“This is a crisis. This is unprecedented,” said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “We have never done anything like this before and because we have never seen such a situation before.” The Great American Lawn has historically been a symbol of status and is depicted as a place of recreation and comfort. But they require excessive amounts of water to maintain – water that depletes quickly. Grass was the largest irrigated “crop” in America, surpassing corn and wheat, according to a frequently cited study by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He noted that in the early 2000s, the lawn – mostly on the front lawn – stretched for about 63,000 square miles, an area larger than the state of Georgia. Keeping all of this front lawn alive requires up to 75% of a household’s water consumption, according to this study, a luxury California can not afford as drought due to climate change pushes reservoirs to historically low levels. . In Southern California – littered with affluent mansions and unspoiled green courtyards – having conventional lawns will simply no longer work as the effects of climate change intensify, said John Fleck, director of the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico. “You want to have some space in your yard for your kids to play with, so a small piece of grass is not terrible,” Fleck told CNN. “It’s just the large area of lawn – which really is only used” because it looks beautiful “- that needs to be left. This is what we can no longer have. “We can not afford water for this,” he said.
Water pigs
America’s obsession with grass can be traced back to 17th-century England, Fleck said, where meticulously trimmed lawns became a “symbol of status and wealth” because of the high cost of maintaining them. “This idea of lawns as a demonstration of position was really embedded in the gardening culture in this country with British colonialism, so it traveled west with us and took all this work,” Fleck said. In the US, lawns have expanded and thrived on the East Coast, “where it rains constantly and you do not need to add much extra irrigation water,” Fleck said. And as the Americans marched west, they took with them “the landscape with which they were familiar and comfortable.” “The big problem is that we brought grass to this climate in the southwest from wetter places,” Fleck said. “The classic example is called Kentucky bluegrass.” Kentucky bluegrass, which is native to Europe and Asia but grows particularly well in parts of the eastern United States, requires much more water than the West can provide. The water does not last long in the arid Southwest. The hot, dry air quickly evaporates the water, which in turn increases the amount needed to saturate a lawn. This phenomenon is exacerbated on hot summer days – warmer air can absorb more – which is also when plenty of water was harder to find. In California, the amount of water required to maintain a lawn varies. declares his home in almost a dozen sub-climates ranging from humid and cool to hot and dry. Thus, a 1,500-square-foot lawn in Crescent City on the North Shore may need 22,000 gallons of water a year, according to the California Department of Water Resources. But further south, demand is rising dramatically. The same size lawn in Los Angeles would need 43,000 gallons a year. An hour east of that in Palm Springs, it jumps to 63,000 gallons a year. Now consider the fact that the average lawn size in California is more than 5,500 square feet, according to HomeAdvisor, and you can see how lawn maintenance in the West could begin to be an important part of a household water budget. About half of California’s urban water consumption is used for landscaping, mainly due to low humidity and hot hot summers, according to the Department of Water Resources. The average indoor water consumption of a Californian is about 51 gallons per day – or 19,000 gallons per year – according to the service.
Lawn mowers, lawn mowers, fertilizers
In addition to intensive water use, gas-powered lawn mowers emit cancer-causing pollutants and global warming gases, which in turn contribute to the climate crisis and drought in the region. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, gas-powered lawn and gardening equipment released more than 22 million tons of carbon emissions in 2018. Each year, the agency estimates that more than 17 million gallons of gasoline are poured by refueling the equipment alone. The grass also has difficulty accessing and absorbing water when fertilized, which means it needs more frequent watering. Fertilizers enhance the growth of the plant, which increases its density both in the soil and below. The roots can be compressed, which ultimately reduces the soil’s ability to hold water. Scientists have linked the use of fertilizers to increased evaporation, the process by which water moves from the soil to the air. In the West, lack of rainfall and rising demand for exhaust – also known as “atmospheric thirst” – are the two main factors in the region’s water crisis. Higher temperatures increase the amount of water that can be absorbed by the atmosphere, which then dries the landscape.
What can you do differently
Fleck, who lives in a lawnless suburban house in Albuquerque, said that if he had a lawn with grass, he would probably require the same amount of water as an “economical indoor water user” consumes in one day. “If you are going to landscaping, the biggest blow to your ‘water buck’ is the trees, not the lawns,” he said. “With trees, you have a cooling effect on the urban heat island, you save air conditioning energy from the shade, and in an urban area with air quality problems like Southern California, trees help clean the air.” Some cities are already facing excessive water use by offering homeowners acquisitions to replace their grass with alternatives, such as native plants or wood carvings. – $ 4 per square foot – and replace them with much more water-efficient desert plants. Since the project began, the city says it has successfully replaced 42 million square feet of lawn. Last year, Nevada passed a law banning ornamental lawn, requiring all “non-functional lawn” to be removed from the Las Vegas Valley by 2027. The Colorado River, which supplies water to much of Nevada, is declining rapidly. . The latest state conservation effort will save about 10% of the area’s annual water distribution from the Colorado River Basin. “Native landscaping makes sense and can be really beautiful,” Fleck said. “One of my favorite western cities is Tucson, and it has adopted this inherent landscape aesthetic and is just a beautiful city and it just uses a lot less water to do that.” Fleck said he expects “the brown lawn will be a mark of honor” soon. “It’s like – contributing to the well-being of our community in this time of crisis by not watering my lawn,” he said. “And I expect it to become the symbol of the regime.”
