Nubo said:
Just washed LEAF Thursday, first time since maybe January so I don't feel particularly guilty.
Thanks to drought, lazy/cheap people like me with dirty cars and brown yards can now appear virtuous.
My car gets washed once a year whether it needs it or not, on my birthday (if I'm in town). A local car wash gives free washes on your birthday. Otherwise, that's what rain is for.
It's a good thing I'm allergic to many grasses too -unfortunately it only developed in adulthood, or I wouldn't have had to mow the lawns for my allowance. So, I don't have any grass or lawn where I live (and had a 'medical' excuse for not mowing when I did have them), although the live oak overhanging my yard keeps me busy picking up its dead leaves and putting them in the organic recycling bin - damned natural litterbug and fire hazard! I do water the young sapling curb tree with my sink and shower warm-up water, especially the last year or two, but that's the extent of my watering. You're right, I'm not cheap or lazy, I'm _virtuous_, at least I am once every five years or so when drought recurs :lol:
Meanwhile, some reading recommendations. Our latest drought has recently got me reading 'water and the west' type books again. I'm reading Wallace Stegner's "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian", an account of John Wesley Powell's career (where he fought back against all the boosters claiming that 'rain follows the plow' etc., by pointing out with scientific facts that the west is desert and semi-desert, and water is the controlling factor. I've just finished "A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest" by William deBuys. Here's one review:
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/a-drier-and-hotter-future" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
but there are many more. The most interesting thing to me is that deBuys points out that even if there's _no_ climate change, the _existing_ population in the Southwest is already overdrawing water to an unsustainable extent, and the population is forecast to keep increasing. I like deBuys 'style, as he lays out the situation calmly, factually and quietly.
I'm about half way through "When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century" by Fred Pearce. This looks at water shortages in many countries instead of just one part of the U.S. Pearce's tone is more polemical than deBuys, and I dislike that so am finding it a somewhat harder read, as it tends towards the "alarmist, Armageddonist factoids" tone of too much environmental writing. The facts are disturbing enough for me.
It's been at least a decade since I last read "Cadillac Desert", so it's time for another re-read. And I've also just read Stegner's essay collection "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West". Inevitably many of the essays are repetitive, but I'm just getting into Stegner, and like his style; I've also got "Angle of Repose" here, and "Desert Solitaire", as it's also time for a re-read of that. Like many conventional environmentalists I have a love/hate relationship with Edward Abbey, and even in this, his best book, there are often jarring notes (e.g. the rabbit bit), but when he wasn't playing the buffoon, he could write. ISTR I read much of DS on a solo trip into the (California) White Mountains, particularly an afternoon spent sitting at Patriarch grove which is certainly dry enough for Utah, if basin and range rather than plateau province.
The trigger for (re-)reading all of these now (plus one of Bernard DeVoto's books on the west) has been "All the Wild that Remains" by David Gessner: http://www.amazon.com/All-The-Wild-That-Remains/dp/0393089991" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
which quotes from all of these and more.