Ready to reduce your home water use to a trickle?

Is it just me, or does anyone else see the connection between these two stories in the L.A. Times?

May 8, 2008: Tejon Ranch pact would allow 26,000 homes on the range

May 14, 2008: L.A. prepares massive water-conservation plan

I'm all for conservation. Really, I am. But what's the real point? Those 70,000 people who could move into the proposed new Tejon Ranch city-sprawl will need some water, and guess who's going to sacrifice for them? Tag, you're it.

The new water-conservation plan calls for fines for watering lawns and washing down sidewalks. And it calls for sending treated wastewater back into the aquifer.

My favorite idea is rewarding homeowners who put in permeable driveways that allow rainwater to percolate down into the aquifer rather than running off into the gutter. We don't yet have a "subway to the sea," but we certainly know how to send our rainwater that way.

L.A. Times readers have even more ideas on how to save water:

— We should all stop eating meat, one reader wrote, as the monumental amount water needed to produce beef is the real culprit. (Another reader said we'd all start eating our pets if the meat was cut off.)
— Control population, another wrote, and heavily tax people who have more than two kids.
— "I'll just dig up my lawn," another reader wrote. "It is not worth all of this."

See all reader comments

Comments

[lil_gaucha]

hmm. I didn't know the Tejon project was getting its water from the LA water authority. I thought it was getting it from a combination of on site wells and the big canal running through the central valley.

hmmm.

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KPR: Good points. According to the story, L.A. gets 42% of its water from the Owens Valley and Mono Lake via the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The California Water Project, the big canal you speak of, also brings water from Northern California, and is dependent on snow pack in the Sierras. I'm no water expert, but I believe these sources are pretty well spoken for, and are being scaled back to protect habitat for endangered species. Am I wrong about this?
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