Water wars

There's a severe drought in Vancouver. All the grass lies brown and dead, except the golf courses. The dark pine forests crackle underfoot. The arboretum explains apologetically that its water is recirculated. Reservoirs are down to record lows.

This was startling to me, as an Easterner; I thought it rained all the time there - I packed my rain coat and pants first thing. And talking to a few people, it seems they're not ready for this. They're used to long showers and lush lawns. They don't know quite what to do.

You'd like to think that everyone would pull together and share what they can, decide together on the priorities, work out some way of dealing with the problem. But judging from other areas that have gone through this, the prospects aren't good. The first stage, which Vancouver may be starting now, is denial. The NY Times reported last Fall on Porterville, California, which has largely run out of water. A mother recounts that when her neighbors' wells began to run dry, she told her children to take shorter showers. “They kept saying, ‘No, no, Mama, you’re just too negative’”. Now they have no showers at all.

“You don’t think of water as privilege until you don’t have it anymore,” said Ms. Serrato, whose husband works in the nearby fields. “We were very proud of making a life here for ourselves, for raising children here. We never ever expected to live this way.”

I heard some of the same in Vancouver, about how some people were refusing to cut down on their showers and watering. It seems people don't want to face this problem till it hits them. Their lifestyle includes water, and they - like the Serratos - are proud of their lifestyles. Giving up their lawns is like an admission of failure.

It can get worse after that. Once the crisis hits, people often start to fight over what's left. We hear about wealthy Californians who fight against or ignore the water restrictions. Farmers who can afford it dig their wells deeper, drawing water away from their neighbors, as well as destabilizing the ground far beyond their own properties.

A typical Western water rights conversation

On the other hand: California does suggest some reason for hope.  While some responses have been short-sighted and unsustainable, others have involved significant changes in behaviors which may make a real long-term difference. Farmers, with government help, have been shifting to drip irrigation which has doubled the yields for given water volumes. This Spring the water district for Southern California beefed up a program to encourage the general public to cut back on their lawns and use drought-resistant plants. The astonishing thing is that people are embracing it in droves; the planted landscape is already being transformed. In an era where government incentives and regulations too often are ignored or manipulated or resisted -- think of Obamacare, or cash for clunkers -- these are unusual successes.

It’s hard to say why these things work when others don’t, but I would suggest two reasons. First, the shift in California has been building for decades. The irrigation programs have been gaining ground, as it were,  for many years, and have proved themselves economically; so farmers have grown generally more open to the idea of changing their practices around environmental issues.

The second reason is that the current crisis has “changed the conversation” -- a currently popular phrase. Changing the conversation means that people are talking about it.  In places that failed to deal with the problem, like Porterville, there was for a long time no conversation: the mother whose kids told her, “You’re just being too negative” were not aware that others in the community were already running out of water. No one talked about it, everyone thought it was just their own issue. But now, with the breadth and depth of this crisis, everyone in California is talking about it, everyone knows that the problem is real. And for changing behaviors, there is nothing more powerful than the sense that everyone else is doing it.

Perhaps those two factors are both needed: slow long-term adaptations, and a sudden crisis. A crisis by itself often just drives people to defensive postures, fighting against their neighbors. But when the conversation gets a chance to build, and everyone knows that everyone else is feeling the same things they are, there is a chance for cooperation. So getting the conversation going may be one of the most important activities.