How Los Angeles Learned to Save Water
A decade ago, Jerry Brown, then California's governor, imposed the state's first mandatory restrictions on water use. Years of drought had brought about a harsh confrontation with reality: Californians would have to change their relationship with water.
'You just can't live the way you always have,' Mr. Brown said to his fellow Californians at the time.
But in California — and most notably in Los Angeles, the state's most populous metropolitan area — a quiet revolution was already underway, Michael Kimmelman reported for Headway in June:
Over the last half century or so, millions more people have moved to greater Los Angeles, settling in increasingly far-flung reaches of the desert and in the mountains, requiring more faucets, toilets and shower heads, producing more garbage and more gridlock on the 405 freeway, reinforcing all the clichés about excess and sprawl.
And during this same time, Angelenos have been consuming less water.
In his feature, Michael recounts the story of how a massive infrastructure project was built to ferry water to the city from across the Southwest. Today, he finds, those who monitor the region's aquifers and reservoirs say that comparable efforts are necessary to prepare for a drier future.
But such efforts to conserve water in the state will be building on a catalog of initiatives that includes both notable successes and telling setbacks.
One of the visible examples of lifestyle changes Mr. Brown included among his plans to pare back water usage in 2015 was an effort to substitute drought-tolerant plants for 50 million square feet of lawns. 'Just a quarter of the $22 million allocated for rebates in the rest of the state has been claimed so far,' the Times noted then, 'perhaps a sign of persistent resistance to ripping out grass.'
Fast-forward to today, Michael reports, and we find the City of Los Angeles alone 'has so far swapped out some 53 million square feet of lawn' — more than the target for the entire state. Even as Angelenos were drought-proofing their lawns, though, they were turning up their noses at water recycling efforts that voters found … unpalatable.
'Potable reuse' — that is, wastewater recycling — has been a water conservation measure since well before 2008, when Elizabeth Royte went deep on the idea for The New York Times Magazine. In 1995, L.A. was on track to be an early pioneer of the approach when the city invested $55 million to begin building the East Valley Water Reclamation Project.
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