Blue Revolution Part 4

As if reading from the menus at the American fast food places popping up around Perth, developers began to build super-sized subdivisions with extra-large lawns and Big Gulp water demand. They franchised out the rugged Indian Ocean coastline north of the city with McMansions. All the growth made Perth very, very thirsty. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the people of Western Australia had become some of the most water wasting on the planeta"not as thriftless as their U.S. counterparts, but close, with a daily per capita consumption of about 135 gallons.11 When most of the world fell into recession during the global financial crisis, growth in Perth pushed on. Iron ore, gold, and other natural resources held Western Australiaas GDP growth above 5 percent for the entire first decade of the twenty-first century.12 By 2009, the average size of a new home in Australia (2,625 square feet in Perth) had ballooned larger than that of any other country, including defending champion the United States (2,168 square feet).13 Youad think Perthas water demand would have kept exploding right along with the economy and new-home construction. Instead, it went in the opposite direction. As Perthas citizens brought bigger paychecks into bigger homes in the first decade of the century, their water use steadily dropped. The catalyst was a drought, the most devastating in Australiaas modern history, along with scientific evidence that southwestern Australia is drying permanently.

Today, the people of Perth are doing something their forebears refused to do: theyare figuring out how to adapt to an entirely new climate. And, as our counterparts on the other side of the globe, theyare proof that we can do it, too.

In the same way that flood has defined the Dutch, catastrophic drought has defined life in modern Australia. Itas the sort of drought that desiccates rivers, blows dust storms that turn day to night, and sets off raging brush fires so disastrous that they have namesa"like those given to the Black Friday Fires of 1939, which killed 70 people and destroyed 1,000 homes, and to the Ash Wednesday Fires of 1983, in which another 70 died.14 Australia was founded during such a catastrophe, the Federation Drought. It scorched from 1895 through 1901, the year the six separate British colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia signed off on their const.i.tution to become the states of Australia. The Federation Drought dried up rivers and lakes, wiped out virtually the entire wheat crop, and killed 50 million sheepa"half of Australiaas signature livestock.15 The Federation Drought, and othersa"during both World Wars, in the 1960s, and again in the 1980sa"are as indelible to Australiansa psyches and their history books as the wars themselves. Historian Michael McKernan calls Australiaas drought menace athe red marauder.a After spending much of his career researching and writing about the horrors of World War I, he was stunned to find Aussie soldiers whoad survived both the war and the periodas drought insist that athe hards.h.i.+p of life at war was preferable to that lived in drought.a16 Along with the lowest annual rainfall of any inhabited continent, Australia has the lowest river dischargea"about one-sixth of Europeas or Asiaas.17 Still, Australiaas European settlers battled water scarcity and plagues of rabbits (introduced by the same European settlers) to spread agriculture across the colonies. They launched large-scale irrigation in 1886. The schemes were modeled on U.S. irrigationa"and brought similarly devastating results to rivers.18 From federation on, states vied to build the biggest and best water-control projects to harness what little river water flowed through the nation.19 In the west, an Irish civil engineer named C. Y. OaConnor built the longest water pipe seen anywhere in the world up to that point. Completed in 1903, his celebrated scheme dammed up the Helena River east of Perth and pumped it uphill to the eastern Goldfields, where men from around the world were stampeding to a gold rush.20 (One of them, a young American engineer and future president named Herbert Hoover, made both his name and his fortune there.)21 In the south, Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia launched ambitious projects to tap the Murray River, which runs through the three states. aThe mighty Murray,a the largest river in Australia, flowed during all but the worst droughts. Or at least it used to. Today, dams, weirs, and other schemes have overtapped the Murray to the point that only one-third of its historic flow reaches the sea.22 In their ongoing war with drought, Australians became obsessed with stockpiling water. In the 1960s, the Australian government even considered exploding hydrogen bombs to create gargantuan reservoirs. Boosters argued that the costs would be cheaper than traditional construction methods, and that athe radioactive contamination of the crater would be negligible after a few months.a23 Nuclear reservoirs never came to be. But by 2000, Australia was storing more water than any other country in the world, behind five hundred large dams and hundreds of thousands more farm dams.24 What Australiaas hydroengineers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could not have known was that no dam was large enough to offset the drought that arrived with the twenty-first.

