. Such an ethic is as essentiala”and as possiblea”as past awakenings to threats against our environment and ourselves: on the large scale, the way we halted use of DDT and other deadly chemicals; in our communities, the way we stopped tossing litter out car windows and tras.h.i.+ng public parks; and at the family level, the way we got used to setting out recycling bins alongside the garbage.

Using water ethically isnat difficult. Itas revolutionary only because itas so different from the way modern America relates to water. But this revolution isnat big, costly, or b.l.o.o.d.y. Itas a revolution of small technologies over mega-waterworks. Itas a savings of billions of dollars in infrastructure and energy costs. Itas as painless as floating on your back in an azure spring. Call it a blue revolution.

Americaas Big Gulp In all, America guzzles about 410 billion gallons of water per day.22 Thatas more than the daily flow of the entire Mississippi River. Power plants drink up more than any other sector of the economy, and while much of what they use is returned, it is often at higher temperatures that can change the ecology of the source. Agricultural irrigation, which accounts for about 40 percent of all freshwater sucked up in the United States each day, is by far the largest drain on our aquifers and rivers.

Throughout the twentieth century, farmers and energy suppliers were the mightiest wizards behind the illusion of abundance. Farmers turned the driest gra.s.sland states in the nation into the most heavily irrigated to raise corn, wheat, and cattle (chapter 5, aTaproot of the Crisisa). Energy companies tapped the nationas rivers first for hydropower, then to cool coal and nuclear plants, never imagining that someday Hoover Damas turbines could stop spinning or that the Tennessee Valley Authority would have to shut down a nuclear reactor due to declining river levels (chapter 4, aPowerful Thirsta).

But even for the wizards, the illusion is beginning to evaporate. Population growth has fueled residential compet.i.tion for the shrinking aquifers and rivers long tapped by farms and energy plants. Our sprawling growth is also physically pus.h.i.+ng urban America into those parts of the country that farms and power facilities once had to themselves. In recent years, water-scarcity worries have fallowed cropland in the West and halted or held up new thermal power plants in every region of the United States.23 In both the energy and agricultural sectors, the green sweep of the nation has not only missed water; it is also aggravating scarcity. It can take ten times as much water to generate power for a plug-in electric vehicle as to produce gasoline for the family car. Biofuels are worse. The production cycle can consume twenty or more times as much water for every mile traveled than for producing gasoline. When scaled up to the 2.7 trillion miles Americans travel each year by car, scientists say, water could become the limiting factor for our biofuels craze.24 Many Americans seem resigned to the notion that agriculture and big industries require a ton of water, and thereas not much we can do to change that. This is an especially common refrain in California, where agricultural irrigation accounts for three-fourths of water use.25 Farmers pump so much, what impact could citizens possibly have on the water crisis? But this is like throwing up our hands and concluding that because coal plants are the nationas top emitters of greenhouse gases, thereas nothing we can do about climate change.

It is time, now, to turn our attention to water. Since the turn of the century, Americans have not been involved in the workings of water; we havenat had to be. The conveyance of clean water to homes was one of the most successful feats of technology and engineering in modern times. But occasionally, weave gotten fed up with the nationas direction on watera”when pollution-plagued rivers led to the Clean Water Act, for example, and when fed-up ordinary citizens joined environmentalists more than thirty years ago to help bring an end to the era of mega-dams.

Now, the overtapping of nearly every large river and aquifer in the nation, and the inability of our political inst.i.tutions to change course, call for our involvement once more. In his best seller Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolutiona”and How It Can Renew America, Thomas Friedman writes that citizens were way ahead of politicians when it came to energy efficiency and green living.26 The same will be true of water. The citizen involvement and creativity now driving innovation in the green economy will eventually build a blue one.

The blue revolution will require deliberately different choices and the political backbone to make them: No wasted water in agriculture. No subsidies for crops that are irreparably harming aquifers. Water-efficient power plants. Restoring floodplains rather than building taller and taller levees. Planting trees and installing green roofs on the grand scale, rather than expanding sewers and costly new wastewater-treatment plants. Reusing water and harvesting rain to irrigate our lawns and to cool commercial air conditioners. Replacing wasteful, outdated fixtures in our homes and businesses rather than building expensive new reservoirs.27 Though the driest coastal cities will still build desalination plants and the largest ones, like New York City and Los Angeles, will still import water from outside their regions, the blue revolution is a turn from the vast waterworks of the twentieth century toward local solutions. Itas an appreciation for local water in much the same way weare embracing local produce (chapter 12, aLocal Watera).

