Cities need to stay hydrated

 

            For National Drinking Water Week, our Public Works Director tells us on the City website, “Our bodies are made up of mostly water and we need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   The same can be said for other living things in our cities that thrive on sprinklers, life that is impoverished and dying where properties dry out over the summer, due to high unit rates imposed by our cities on our water use.  

            Water is the wealth of any ecosystem.  Watering stores water in surface soil and plants, to guard against fire.  Our animals, plants, and soils “need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   

            Like money, water must circulate to be abundant.  Drought is a water depression, not enough water in the air to make rain.  Sprinklers are efficient rain makers.  Half of the water they throw evaporates, which condensed into thunderheads in 1985 in Grants Pass and made nice, wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend, the first summer I lived here.  

            In 1986, we were told that we were in drought, and “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  That summer, we went 103 days without rain.  Rationing water in a drought doesn’t help it; it makes it worse, by cutting a major source of evaporation, watering of lawns and transpiration from watered plants. 

Rationing water by price has made drought chronic, because watering is the biggest and easiest use of water to cut—and the most destructive to residents’ morale and real estate.  Dry lawns die; some trees and shrubs die with no irrigation.  Residents and landlords stop looking at their yards because they are ugly.  They feel bad because they are too poor to water their property.  They feel even worse when their neighborhood burns because of uncut weeds and little or no soil moisture.

Building water plants and watering our cities with cheap, clean water, paying our water system’s monthly bills with only base rates, made our weather increasingly moister and more moderate over fifty-plus years, and kept the price of using water low, so cheap we thought of it as free, so we could use it for any beneficial use.  We need to return to pricing our water to sell it, not to ration it.  

Clean water is not just for drinking and household use.   The first man the Lord God made was a gardener, the first woman, his helper.  Gardening, which includes lawns, is perhaps water’s highest and best use.  It reaches to the heavens and makes rain.

                       

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 4-20-2022 and the Josephine County Commissioners 4-27-22

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com