Between 2000 and 2010, the rain stopped falling in the very places Australians had built their cities and developed their irrigation schemes.25 The driest period on record shriveled Australiaas crops. Normally the second-largest exporter of grain after the United States, Australia had to import grain to offset a wheat shortage.26 In the forests, eucalyptus and other drought-hardy trees died off en ma.s.se.27 In outdoor-loving cities like Sydney, water-spoiled residents had to forgo filling swimming pools and watch lush lawns fry to a crisp brown. In rural sheepherding areas, some Aussie children whoad been born after the turn of the century reached age four having never seen rain.28 But most frightening was the looming failure of the five hundred ma.s.sive dams on which Australians had grown to depend. Between 1997 and 2008, utilities in Australiaas major capital cities reported that the flow of water into their concrete confines averaged half the long-term normal of the previous century. Melbourne and Adelaide received 65 percent of their century average. Brisbane collected only 44 percent. Sydney and Perth each got only 43 percent of their historic average over the decade.29 At first, researchers and water managers dubbed this a one-in-a-thousand-years drought.30 Over time, everyone came to call it the Big Dry. But finally, scientists concluded that it really shouldnat be characterized as a drought at all. Instead, like in todayas American West, it was the new normal. The rainfall deficits and higher temperatures appeared to be permanent changes to Australiaas weather map. At the University of Adelaide, water expert Mike Young explained that unlike during the Federation Drought, the Second World War Drought, and others, aWhen the drought breaks, we will not return to cooler, wetter conditions . . . . [W]e are not expecting to return back to the old regime.a31 When they try to crystal-ball the impacts of climate change for Americaas rivers, rainfall, and other resources, U.S. water managers a.s.sume that it canat be all bad: while some areas will see less water, they say, others that need it will see more. Water managers in Australia used to say the same. The Big Dry proved them wrong. As the consequences of climate change unfolded, utility officials were dismayed to find that aall of the surprises have been on the negative side.a Extreme hot and windy summer days in Victoria, for example, led to bushfires that in turn destroyed 30 percent of Melbourneas crucial forest catchment areas, which capture and store water.32 Utility officials around the country also quit referring to the Big Dry as a drought. It was, instead, the future. To get a feel for it, they looked southwest, to Perth. The city of lovingly tended gardens was the first in Australia to endure long-term rainfall deficits. Nationally, utility managers began referring to Perth as the acanary in the coal mine . . . the first capital city to be impacted by climate change.a33 Historic averages showed Perth was not, in fact, in the first decade of a drying climate. It had been drying out for thirty years.

Winter, Down Under, arrives in June. (Just as topsy-turvy for Americans who visit Australia in December, Santa Claus brings new bathing suits and water toys so kids can cool off in the dry heat that sizzles during Christmas break.) In Perth, winter means rainfall. Most everyone welcomes the rains that cool the palm-lined streets in June, July, and Augusta"especially because they follow the hot, dry summer that lasts December through February, and the hot, dry fall that goes on March through May. (Calling the latter season afalla seems a stretch. It is, more accurately, summer 2.0.) In 2001, winter did not come.34 Jim Gill, then CEO of the Water Corporation of Western Australia, watched the bad news on a computer graph at his office in a leafy Perth suburb called Leederville. The probability graph plotted stream flows into the ten major dams the Water Corporation relied on to supply drinking water to about a million and a half customers in Perth, towns to the south, and additional communities along the iconic water pipeline built west to the Goldfields in 1903. Traditionally, dam levels sucked down during the thirsty summer and fall months would begin to rise again by July. Even in drought years, the stream-flow lines on the graph would be there. Theyad just be particularly low. But that July, the stream-inflow lines disappeareda"they had plotted off the probability graph.35 aWe were very worried,a says Gill, a Cambridge- and Harvard-educated civil engineer whoad been named Water Corporationas CEO after a career building bridges and running Western Australiaas railroads. aIt was the winter from h.e.l.l.a36 By August, the dams held just 25 percent of their capacity. It was the smallest amount of water theyad carried since 1962. Back then, the dams had to supply fewer than 500,000 people. Now, the quarter-full conveyances were supposed to quench a million. A million of the biggest water wasters in Perthas history, and among the most wasteful anywhere in the world.

Perthas population doubled between 1970 and 2001.37 Outdoor watering expanded exponentially during that time. In 1977, fewer than 10 percent of Perthas homes had irrigation systems to keep spreading lawns green. By 1998, the figure was more than 60 percent.38 Of course, the real calamity for Perthas water was the backhoe rather than the boreholea"the cityas sprawling development patterns. Though Perthas nineteenth-century developers had little choice but to stick to the sandy soils of the Swan Coastal Plain, the advent of heavy earth-moving machinery after World War II meant their twentieth-century counterparts could fill in the lower-lying wetlands, too.39 To get to the wetlands, the modern developers bulldozed mile after mile of the regionas bushland. By the twenty-first century, more than 70 percent of the areaas famous bush was gone.40 So were 80 percent of the wetlands.41 Before the Big Dry, Perthas proud new homeowners seemed to have little concept of the precious wetlands and bushland their subdivisions replaceda"much less the water scarcity of their environs. Thirty percent of Western Australiaas population had relocated from somewhere overseas.42 Even longtime residents were oblivious to the biggest problem awaiting Perth. And why wouldnat they be? The government had trotted out new water-storage and water-supply projects endlessly from the day C. Y. OaConnor locked the first steel pipes together for his Goldfields water scheme a hundred years before.

Throughout the 1970s, a80s, and a90s, Water Corporation sommeliers uncorked new groundwater schemes up and down the northern suburbs to top off supply. By 2001, Perth was getting half its water from the ancient aquifer that underlies the city, the other half from the dams.

