Water
& Xeriscaping
Yesterday I read about water in our textbook Environment: The Science behind the Stories
by Jay Withgott and Scott Brennan from 2 to 4:30 a.m. and understood
better what happens to our water after we pee, brush our teeth, bathe,
and wash the dishes. There's a pervasive question: "Won't it just come
back again?" But the energy expended in a wastewater treatment facility
is great, and especially with climate change rain isn't dependable, so
we need to change our habits, which is the focus of today's
log--examples I saw of changing habits--mine and those of shoppers. But
before I leave the textbook, I'll comment on a picture of xeriscaping
in Nevada. (Xeriscaping is a fancy word for landscaping with plants
suitable for arid conditions.) This reminded me of a friends' home in
Arizona. Their lawn was "low maintenance" because it was gravel.
(Barry, one of the owners, quipped, "But it's hell on the lawnmower.")
Now more than ever I respect their choosing gravel over mining water
from another source the way the desert community of Las Vegas does.
Las Vegas is NOT a sustainable community, and not just because they've
sprawled to incorporate the monuments of France and Italy. (Does it
also have the Stratosphere of Berlin? No wonder it developed area, as
well as its population, tripled between 1984 and 2009.) It's a desert,
so the water has to come from somewhere else, and the people living in
that somewhere else aren't happy!The book, which came out two years ago, takes on bottled water, which I think has already gone the way of tobacco. It just had a shorter history. We've really been educated, at least in San Francisco, where bottled water was banned at City Hall in 2007. Now it's more common to see people with stainless steel bottles than with plastic bottled water, and when we do see someone with plastic bottled water, we wonder where they've been that they've missed the message, just as when we see someone with a cigarette.
That brings up the idea that "You can't legislate morality" that was prevalent in the South when I was growing up. But once integration laws were enforced both habits and attitudes did change. People learned, however begrudgingly and imperfectly.
But I remember before we had bottled water, too. My French boyfriend Jean was visiting in 1977 and asked, "How can it be that in America, where everything is bought and sold, no one has started selling bottled water?" I said, "Because our water is so good." But about a year later, I started to see it. In a couple of years I started to drink it, too, believing that it was healthier. Then, coming back from Turkey in 2005, my bottled water in hand, I read a New York Times article about the harm bottled water was doing and now totally unnecessary it was to drink it in our country. I had a party to share summer vacations with friends, and instead of service bottled water, I put tap water in a pitcher, labeled it TAP WATER FROM THE HETCH HETCHY. I can't find that sign, but I see that I put the New York Times article in my album for Turkey. It was "Bad to the last drop" by Tom Standage. "Money spent on bottled water would better help the world's poor," he says. He's the author of "A History of the World in Six Glasses" and is technology editor of The Economist.
Today (and I'm writing about Saturday, October 20--a few hours late) I walked to West Portal instead of driving, and at Good Will, I noticed that people were saying they didn't need bags or they were trying to fit everything into one bag. Ten cents seems like so little, but maybe they're getting the idea of why we're being asked to pay. The sign at the Good Will Store made it apparent! I felt good about that.
Walking home, I felt I was doing something good for me as well as for the environment, and I thought about our parents who had us walk to school instead of carpool with the other kids on the block. I'm sure that did us good.
I continue not to turn on the heat. (I will when friends come over and start to ask for a blanket.) I was amused when, in The End of Your Life Book Club, the author says that his dad always put on a sweater instead of turning on the heat, so the temperature was always "between freezing and frozen."
We almost never turned the heat on growing up and don't turn it on now. Feels good to get that really low PG&E bill.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the water - we have moved it 170 miles from where it was and pee and poop in it, spend a lot of money to move and treat it, shoot out into the ocean or bay - water cycle and climate change impacts on it means it doesn't come back our way necessarily