In that spirit, the blue revolution begins in our own backyards. Just as itas no longer possible to give all large water users as much as they want, any time they want, itas no longer possible for every one of us to use 150 gallons a day from our ailing aquifers and rivers. Itas a lot like Americaas bank accounts: we are seriously overdrawn for luxuries we didnat even need.

So, how much of that daily 410 billiona”gallon Big Gulp is just us watering our lawns, flus.h.i.+ng our toilets, and was.h.i.+ng our dishes? Coming in third after power plants and agriculture, about 43 billion gallons a day, or 10.5 percent of the total, goes to public and private utilities. Thatas where the majority of us get our household water. For the most part, this water comes from aquifers (groundwater) or from surface waters (rivers and lakes). Water managers like to accentuate the difference between groundwater and surface water, but those terms simply refer to the location of water at a given moment. Water is often moving between the two. After falling as rain, water percolates into the soil, then flows underground to river channels. Evaporation and transpiration from plants pick it up again to cycle back into the atmosphere.28 To satisfy the Big Gulp, we pump this freshwater from underground, or from a reservoir or river, filtering and treating it at great cost so it meets state and federal drinking-water standards. Then, we move water through a network of millions of miles of pipes under our cities and highwaysa”some the diameter of a small pizza, some wide enough to drive a Volkswagen Beetle through. All of this takes a remarkable amount of energy. About 13 percent of all electricity generated in the United States is spent pumping and treating water and moving it around.29 Thatas nearly double the most generous estimate of U.S. electricity spent powering computers and the Internet. (This means a good way to save energy is to save water, and vice versa.) And then, the vast majority of this painstakingly purified drinking water is never drunk. Some of it goes down our toilets. But the lionas share is soaked, sprayed, or sprinkled on gra.s.s. Waterfalls and grottoes aside, the distance between Americans and their global neighbors who use less than 50 gallons of water per person each day is about one-third of an acre. Thatas the average size of the American lawn.30 The Fifty-First State California State University research scientist Cristina Milesi grew up in northeast Italy and moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in ecosystem modeling. When she arrived, she was struck by the size of lawns compared with those in Italy and wondered how much they contributed to Americansa super-sized water consumption.

In the early 2000s, Milesi, a remote-sensing expert, wanted to design computer systems that use weather and climate information to help homeowners make better decisions about when and how much to water their lawns. But no one had ever figured out how much lawn actually carpeted the United States. There were no Google Maps for lawns to overlay with rainfall, soil moisture, and other data. So Milesi, who works at the NASA Ames Research Center at California State University, Monterey Bay, began to create her own using satellite imagery.

The findings so surprised her that she repeated her calculations over and over to make sure they were accurate. Her satellite a.n.a.lysis showed that, between our homes and our highway medians, our golf greens and our gra.s.sy sports fields, lawns are Americaas largest crop. Weare growing far more gra.s.s than corna”with 63,240 square miles in turfgra.s.s nationwide. Thatas larger than most individual American states.

To irrigate this afifty-first state,a Milesi estimates that we use as much as nineteen trillion gallons of water per year. Thatas more than it takes to irrigate all the feed grain in the nation. aPeople donat believe their water use makes a difference, especially because agricultural consumption is so high,a Milesi says. aBut water is probably the most important issue facing urban areas in the futurea”and the primary pressure point on urban water use is the lawn.a31 Itas not that we donat have enough water. Itas that we donat have enough water to waste. And we definitely donat have enough to pour off nineteen trillion gallons a year, most of it drinking water created at high cost to both wallets and wetlands. Sure, some of our lawn water, now spiked with pesticides and fertilizers, percolates back underground. But much of it becomes so-called stormwater, which local governments then have to handle through an entirely different network of drains, storm sewers, pipes, and treatment to make it safe enough to flow back to streams and rivers. Sometimes, the stormwater never makes its way back to its source; in the coastal United States, hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater shoot out to sea every day.

Landscaping and sod soak up about half of all household water drawn in the United States. Scientists report that Americans who live in cooler climates use up to 38 percent of their water outside, and those who live in hotter, drier climates use up to 67 percent of theirs outdoors.32 Water managers say this pattern persists despite multimillion-dollar public-education programs to convince Americans that they need not water their gra.s.s every daya”or even every other daya”to keep it green.