But in the dry winter of 2001, all that still wasnat enough. And Gill and his colleagues were feeling the heat. The public figured that if Perth was running out of water, the Water Corporation was to blame. Perthas media mounted a campaign against the utility, alleging incompetence for failing to adequately plan for Western Australiaas water supply.43 As dam levels dropped, Water Corporation imposed a daytime sprinkler ban and two-day-a-week irrigation schedule based on home address to spread water demand over the week. Residents, especially business owners and workers in Perthas substantial nursery and lawn industries, decried the new rules. aNo one believed the lawns and gardens could survive on two days a week,a says Greg Stewart, general manager of a chain of landscaping stores called Total Eden.44 At the Water Corporation, Gill appointed a drought committee of senior managers who held emergency meetings as often as three times a week in a small conference room at Leederville headquarters. They called their drought bunker the Canning Room, after one of Perthas original, enormous concrete dams built in the 1940s.45 The name was ironic, given the fact that Perthas dams were failing.

As bad as winter 2001 seemed, the following winter was worse. In 2002, Water Corporation officials celebrated the opening of another major dam, this one on the Harvey River, in a fruit and wine region south of Perth. Itas a safe bet Harvey will go down in history as southwest Australiaas last mega-dam.

That winter, the dams plunged to less than one-fifth of capacity. In the precipitous drop, scientists were beginning to see the drying as long term, even permanent. They doc.u.mented a 21 percent reduction in rainfall in southwest Australia in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The low-pressure weather system that used to bring the welcome winter rains has s.h.i.+fted slightly to the south, a feature of global warming. Itas not that the rain doesnat fall anymore, explains Chari Pattiaratchi, a professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia. Instead, athe rain that used to fall on land now falls in the ocean.a46 On a historic graph, the plot lines now showed that between 1975 and 2002, stream flows to Perthas dams had averaged under half the figure from 1911 to 1974. The average for the decade from 1997 to 2006 was lower still.47 The most telling fact the computers spit out, though, was that the trickle of water into dams was not just a matter of declining rainfall. As southwest Australiaas rainfall decreased 20 percent, stream flow into dams decreased between 50 percent and 70 percent.48 That meant the three-decade drying of Perth could not be blamed on global warming alone.

Stream flows dried by half in precisely the same thirty years that Perthas population doubled. Filling the wetlands, felling the bushlands, paving over the recharge areas, and pumping the ancient groundwater all had something to do with it.

Just as global warming wasnat the only factor drying up Perth, it wasnat the singular alarm that finally roused citizens from their pool lounges built from kwila wood to pay attention to water. Popular environmental awareness in twenty-first-century Perth was awakened in part by the Big Dry and by droughtas historic imprint on the national psyche, says noted Australian landscape architect Richard Weller.49 But the vexations of population growth, from the flattened bushland to the snarled morning traffic from the suburbs, were also wake-up calls. Another ringing alarm was scientist Tim Flanneryas prediction of Perth as a aghost metropolis.a But of all the water warnings sounded in the early years of the century, none was so frightening to southwestern Australians as the threat to shut off their lawn sprinklers.

Still in the grip of the Big Dry in 2005, Jim Gill began to warn that a total irrigation ban was imminent if water levels didnat rise. State university scientists urged the ban. Representatives of Perthas $1.4 billion lawn-and-landscape industry fought it, warning that 16,000 workers would lose their jobs. But people were beginning to realize that the permanent daytime sprinkler ban and two-day-a-week watering rules, now in place for four years, had not killed off anyoneas roses. Greg Stewart of Total Eden says residential irrigation sales dropped more than 20 percent in the first year. But during the second year, residents began to accept the idea of gardening with less water. By the third and fourth years, they were demanding so many new types of native plants and drought-tolerant turfs that landscape-industry sales had begun to return to their water-wasting heydays.50 The irrigation ban became a major issue in Western Australiaas 2005 elections. Premier Geoff Gallop, a PhD economist, promised that if voters returned the Australian Labor Party to power, the sprinklers would keep spinning come summer.51 Labor stayed in power. And the sprinklers kept whirring under the evening-only, two-day-a-week rules. But something had changed: the level of public engagement in water. Citizens became increasingly interested in water policy. They wanted to keep Perth green with some irrigation. But their supply-side conventional wisdom was giving way. Until then, popular sentiment always had it that the stateas engineers would ultimately solve Perthas water problems in the same way C. Y. OaConnor had quenched the Goldfields.

Now, community opinion began to stray from the kinds of water schemes that had helped dry out Perth. Citizens spoke out against the Water Corporationas top choice for new water supply in the new century: a plan to tap a huge aquifer called the Yarragadee.52 Water Corporation officials declared the underground source plentiful enough to meet all the needs of the growing southwest, with aa staggering two thousand times the capacity of Sydney Harbour.a53 Public university scientists and farmers who made their living in the region vehemently disagreed. Ultimately, state environmental regulators overturned Water Corporationas preferred option to develop the Yarragadee Aquifer. Publica"and therefore politicala"opinion came to favor a second option, a desalination plant at the Indian Ocean that would deliver the same amount of water annually, though at considerably higher cost.

Western Australia opened the nationas first major seawater-desalination plant in 2006, in a coastal industrial town called Kwinana, south of Perth. The $385 million plant is the largest in the world powered by renewable energy. Its blue-gray exterior reflects the colors of the ma.s.sive bay it overlooks. c.o.c.kburn Sound is both an abundant marine fishery and the most intensely used bay on Australiaas west coast. The Kwinana plantas twenty thousand reverse-osmosis membranes wring twelve billion gallons of freshwater from the sound each year. The Water Corporation is now building another plant, this one to cost $1 billion, at a coastal village farther south called Binningup that will produce about the same amount.

