WATERING LAWNS

"It is really hard for the public to take these kinds of exhortations to heart if the people who are telling them to conserve are not doing it as well."

There was another male-bashing ad on the radio recently, this time about watering your lawn. The dad was teaching his kids how to take care of his lawn and in an unprecedented change of course for modern advertising, he turned out to be wrong every time! "Don't water every day, dad, our teacher told us we only had to water an inch a week!" Oregon gets so much rain in the Willamette valley that jokes are told nationwide about how we rust instead of tan, and so on. Yet even here, in the Summer water conservation is the byword, as if we're suffering drought every year.

Part of this, of course, comes from the fact that Oregon sells water to California and thus the government wants people to use less so they can have the excess to sell and make money for programs like weekend basketball tournaments that shut down main streets. You must sacrifice so that the budget can get filled! Likely you see this kind of call for less watering, for conservation in your area. Water only on alternate days, water once a week. Then you go by a state building and the sprinklers are on every morning for a brilliant green lawn while yours looks like its half dead and rock hard.

At the Los Angels Times, this hypocrisy was pointed out in a more specific and personal way by LA government:

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa challenged residents this summer to "change course" and slash their water use by 10% in the face of a historic drought.

But records show that the mayor and several other top city officials have long been heavy water users themselves.

In Villaraigosa's case, even if he had made a 10% reduction at the two homes where he has lived since winning election in 2005, he still would have used nearly twice as much water as comparable properties in the vicinity.

City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and Councilman Tony Cardenas surpassed the mayor, using more than twice the number of gallons over the last two years as typical property owners in their parts of town.

In fact, a review of Department of Water and Power documents shows that at least nine of the city's 18 elected leaders used higher than average amounts of water -- sometimes a little, other times a lot -- over the last two years.

The City Attorney Delgadillo even had his water shut off for a time because he didn't pay the bill. Villaraigosa blamed the water use on a gopher that chewed through an underground sprinkler line, not the fact that he waters every day and his lawn looks like a golf course. At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh pointed this out briefly, and commenters responded:

Kind of like the Soviet politburo. Everybody is equal except us. A state-run society is great if you are the state.
-by Truth Seeker


Politicians often are hypocrites, but as Owen Hutchins says, even if they aren't following their own advice, it may still be right. Furthermore, there could be valid reasons for them not to be following their own advice, at least in the short term. Suppose that the mayor's house is on a double lot, so that he has more than twice the lawn in need of water than the owner of a single lot. If the two care for their lawns in comparable ways, the mayor will use more than twice the water.

Even if the mayor reduces his watering somewhat, he's still going to need more water than the owner of the single lot. If he stops watering part of his lawn or greatly reduces watering all of it, the neighbors are probably going to be pissed off at the brown eyesore that results. Moreover, by maintaining an extra-large amount of grass, he is arguably doing something beneficial for air quality.

Now, maybe, in the longer term, the mayor should move to a single lot, or install a more efficient root-based irrigation system, or replace part of his lawn with succulents, but these are things he can't necessarily do right away.
-by Bill Poser


It's always easy to save water if you are a water waster to begin with.

Rationing should never be based on a percentage of past usage since that invariably disproportionately punishes people who normally use water sparingly. Public policy must be that water will be apportioned based on the number of people in a household. Rich people with big households don't need to drink more water or shower more often than poor people.
-by Scote


I'm disturbed as always about the hypocrisy of the screeching, preaching "environmentalists."

But I'm also disturbed that one's water and sewer bills are a matter of public record, available for all and sundry to see, just because the government has chosen to exercise a monopoly in providing water to its citizens. It's nobody else's business how much water I choose to buy, and it shouldn't be a matter of public record.
-by PatHMV


IIRC, there's a similar story from the book, Wealth Addiction, by Philip Slater, 25 years back. What Slater found was that wealthy people, in time of drought/water shortage (and increased water expense) will begin to use more water, not less. You see, it sets them apart from the plebians and starts to look like a luxury item. So they'll water their lawns more often. They also seem to do it unconsciously.
-by IB Bill

Ultimately hypocrisy only proves that the people involved are inconsistent and at best fools. It doesn't mean that what they've said is wrong: it may very well be a good idea to conserve water (in LA's case, they're right). We could, possibly, be headed to a horrific global doom (sure, the science doesn't indicate that, but science isn't infallible). But when the people most visibly and authoritatively making these statements do not personally feel compelled to heed them it doesn't exactly inspire confidence or show leadership. Or, as Glenn Reynolds puts it "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis".

Some states, like California, do have water crises, especially Los Angeles which was basically built in little more than a desert. Why anyone in the city has a lawn to begin with I can't imagine, but for those areas conservation makes sense. So do giant desalinization plants and other efforts to gather water such as dew trappers. The thing is, not everywhere is suffering drought or is in an area where water conservation is such an issue, but we get these warnings anyway.

By federal law, you cannot sell showerheads without flow restrictors, all toilets have reduced capacity water, all home washing machines are reduced water. Is that truly needed everywhere? I somehow doubt it.

Lawn care, Water conservation, Hypocrisy