We donat have heroes for saving the planetas blue, the way we do other environmental causes. You can find climate celebrities all along the political spectrum and from Hollywood to Was.h.i.+ngton. Water is harder. Who in the world would be willing to stand up against watering the lawn or filling the swimming pool?

Maybe Donald Trump could fire water hogsa”but head have to start with himself. The same year he proclaimed himself a water-loving environmentalist in his bid to build a luxury golf resort and community on a breathtaking oceanfront site in Aberdeen, Scotland, Trumpas estate on a breathtaking oceanfront site in Palm Beach, Florida, was the most water-wasting on the entire island.

Trumpas Maison de laAmiti, viewed from the air, looks barren compared to the surrounding estates and hotels. It takes a moment to realize thatas because the property has been razed of trees; most of its seven acres is solid gra.s.s that stretches all the way to the sea. In 2007, during the worst drought in the history of the southeastern United States, Trump gulped an average of two million gallons of water a month for his outsized lawn and twenty-two bathrooms. He racked up a $10,000 average monthly bill.33 By comparison, even thirsty Palm Beach looks frugal; the average family there uses about 54,000 gallons of water per year.

The a07 drought was dire along the southeast coast of Florida. Lake Okeechobee, primary water supply for Palm Beach and other cities and backup water supply for more than five million Floridians, began to dry up. The gra.s.sy lakebed was so parched that it caught fire and burned for weeks. To try to save precious freshwater, local governments in Palm Beach County slapped a 30 percent surcharge on customers who used more than 6,000 gallons a month, enacted lawn-irrigation restrictions, and imposed fines on anyone who didnat follow the rules. But the oceanfront dwellers found a loophole. Residents with new landscaping were allowed to water three days a week instead of one for a month after planting. After the month was up, if they planted more new vegetation, they could again water three days a week. The Wall Street Journal found that residents were putting in new trees and turf, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars a home, just to avoid the water restrictions. aWeare all just ripping out the old lawn and shrubs and putting in new ones,a one Palm Beacher told the Journal.34 It may not be all that surprising that Donald Trump and some other Ocean Drive residents (or nonresidents, as is more often the case in summer) would have the highest water consumption in the land. But water hogs come from all corners. Golfer Tiger Woods used nearly 4 million gallons a year at his Jupiter Island, Florida, home during the regionas devastating drought.35 Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, consumed 13.8 million gallons of water in one year at his Las Vegas mansion.36 Canadian pop singer Cline Dion has the dubious distinction of being called out as one of the largest water users in two statesa”both Florida and Nevada.37 In 2010, she spent $20 million on her Jupiter Island, Florida, backyard water park with two swimming pools, two water slides, and a lazy river, all of which use 500,000 gallons a month.38 Then thereas Lance Armstrong, who makes his home in Austin, Texas. During an intense dry spell, the local daily newspaper reported that the seven-time Tour de France winner was the cityas worst water guzzler. Armstrong used 330,000 gallons in one month at his Spanish-colonial home with its swimming pool, gra.s.s, and gardens, according to the Austin American-Statesman.39 Thereas not a more perfect picture of the American dream than Lance Armstrong swimming laps in his pool or doing crunches on his lawn. Gra.s.s brings the healthy enticements of the outdoors to Americaas doorstep. Itas been a.s.sociated with physical health in the United States since the nineteenth century, when our fore-families created the first suburbs to escape pollution and disease in the cities.

In recent years, environmentalists have drawn a bead on high-maintenance turfgra.s.ses, not only for their intense water use but also for the pesticides and fertilizers that run off and pollute rivers and estuaries. Lawn loversa”and the $60 billion turfgra.s.s industrya”are arming up to defend their turf. But it doesnat have to be all gra.s.s, or no gra.s.s. Thereas nothing wrong with a little, especially if itas of a native variety able to thrive in local conditions. Weave simply gone way over the top.

Moms and dads with small kids will tell you itas better to play and picnic on gra.s.s than, say, gravel or smelly recycled tire treadsa”the lawn subst.i.tutes showing up on urban playgrounds. Life is good with a patch of gra.s.s to spread a picnic blanket and let your kids run. But should it really be Americaas No. 1 crop? Irrigated at more than double the rate needed?