When the second plant opens in late 2011, one-third of southwestern Australiaas water supply will come from the sea. The costly transition from dams to desalination is now spreading across the country: Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland all recently opened major desalinization plants or have them under construction.

But the real sea change was not that from dams to desal; it was a cultural s.h.i.+ft from complacency to care. Western Australians had become convinced they should lay off their remaining freshwater resources. And for the first time in the stateas modern development, a water ethic began to take root in the regionas sandy soils.

A few years earlier, in 1996, an a.n.a.lyst named Meredith Blais came to work for the Water Corporation from BC Hydro, one of the largest electric utilities in Canada. Blais had a background in commercial financial services. But her work exporting water from Canada to the United States for hydropower convinced her that grasping the soft side of the industrya"the popular imagination, the values of indigenous cultures, and other intangiblesa"was more important than her training in risk and rate of return.

During the Yarragadee controversy, Water Corporation looked out of touch with residents who were demanding efficiency before any new groundwater wells. After it was over, in 2007, Blais helped convince executives to build the utilityas long-term water-development plans around community preferences. Over two years, Water Corporation officials met with thousands of residents at shopping-center forums, public meetings, and other venues. At the beginning of the Big Dry, public sentiment ran strongly against limits to water, especially garden water. Now, as popular opinion turned against tapping new freshwater resources, the top two priorities to emerge were healthy ecosystems and water conservation.

The community-inspired water plan became known as Water Forever. Like most feel-good doc.u.ments, it might have gathered dust on a shelf if not for a keen move by Blais, who hired an economist to make the business case for it. The consultantas report was dramatic: the Water Corporation would save more than a billion dollars if it paid more serious attention to conservation. An investment of $81 million in water-efficiency programs would save $1.1 billion in new-source costs and another $136 million in wastewater-treatment costs.54 The numbers were atoo big to ignorea for the Water Corporationas new CEO. Sue Murphy was a civil engineer whoad made a name for herself managing construction projects in the rugged gas and oil fields of northwestern Australia. Jim Gill recruited her to Water Corporation in 2004 to manage the capital side of the desalination work. When he retired in 2008, she was named CEO.

Murphy accepted the economic arguments for efficiency as aa no-brainer.a aItas not about reducing revenue,a she says. aItas about deferring capital spending.a.5.5 Indeed, as Western Australiansa water use continued to plummet, the Water Corporationas revenues rose every year of the Big Dry, to $1.7 billion in 2008a"2009.56 By the time the Water Forever plan got under way in 2009, the average residentas daily water use had already dropped from 135 gallons a day to about 100 a day, a 25 percent reduction in the decade of the Big Dry.57 As French engineers worked on the mega-technology of desalination, Perth witnessed a revolution in individual technologies like rainwater tanks, 44,000 of which were installed in city homes by 2007.58 Businesses saw the most dramatic savings, like the fish-filleting operation that installed foot-operated taps to slice 80 percent from its daily use.

Water Forever aims to reduce overall water demand by another 25 percent. The program sends awater-wise specialistsa door-to-door to build personal relations.h.i.+ps with citizens and help them use less water. It employs four full-time teachers who develop water curriculum and work to understand how children influence the way their families use water. It calls for recycling 60 percent of southwest Australiaas wastewater to irrigate everything from parks to food crops. Already, treated wastewater irrigates agricultural areas to the south, including tree plantations and wine grapes. (Maybe thatas the secret to Omrahas award-winning chardonnay.) Perthas water savings were not the most dramatic in Australia during the Big Dry. Some Australian cities slashed water use by nearly half with emergency irrigation bans that carried fines of up to $5,000 for citizens and $10,000 for businesses.59 The difference was that Perth was learning to live permanently with less water. In 2010, as heavy rains pounded the country, headlines in every state but Western Australia announced that water restrictions were being eased.60 In Perth, the state water minister used the occasion of rain to announce a permanent winter-sprinkler ban. Ten years earlier, a permanent ban would have been political suicide.

Perth is still lush with vegetation. Kingly palm trees line the streets. Soccer fields stretch for miles along the riverfront. Terraces sag with large, old hibiscus and other flowering tropicals more suited to the South Pacific. That all the green survives is proof no one needed to water more than two evenings a week in the first place.

These days, Murphy is pus.h.i.+ng beyond the tap to help Western Australia figure out new development patterns more appropriate to its dry climate. aWeare only going to get so far turning the shower off after three minutes,a she says. aThe next step is, How are we going to become adults and have a mature relations.h.i.+p with our surroundings?a61 Sheas brought in academics, including Richard Weller, the landscape architect who is a longtime critic of the status quo. He calls her aabsolutely genuine about change,a62 pus.h.i.+ng the Water Corporation far beyond its traditional role.

