The drought doesn't seem to be getting worse faster, but the authorities have been getting more concerned this month. It will probably be hard to reduce water consumption by half, as Governor Easley requested this week. According to news stories, water managers think even 20% reduction would require major sacrifices at this point. Cities like Durham might need to take more drastic steps, since we have less than 70 days of water left in the main reservoirs (I'm not sure if this counts unused reserves), but I think some areas have little drought and is the State expecting a dry winter? I could use a lot less water, but I might be more dirty, since I already follow many of the water saving guidelines, like using graywater for watering plants, reducing the amount of water I use for washing, I never washed my car or watered the grass to begin with, and I already had jugs in the toilet tanks to reduce water usage and I don't flush much. NPR had a story last Tuesday afternoon about how one Japanese family saves water by using dishwater to wash clothes, reusing bath water (which I think is, or was, common in Japan), and not washing dishes. That is admirable (and possibly unhealthy), but I'm not sure if we are at that point yet, and using graywater extensively would require plumbing work so we don't have to carry buckets around. Desalination plants, already in use on the coast, are a possible long-term solution we might eventually have to use, but they have drawbacks, and we should conserve before we look for new sources of water to waste. We should oppose any plans for large new reservoirs on rivers for environmental reasons and communities that would be uprooted.
I sympathize with wanting to save drought-stricken garden plants and trees, but I don't quite understanding watering of lawns. They have good qualities, like being 'healthy' green, uniform, probably safe to walk on barefoot, and we probably prefer savanna habitat as a species generally, but lawns are also ugly, and most Americans don't seem to see that ugliness. For the best, or orthodox, appearance, lawns usually require hazardous chemicals and the chemical and oil industries that make them, are not biologically diverse and don't support much wildlife, are planted with non-native and invasive plants, require mowing, mostly by mowers that directly or indirectly pollute the air, lawns don't help reduce heating and cooling costs like trees do, and I think lawns evolved from the mass of people emulating the European rich. Fertilizer put on lawns runs off and causes algae blooms and fish kills, and globally we are adding more biologically available nitrogen to the biosphere than it had naturally, with uncertain results (note that adding nutrients to a system has been shown to decrease biodiversity). The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, but it has to be fixed for organisms to use it, but now we can fix it for use in fertilizer, explosives, etc. There have been reports that many subdivisions are requiring people to maintain their lawns, even as we are running out of water to drink. Maybe I am underestimating how long it takes to regrow a lawn (especially in moonscaped new subdivisions, like the one at the corner of Herndon and Scott King roads, or Southpoint Mall), and it probably is a costly loss to lose fresh sod. If a lawn were allowed to dry out, I assume it would go dormant and eventually develop deeper roots, though.
The place where I live has some lawn, but I am not in charge of how it is managed. It isn't watered and is mostly weeds other than grass, and is mowed with an electric mower, but if I were in charge, I would reduce the sward and add some more useful plants to the mix, though that might include warm-season or mixed grass seed and non-native plants, like white clover (which I think is better looking than grass during the cool season, and it is edible and useful to wildlife). Most lawn plants are non-native, because they are weeds that thrive in that kind of disturbed and sunny habitat, and native plants evolved for a mostly forested landscape, although there were large savannas here when the Europeans arrived. I think Penny's Bend on the Eno River is a surviving fragment of natural savanna.
An unrelated note:
Alliance Marxist-Leninist is one of the many local and national co-sponsors (such as the local BORDCs, GRIM, and the Durham People's Alliance) of NC Stop Torture Now's demonstration against rendition, torture, and the war this Saturday in Smithfield and will probably table at the rally.
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