Originally published at: Los Angeles area will have to let its lawns go brown, starting June 1st, due to historic drought | Boing Boing
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Rich people will get around those rules anyways just like the last few times
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The L.A. type folk are buying up the High Desert in a fast giddy up [building McMansions] and with that they are putting in sod lawns [plowing under indigenous plants], that no matter how much water you dump into them [grass lawns] they will die never the less in this environment.
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All the leaves are gray (all the leaves are gray)
And the sky is brown (and the sky is brown)
Soil’s dry as chalk (soil is dry as chalk)
Trees are falling down (Trees are falling down)
Time to be alarmed (Time to be alarmed)
And not be in L.A. (And not be in L.A.)
California burnin’ (California burnin’)
On such an arid day
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Nothing in the rules forbids the use of bottled water.
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This of course isn’t really enforceable. Even with those houses with the greenest, lushest lawns, will just claim that they only water once a week. The only way to enforce this is to drastically raise water rates.
Oh, and stop growing almonds in the desert.
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Isn’t saying now that the ban will start in a month tantamount to saying you should water the living shit out of your lawn in the interim?
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Grass lawns should illegal in SoCal anyway. Let them turn brown.
Also, why do they always squeeze the homeowners without touching industry?
As I understand, homeowner water waste pales in comparison to the amount wasted by industry or bottled and sent off to parts of the world without water scarcity by companies like Nestle.
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They had tanker trucks come in to spray the football pitch sized front yards
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No hope for more state support for replacing lawns with solar farms, (with a growing list of plants that do well under solar panels planted beneath), by which to power LA’s increasing need for powering air-conditioners and other climate change ameliorations?
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I’m always pleased when my lawn turns brown because then I don’t have to mow the thing anymore. I’ve always found lawns to be a weird north american cultural thing that I don’t understand.
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“Jeeves! Are you putting Poland Springs on the lawn?”
“Yes, m’lady.”
“I told you that the front yard gets Perrier! We don’t want the neighbors to think we are poor!”
“Yes, m’lady.”
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Well I live in the more grass friendly midwest, but I have never watered my lawn in my life and I’m 69. I figured if it went brown, it went brown. I also don’t use weed and feed so eventually green “weeds”, wild violets and strawberries and clover get in my lawn and tend to be drought resistant, so I get green in my lawn all without any work.
If I really wanted to spend money I’d deliberately plant a pollinator friendly, drought resistant lawn, but I’m not ready to do that right now.
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And the to stop growing other water intensive crops like alfalfa. As I understand, California grown alfalfa is almost 100% exported to other countries who could grow it themselves but don’t because ours is so much cheaper. We have to put something in all those shipping containers headed back to Asia!
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While interesting to hear about your experience, it’s just not comparable to that of a homeowner in Southern California. In this part of the country, your lawn is only green because you water it almost every-single-day, all year long. If you have a few thousand square ft of yard, keeping it green takes thousands of gallons of water (6 to 8k gals) each month. If you stop watering it, unlike where you are from, it doesn’t just go dormant/brown. It dies.
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So basically LA is starting to get some of the water use restrictions we’ve had in Northern California since last year, while we send them water.
That’s pretty weird - it’s not like drought conditions are magically going to improve later this year, after the end of the rainy season - even the next winter’s rain won’t tell us if the drought is over, it’ll just blunt the impact a bit at best.
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Just going to say…Water? From like…the toilet?
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As a California native and a transplant (22 years ago) to one of the counties listed in the post, it blows me away that lawns are even legal to install anymore. And I mean that seriously.
In the two decades that I’ve lived in my neighborhood most people who had lawns previously ripped them out and replaced them with hardscape and/or native plants (at least in the front that I can see) which was nice to see. And most flips of the older homes that make up my neighborhood, the flippers either do the same thing or spruce things up by doing the same thing if the yard was in bad shape.
But when I see new lawns go in anywhere, or water blasting all over the place for existing lawns it drives me insane.
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That’s every Golf Course you pass in the USA, number 1 polluter of ground water, number 1 water waster. And those Golf Courses are in almost every community…
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