aThe black-letter law of the role of a water utility is to just track demand up and supply more,a Murphy says. aBut if we do that weave missed the point. Weave missed the point altogether.a63 Building a jetty on Western Australiaas coast in one of her first major management projects as a young engineer in the 1970s, Sue Murphy became the b.u.t.t of jokes for likening big construction jobs to organizing a dinner party. She was quoted as saying, aItas about sequence, itas about budget, itas about getting the right people and the right ingredients and making it all happen.a Her male colleagues gave her a copy of the Womanas Weekly Cookbook. They inscribed it, aEvery Girlas Guide to Jetty Construction.a64 But Murphyas recipe is resonating in Perth, where she is pus.h.i.+ng three ingredients to a sustainable future. She calls them Water Forever, Zero Footprint, and Great Placea"a three-part goal to lower Perthas water and carbon footprints in a way that allows the community to grow and maintain the quality of life for which it is known. aItas a triangle held together with plastic bands,a she says. aIf you pull Great Place too far, and people have an affluent lifestyle and disregard their surroundings, you distort the whole triangle. Similarly, if you pull the Zero Footprint too far, and have a cloth-and-ashes approach to everything that doesnat allow development, you distort the whole thing. Itas a matter of keeping them all in tension enough to keep moving.a65 To hear a gas-and-oil engineer rhapsodize on sustainability is enough to make you wonder whether Sue Murphyas male colleagues were right: perhaps Murphyas gender is worth noting. In Australia, just as in the United States and elsewhere around the world, water professionals tend to be engineers, who tend to be men. The generalization may not be fair to women engineers and their male counterparts working to diversify the professiona"and the many firms, universities, and professional organizations supporting the efforts. But the fact remains that the engineering workforce has the greatest underrepresentation of women of any profession.In the United States, only 11.5 percent of working engineers are women.66 The future doesnat look much better: while the number of women undergraduates on college campuses has increased in recent years to more than half, the number of women engineering undergraduates has declined slightly, to less than one-fifth. Women comprised 18.5 percent of engineering undergraduates in 1995. A decade later, 17.2 percent of engineering undergrads were women.67 Drill down into the U.S. utility-workforce data, and the picture is much worse. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2009, water-utility workforces were still 90 percent male.68 Florida Everglades champion Marjory Stoneman Douglas, before she became an environmentalist, advocated as a suffragist and journalist for women to crack male-dominated careers. In a Miami Herald column in the 1920s, Douglas wrote that men working alone were not as sensitive to the broader needs of society.69 As an older activista"she did not devote herself full time to the Everglades until age seventy-ninea"she connected that dynamic to the interplay of engineers and nature in Americaas greatest wetland.

Douglas memorably described U.S. Army Corps engineers as emotionally arrested boys who played in south Floridaas muck as if it was their own mud pie.70 She once wrote in the Herald that men are achiefly interested in the material improvement of . . . roads, bridges, deeper harbors, no-fence laws, and such excellent measures, all related in some way to their earning capacities. Now the women voters are interested in these things also, but when they sponsor especially a bill in the legislature you may notice that it is not material improvements which they desire for the state or their locality. The thing that interests them is the welfare and advancement of people.a71 Those statements seem archaic in our egalitarian, modern age; at this writing, the American presidentas most urgent priority is to give everyone in the country access to health care. As well they should: itas been nearly a century since Douglas wrote them, in 1923. Yet in the U.S. water sector, Douglasas words are still disturbingly timely. The sector is neither egalitarian nor modern. Utilities have been among the most stubborn holdouts in Americaas slow turn toward corporate sustainability and its truism that conservation can lead to higher profits. James H. Miller, CEO of the global utility PPL Corporation, which runs hydropower plants throughout much of the United States, from Maine to Montana, may have summed it up best when he lectured electrical-engineering and computer-engineering students at his alma mater, the University of Delaware, in 2010: aThereas an awful lot of talk about conservation driving down the need for electricity, but to me thatas counterintuitive to the continued progress of our country,a he told the students. aWe want to make things, and that takes power.a72 Water scholars in the United States and abroad spend a lot of time thinking about how the lack of women in water management in the developing world exacerbates global water problems. American environmental lawyer Kathy Robb, cofounder of the Womenas Network for a Sustainable Future, points out that water engineering in developing parts of Africa and Asia atends to emphasize providing water facilities, leaving the social issues to be sorted out over time.a She notes that involving women in the earliest stages of water planning makes facilities much more relevant. Bringing women into decisions about where to put new wells, for example, helps reduce the distance girls must walk to collect water, enabling more of them to attend school.73 Americaas water problems in no way compare with a global crisis that has half the worldas hospital beds filled with patients suffering waterborne disease.74 But the more I study American water management, the more I wonder whether the First World would gain from more women in the sector as well. The U.S. sector is dominated by forty-five-to-sixty-four-year-old men who came of age during an era of gallantry for civil engineers, when the job was to aannounce and defenda projects, not engage the community in them. Those general demographics are hanging on as the baby boom generation forestalls retirement and the percentage of younger workersa"male and femalea"whoave been trained in the people side of water declines.75 The Water Corporation is no doubt still an engineering organization; its desalination strategy is sharply opposed by environmentalists and economists who argue Perth should have taken water efficiency much more seriously before embarking on such energy-intensive and costly technology. But thereas no question the utility is one of the few to have made the s.h.i.+ft from announce-and-defend to community engagement. Itas hard to say whether Sue Murphyas gender has a whit to do with it. Patricia Mulroy of the Southern Nevada Water Authority may be the best evidence that it does not.

