Showing posts with label CRD water use. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CRD water use. Show all posts

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Gardens don't "waste" water, they conserve water

In a book from 2005 (Curious By Nature), Candace Savage tells us that in Nebraska, fully 250 kilometers of fibrous roots were measured under half a square mile of grassland. The roots of grass are what hold soil in place, so that micro-organisms can break down minerals from rock and soil creating the foundation of terrestrial life. It was the loss of grassland that created the American dustbowl of the 1930s, it was the overuse of the land for agriculture and the removal of the cover that protected the roots that kept the soil alive with microscopic and insect life. It doesn't take long for a little dryness -- a few dry years -- to create havoc in the world we think we can safely wrest for our own purposes from Nature.

Here in BC we have just had the first call of the season for water conservation, the first warning about the paucity of this year's snowpack and its insufficient meltwater. Don't water your garden, say the officials, let your grass go brown and your bedding plants shrivel up.

Sadly, your shrubs will shrivel indeed but grass won't die, the genius of grass is that it has evolved to bounce back greenly from a dry spell with the first enlivening shower -- it is in fact the best covering for dry areas. Removing it to put in spaced-out drought-tolerant plants actually causes soil erosion and compaction from traffic, and loss to wind. The most drought-tolerant plant is grass, but though it tolerates drought, the best grass is watered grass.

If the municipal watering-police were truly motivated to conserve water, they would want to keep gardens in place. They would make sure the cityscape was punctuated with wide greenspaces. Gardens retain water, trees and shrubs pool it for birds and insects in their leaves, return it to the atmosphere and hold it in their roots. A lot preserved for garden space retains water and keeps the environment healthy, while a lot paved over for development is greenspace lost for water. It is now going to harbour a house or apartment block, whose inhabitants will use up hundreds of times more water through their pipes than any garden does, and who will not return it in nature's hydrologic cycle. So if they really want to conserve water, why don't the bureaucrats and politicians put the brakes on development, not on watering gardens? We need to measure how much population our given landscape and climate can healthily support, and limit population growth to that. The alternative is destruction of the living world of nature around us, and a terminally decreasing quality of life for ourselves.