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Few modern cows are as sacred as the cause of water conservation. Everybody's for it.
Environmentalists with xeriscaped yards tell us that it is important to husband our resources, and the water buffaloes never tire of telling us that if we don't hoard every precious drop, then it will flow to Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and California, to the detriment of Colorado.
(If you're curious about the word xeriscape,
which means a landscape designed to thrive without much
water, it has the same roots as Xerox--the Greek word
xeros,
which means dry.
(When, Chester Carlson perfected his dry electro-static
process about 50 years ago, he used this classical root
when he fabricated the trademark Xerox.
He also
minted a generic term, xerograph,
so that you can
print I xerographed the secret documents
and not get
a nasty letter from a trademark attorney, which you will if
you publish I xeroxed the secret documents.
)
But it could be that if you truly care about Colorado's environment, you should rip out that yucca and buffalo grass, and replace it with phreatophytic (water-loving) cottonwood trees and thirsty Kentucky bluegrass.
This first came to my attention about a decade ago, when I visited my brother in a Front Range city. His yard looked like a rice paddy.
I thought there were watering restrictions here,
I mentioned as we squished around en route to the chicken
coop to gather eggs.
They haven't put meters in this part of town yet,
he said, and so I use all the water I can.
But why?
I'd just lost a boot in the muck, and
was wondering about boat rentals.
Because every gallon I use means one less gallon that
the city can use to supply new subdivisions that make
somebody else rich while putting more traffic on my street
and more kids in schools that are already over-crowded.
Wasting as much water as possible is my small contribution
toward preserving our quality of life.
That was my brother, who, like me, often suffers from attitude problems, and so I didn't give it much more thought.
But a recent correspondence from Jim McMahon of Denver, a certified ecologist, makes much the same point.
He observes that when he waters his yard, the water does not vanish.
Instead, some of the water is absorbed by the grass roots, where it makes its way up the stem and eventually returns to the hydrologic cycle when the grass dies and dries.
Some evaporates or transpires through the trees, to
become rain somewhere. Much of it percolates down through
the soil and into the local aquifer, where it might be
pumped up at a well, or else seep into a river. In short,
he doesn't consume
the water. He just transfers
it.
In more polite and scientific terms, he also makes much the same argument my brother did:
When you conserve water, you make the water available to other people. Assuming that there's enough for the current population, then your savings represent a net increase in the available water supply.
Thus real-estate developers will be able to convert more open land into housing developments and shopping malls. They profit from these enterprises.
But you and I have to endure more traffic, more congestion, more air pollution, more crowding in schools, more crime -- in short, a diminished quality of life.
So water conservation
is actually an appealing
term for an otherwise typical American transaction: take
from the poor and middle class in order to provide
financial benefits for the wealthy.
When we conserve water, then, we end up losing many of the things we like about living in Colorado. We gain nothing (except, in metered areas, perhaps a lower water bill), while we enable real-estate developers to make big profits as they use the water we carefully saved by putting bricks in our toilets and replacing our bluegrass.
Is there a solution for this appalling inequity?
An acre-foot is approximately the amount of water needed by the average household in a year. So we could give every current householder an adjudicated water right to one acre-foot.
You could use your water right, or you could economize with low-flow showers, xeriscaping and all the rest, and perhaps get by on a quarter of an acre-foot. Then you'd be free to lease or sell the rest of your water right.
Whenever a developer needed water, he'd have to buy or lease unused portions of water rights from you and others who worked to conserve water.
Thus, you'd get some financial reward for putting up with the effects of development.
Granted, there are doubtless some unforeseen problems with this approach, but if they really want us to conserve water in order to further enrich real-estate developers in their noble work of making Colorado less livable, then they've got to show us that it's in our interest to conserve water, and money is an excellent way.
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