What is clear is that Murphy is helping launch a brand-new role for water utilities globally. Murphy wants the Water Corporation to ainfluence outside our mandate,a helping Perth citizens build a water ethic as they figure out who they want to be in the twenty-first century, if not the English gardeners of the nineteenth or California suburbanites of the twentieth.

aNeither of those visions was right for Western Australia,a says Murphy, a mother of three daughters who likens the challenge to helping children grow up to become precisely who theyare meant to be. aThe white population of Perth has been in a battle with the environment ever since we arrived: cut down the bush, plant the gra.s.s.

aUntil we make peace, the battle keeps going.a76 One beautiful Sunday morning under pale blue skies in Perth, I rented a car and set out to find C. Y. OaConnoras century-old water pipe to the Goldfields. My friend Ros, who comes from Perth, had Google mapped my day. Ros was ambitiousa"one of those small numbers of women I just talked about, with her engineering doctorate. The 76 turns she had dictated for me were not easy for someone unaccustomed to driving on the left.

If Australia has Sunday drivers, I was the worst that morning as I headed east through the hills of Perth and the areaas endless roundabouts. Stressed out trying to keep left, navigate the roundabouts, and read Rosas map, I had to pull over to check out yards. I saw few English gardens in these outskirts of Perth, but lots of rainwater tanks, rock gardens, and native plants, from peppermint trees to kangaroo paws, with their red-and-green blossoms.

The farther I traveled from the city, the more I relaxed my grip on the right-side steering wheel. Literally and mentally far from the coastal crowds and the generic suburbs north and south of Perth, I could see why the metro area was growing farther and farther out. I drove through historic villages with cozy cafs and old willow trees dripping their shade over sidewalks. Once Iad pa.s.sed the villages and begun to wind up Mundaring Weir Road toward the dam that feeds the Goldfields pipe, I was driving well enough to enjoy the deep eucalyptus forests that stretched on both sides of me.

In 1903, the year OaConnoras pipe began to send water from the hulking dam to the Goldfields, the state had ring-barked and burned these forests, killing more than twelve thousand acres of trees. Public-works engineers were convinced that getting rid of the trees would speed up stream flow into the dam. Some years later, they saw the opposite was true: deforestation led to lower stream flows and rising salinity in the weir.77 Now, as I drove through the forests of tall jarrah and smooth-barked wandoo, frequent signsa"posted by the Water Corporationa"reminded me that these trees are protected. The utility had learned that conserving forests is one of the best ways to save water. Going a step farther, its scientists had identified catchment managementa"letting trees grow larger to increase the amount of rainfall the forest capturesa"as a key water-supply strategy for the future.

In a 5 milliona"acre forest to the south near a dam called Wungong, a twelve-year trial is under way to see how much water catchment management could yield. Scientists are thinning 10,000 acres of jarrah and white-flowering marri to let trees grow to their pre-European density. The larger the trees, the more water per acre percolates into the soil, aquifer, and streams, and then to dams. Early results from the small area indicate two million more gallons a day flowing into Wungong Dam.78 If the trial continues to succeed, Water Forever plans call for multiplying those numbers across Western Australiaas forest catchment areas.

The transcendentalist clich about journey over destination proved true when I finally made it to the pipeline. I walked the hundred-foot-high wall of Mundaring Dam, its still reservoir on one side, the dusty Helena River bed on the other, so long dry that clumps of bush were spreading over the bottom. I wandered through the brick steam-pumping station that still chugs water to the pipeline.

Then, I found the first links of OaConnoras pipe. I thought it was sad he never knew how Western Australians came to celebrate him as a hero. Beaten by vicious political and press criticism, he rode his favorite horse into the Indian Ocean and put a bullet in his head. Less than a year later, water began to gush to the Goldfields.

At the turn of the last century, it was no less than revolutionary to lay pipe nearly four hundred miles uphill and turn water into gold in a dry and isolated land. This century, it is equally revolutionary that one of the most wasteful cultures in the world is learning to live with less watera"adapting to its dry and isolated land.

The impressive part of my day trip was not OaConnoras pipeline. It was his descendantsa water ethic on display along the way: Abundant rainwater tanks. English gardens converted to native landscapes. A water utility trying to save as much water as it is trying to make. Catchment forests that affirm the importance of keeping as much freshwater as possible in nature: soils and streams, wetlands and woods.

In February 1962, another American took a much more spectacular day trip, maybe the best one ever. Astronaut John Glenn blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard the Friends.h.i.+p 7 in the countryas first orbital s.p.a.ce flight. Glenn spun east at 17,500 miles an hour in the cramped s.p.a.ce capsule. He experienced anothing novela in the first forty minutes, from Florida to Africa, writes Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. Everything Glenn saw, felt, and did was precisely the same as he had experienced in NASAas simulators.79 But wonder took hold as he sailed into the night side of Earth, over the Indian Ocean. He saw stars and the atmosphereas haze, and then, over Western Australia, lights. aOff to one side he could make out the lights of an entire city . . . an absolute ma.s.s of electric lights, and south of it there was another one, a smaller one,a Wolfe writes. aThe big ma.s.s was the city of Perth and the smaller one was a town called Rockingham.a It was midnight in Perth and Rockingham. aBut practically every living soul in both places had stayed up to turn on every light they had for the American sailing over in the satellite.a80 Half a century later, Americaas longtime friend around the night side of the globe has something new to show us. Weave long shared with our geographic antipode the poles of prosperity and waste. Weave imported Western Australiansa outback kitsch and chardonnays.

