DryStoneGarden

Or at least we should consider it normal.

Forum on KQED did an hour this morning on California’s water shortage. The Department of Water Resources has our precipitation at 70% and the snowpack at 50-70%, and we’re likely to have rationing this year. Wendy Martin, statewide coordinator drought coordinator for CDEC, talked about consulting with Australians about their drought. Australia is in their 10th year of drought, but they’ve decided to stop considering it a drought; they adjusted their baseline water expectations to consider their drought normal. They are a drought country, they realized, so they should expect drought. Anything extra should be considered gravy. She said the Australians were unimpressed with our California drought, because we still have turf. How could we be in a drought if we were still putting water into our lawns?

EBMUD and MMWD did a really good job last year with their invoices to get people thinking about their water usage. We noticed a big difference in people’s awareness, directly related to the information they read on their invoices. We’d never before had a client talk to us about the water bill, but last year almost every client did. MMWD has a rebate program that helps pay for the materials to improve water efficiency; they pay up to $350 for a single family house. It can be hard to spend money on irrigation, and have the landscape look essentially the same after the work is done, so the rebate checks make a big difference, not only by lowering the cost, but also by showing that the community appreciates the effort. Changing habits needs the carrot and the stick. This drought is a great opportunity to change how people think about water usage.

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