Confident that I had misheard what the director of the Utah Division of Water Resources had estimated was Salt Lake City’s per-capita water usage--we were on a public-radio talk show, and my phone’s acoustics were iffy — I asked for clarification. When he replied, “about 220 gallons a day,” I knew the city was in trouble.
Like other western urban centers, Salt Lake has a booming economy, swelling population, and intense sprawl. It also has lots of green lawns, courtesy of busy sprinklers spraying water on Kentucky bluegrass. That this is the wrong turf for an arid region speaks to a larger problem: is it possible for Salt Lake and its peers to become water-tight?
Sarah B. Van de Wetering asks a similar question in her recent Headwaters perspective, “Watering the West”: “How can we bring our policies and practices into sync with the physical realities of the region?” Her answer — “One important piece of the puzzle is the process by which we make decisions about where and how people will live on the land” — is crucial, for it requires a conscious effort on the part of citizens and political representatives to redefine the human presence on this dry land.
Developing that consciousness, and the legislative means to enforce it, will require, as she points out, a collaborative process integrating land-use and water planning to a degree that has rarely been attempted in the American West. That must change, and quickly: the very pressures that make the current water regime unsustainable are intensifying, and the region’s already variable rainfall may fluctuate ever more wildly in response to global climate change.
Still, it’s possible to make the transition: San Antonio, for one, has enacted market-based initiatives and regulatory measures that have sharply cut per-capita usage from 212 gallons in 1985 to 147 in 2002, with the goal of 110 gallons by 2015. The Alamo City did not turn off the tap without resistance — we’re talking about water, after all — but it has broken some bad habits and revived some long-lost good ones, allowing the city to begin living within nature’s constraints.
The Spanish were the first Europeans to discover how rough life could be in desiccated south Texas, and its colonists survived by making extensive use of cisterns. These water-storage systems, still in operation more than a century later, puzzled visiting poet Sidney Lanier. He thought it peculiar in January 1873 that the town was “built along the banks of two limpid streams, yet it drinks rain-water collected in cisterns.” Had he remained for the summer, he would have better understood why San Antonians so carefully harvested rainfall.
We have had to relearn that critical lesson in sustainability. That’s because in the 1890s, water prospectors punched wells into the artesian plain, discovering the prodigious Edwards Aquifer. For the next century, the city expanded on the basis of cheap water, happily ignoring key indicators of environmental distress, as once-flush springs began drying up. Devastating multi-year droughts in the 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s, along with explosive population growth, reduced aquifer levels, endangering a blind salamander; this triggered a Sierra Club-sponsored lawsuit that called the question: could San Antonio change its water-guzzling behavior?
It has. When in 1993, the state created the Edwards Aquifer Authority, spanning seven counties, communities had to develop strategies to match use to pumping limitations. By educating the citizenry about conservation, raising prices, underwriting the transition to low-flow toilets and showers, and requiring homeowners and businesses to plug leaking faucets and pipelines, and farmers to line irrigation ditches, the San Antonio Water System slashed consumption. Helpful too has been its sizeable investment in a water-recycling program providing 29,000 gallons per day of “grey water” for golf courses, parks, and other non-potable purposes; and it has constructed a $215 million facility that stores 3.67 million gallons in another local aquifer. With this massive underground cistern, we have rediscovered what the Spanish settlers knew--conservation matters.
Just how much it matters was clear this past summer, when despite a year-long drought, San Antonio reached only Stage-One restrictions; a decade earlier, without the benefit of our innovative conservation measures, we would have been in a much-more difficult situation.
Not as dire, perhaps, as what the intermountain urban west now confronts, but as San Antonio’s experience suggests the dilemmas other western communities face can be resolved. Enacting long-term, year-round water-conservation measures; schooling the public about the essential links between economic growth, urban development, and aridity; and nurturing an environmental perspective rooted in the region’s historic landscape can change human behavior.
And should Salt Lake City decide to rip out its Kentucky bluegrass lawns that, too, would be good.
Char Miller is professor of history and director of urban studies at Trinity University in San Antonio. He is the author of Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas and Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. He is also editor of Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict; Water in the West, and co-editor of Water and the Environment since 1945: Global Perspectives.
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