Now, itas time to do the same with their water ethic.

Chapter 11. An American Water Ethic.

To find hope for a water ethic in the United States takes some serious searching, and in some pretty unlikely places. Like the hot-as-blazes roof of a commercial office building on the sprawling north side of San Antonio, Texas, in the middle of summer.

When he used to clamber up to this roof just a decade ago, Rex Poppy, the chief building engineer for local commercial developer Concord Property Corporation, looked out over a vista of trees and cow pasturea"with plenty of deer darting througha"as far as he could see. Today, in every direction, buildings and highways spread to the horizon. To the north, new housing developments are stacked like terrace steps to the heaven that is Texas Hill Country. Military personnel, immigrants from nearby Mexico, and retiring baby boomers have helped drive the third-highest population growth in the nation to San Antonio, behind New York City and Los Angeles.1 The flow of moving vans has more than doubled the population since 1970, to 1.4 million.2 But the flow of the cityas historic water source, the once prodigious Edwards Aquifer, cannot keep up.

Until recently, San Antonio was the only major city in the United States to derive its entire water supply from a single aquifer. The 180-mile-long Edwards quenches 2 million people and provides nearly all the agricultural and industrial water in the region. It is home to fourteen endangered or threatened aquatic creatures and fills thousands of springs, as well as the Guadalupe, Nueces, San Antonio, and San Marcos rivers. But so many users revved up so many pumps that the Edwards could no longer meet all the human and natural needs. Just twenty years ago, the situation seemed as intractable as those in Californiaas Delta, the Everglades of Florida, or Atlanta, where federal judges have declared that water conventions must change to protect endangered species, halt pollution, and save an overburdened river.

aAll those places are calling out aArmageddon,aa says Alexander Briseo, chairman of the board of trustees of the San Antonio Water System. aBut itas nota"weare living it here.a3 Briseo was city manager in San Antonio in 1993, when U.S. District judge Lucius D. Bunton III ordered Texas to back off the Edwards and make a afundamental changea in its approach to water.4 Around the same time, San Antonio voters halted the cityas only backup plan: a controversial reservoir and dam project on the Medina River the city had spent the past decade permitting.

aWe were thinking aArmageddon,a too,a Briseo says.5 San Antonio had no choice but to dramatically cut waste. In the early 1980s, citizens used an average 225 gallons of water every day. Twenty-five years later, that number had been slashed in half, to 115 gallons. The San Antonio Water System now pumps less from the Edwards than it did back thena"with 67 percent more customers.

Breaking off a deep love affair with lawns and other cultural changes brought about half the water savings. The other half has come from commercial users, including Concord. All over San Antonio, building superintendents and engineers such as Rex Poppy have made simple fixes to save huge amounts of water, in places their customers never would notice. Like this urban rooftop.

On sizzling summer days, giant commercial air conditioners crank up all over San Antonio, as they do all over the nation. Most of the big ACs are water chilled, sucking thousands of gallons a day into their cooling towers. Utilities pump this watera"often from threatened sources such as the Edwards, the Colorado in the West, and the Chattahoochee in the Easta"and treat it for drinking at considerable costs, all pa.s.sed on to customers. But thereas no good reason to chill ACs with drinking water. We do it this way because, hypnotized by the illusion of water abundance, weave always done it this way.

Recycled water works just as well. AC units themselves generate a pretty steady supply in the form of condensatea"the drip, drip, drip you sometimes see outside a home AC. Concordas seventy-ton units sweat off about ten thousand gallons a montha"all water the company used to send down a drain pipe.

Rex Poppy changed that with one trip to the Home Depot.6 He rigged a system that captures the buildingas condensate and pumps it to the rooftop cooling towers. This relatively minor bit of repiping doesnat generate all the water the towers need. But every year, it saves 120,000 gallons and knocks his companyas water bill down by $1,200. Across town, San Antonioas River City Mall now collects 12 million gallons of water a year from its AC, after an upgrade that paid for itself in eight months.

Imagine the numbers if every building super in the country decided to save water this way, and you begin to get a picture of what the blue revolution will look like. But the numbers arenat the moral of the water story here. San Antonio is proof that an American metro that historically abused water can changea"at many different levels of society. What sets San Antonio apart from other U.S. cities is a water consciousness unconfined to lonely sectors such as environmental groups or green builders. The water ethic has soaked in with the city-owned water utility, elected officials, residents, and private businesses such as Concord.

