Conserving Water Beyond the Movement
I’m sitting on my deck thinking about two things. One is that I need to water my vegetables. The other is water conservation, CoolMom’s July focus. I’m glad CoolMom is focusing on this issue because it seems to me that it has yet to make it into the public consciousness the way, say, recycling has.
Ella cooling off
Gardening and water conservation have been challenging commitments for me to make simultaneously. I used to fill my yard with drought tolerant plants and let the grass go brown in the summer, which required little water usage even during the warmest months. Now, a good rain barrel system seems a necessity to make vegetable gardening truly sustainable.
One way or another, this is the time of the year that conserving water becomes challenging. Kids want to play in the water, the vegetables need watering, we drink more, probably even bathe more. Sometimes I can see in my mind the reservoirs depleting as I wash the dishes.
So, what to do? I suppose we all do what we’ve been told. Don’t run the water while brushing your teeth. Take shorter, more water efficient showers. Collect rain water for our gardens. I’ll confess that I do fill a kiddy pool now and then, but then I use that water to quench the garden, one painstaking bucket at a time.
Though lot could be done to advance rain water collection and good daily water conservation practices, it seems that most of the people I know really understand what to do and probably try to do it most of the time. What, then, is the next step? What should an organization like CoolMom do? What steps could be taken, individually and organizationally, to go beyond where we already are?
Because I tend towards philosophical thinking, one track of my mind goes to deeper lifestyle changes. The American obsession with cleanliness strikes me as being responsible for a great deal of unnecessary water usage. If we weren’t so determined to smell like soap (organic orange blossom and honey dew soap) all the time, might we be able to live with showering every other day? Why must our cars be so shiny? A lot of our dishes could probably get by with a good rinse rather than the full dishwasher cycle. So, that’s one question. How do those of us already trying to conserve water take a step in the direction of using even less by challenging ourselves to change water consuming habits that we have yet to abandon? And how does that apply to community water usage?
The other question is how do we make water conservation a priority beyond the networks of the sustainability-minded. The common answer often is “education.” This is certainly true, but I think you have to first give people a reason to seek education rather than telling them they need to get educated. What public policy would lead a vast number of people to pay attention to water consumption and care whether or not they were wasting water? One thought that comes to mind is strong economic incentives for low water usage. Those who undertake conserving water to save money may also start building awareness of other reasons to do it. And there must be other ways to motivate the larger public to make progress on this issue.
I’m not saying there isn’t a lot that I could still do individually. However, when I drive down a street somewhere and see a man hosing down his driveway rather than sweeping it, I think, “How do you get that guy to change his behavior?”
I guess that’s my question, a question I’d like to throw out there to CoolMom members and friends. How do we make water conservation a neighborhood-wide, city-wide, state-wide, country-wide practice? How do we make it more a matter of public policy?