Before Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York Cityas Central Park, Bostonas Emerald Necklace, or any of his other celebrated urban green s.p.a.ces, the father of landscape architecture worked as a journalist. He had a vivid eye for people and, naturally, for places. In the mid-1850s, the New York Times commissioned him to write about slavery in the American South. His reporting took him to Texas, where Olmsted scribbled as much about land and water as the slave economy he so opposed.7 In 1857, he published a book called A Journey through Texas, or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. San Antonio, with its Spanish missions and ajumble of races,a stands out in the saddle-trip as one of Olmstedas favorite spots.8 He was enamored to find gus.h.i.+ng water in one of the driest climates head ever experienced: The San Antonio Spring may be cla.s.sed as of the first water among the gems of the natural world. The whole river gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth. It has all the beautiful accompaniments of a smaller spring, moss, pebbles, seclusion, sparkling sunbeams, and dense overhanging luxuriant foliage. The effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible conceptions of a spring. You cannot believe your eyes, and almost shrink from sudden metamorphosis by invaded nymphdom.9 Olmstedas fountain-spraying spring, along with several other large artesian geysers and thousands of smaller ones, started their journey to San Antonio as rainfall in the Texas Hill Country. The rain seeped into the cavernous limestone of the Edwards Aquifer and flowed south underground until it erupted in what is now the Alamo Heights section of the city north of downtown, feeding the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek. Water coursed through the area with such abundance that the Spanish were convinced to begin building missions here in 1718, including the legendary Alamo. Missionaries also built acequias, or community water ditches, an extensive network of ca.n.a.ls and wells that brought the water to local crops and to the Alamo itself.10 San Antonio had grown enough by 1866 that the ditches were overflowing with waste, and a severe cholera outbreak sent leaders in search of a more modern system.11 The San Antonio Riveras headwaters were owned by Colonel George W. Brackenridge, a local businessman and philanthropist who lived on the river and loved the springs. He was the first to sink artesian wells into the aquifer in 1889 and 1890 to supply water to the city. Photos from 1895 show early wells shooting water 25 feet into the air.12 By 1900, all of the cityas water came from wells dug into the Edwards. But by that year, too, San Antonio Springs had dried to a trickle. Brackenridge was devastated. He wrote that athe sinking of so many artesian wellsa had dropped the water table enough to stop the flow of the springs. aThe river is my child, and it is dying, and I cannot stay to see its last gasps.a13 Brackenridge sold 280 acres that included the San Antonio Springs to a religious order called the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, which had settled in the area in part to address the suffering caused by the cholera outbreaks. He sold the waterworks, including the wells, to another private water company; they were later acquired by city government. He also donated nearly 350 acres to the public for Brackenridge Park, as popular today as it was in the 1920s, when its rustic stone buildings and pathways were built.14 Whatas bewildering about the ravage of the Edwards and its springs more than a century ago was that Texans just kept pumping. In a Tragedy of the Commons acted out across the United States in the twentieth century, prescient warnings like Brackenridgeas were drowned out by promoters growing cities in the sun.

Texas historically put no limits on groundwater, the use of which was governed by an English common law concept called the Rule of Capture.15 In the nineteenth century, the rule applied to underground water in almost every state in the nation. The Ohio Supreme Court had given property owners the same absolute right to it as to rocks and minerals under their land, saying the water underground was so asecret, occult, and concealeda that any attempt to regulate it would be apractically impossible.a16 As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, groundwater movement was not so secret and the Rule of Capture became history in most of the country. But not in Texas. In 1904, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed the rule, also known as the Law of the Biggest Pump, giving landowners the right to suck up unlimited amounts of groundwater even if it hurt their neighbors.17 By 1934, withdrawals from the Edwards. .h.i.t 100,000 acre-feet per year.18 Pumping really revved up in the 1950s. In a mid-century drought, Comal Springs, not only the largest spring in the Edwards but also the largest in the southwestern United States, stopped flowing altogether for nearly half of 1956.19 By 1981, nearly a quarter of the major freshwater springs of Texas had failed due to groundwater withdrawals.20 In 1989, pumping from the Edwards reached a seemingly impossible peak of 542,400 acre-feet.21 The proverbial last straw was poked into the aquifer in 1991, when a giant catfish farm called Living Waters Artesian Springs, fifteen miles southwest of San Antonio, began to suck up forty million gallons of water a daya"one-quarter of the entire cityas daily draw. Protected by the Rule of Capture, the fish farm slurped water out from under neighbors, including some of the very pumpers who had fought to preserve the rule. By taking the Law of the Biggest Pump too literally, the catfish farm helped end the Rule of Capture for the Edwards Aquifer.22 The case that ultimately toppled the Law of the Biggest Pump and led to San Antonioas modern-day water ethic was Sierra Club v. Babbitt. It began in 1991, when the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in defense of the federal Endangered Species Act against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, charging that relentless pumping doomed endangered fish, salamanders, and wild rice that rely on the Edwards. Two years later, Judge Lucius D. Bunton III told the Texas legislature it must come up with a way to regulate pumping in the Edwards. While he was ruling on the endangered-species case, Bunton set out a much larger vision for a water ethic: Without a fundamental change in the value the region places on freshwater, a major effort to conserve and reuse Aquifer water, and implemented plans to import supplemental supplies of water, the regionas quality of life and economic future are imperiled.23 Buntonas historic rulings led the Texas legislature to create the Edwards Aquifer Authority in 1993 to regulate groundwater withdrawals. In the midst of a severe drought in 1996, the Texas Supreme Court overturned a state trial-court ruling that the authority was unconst.i.tutional. After the politically appointed authority (some of its members were fiercely opposed to its creation) declined to slow pumping during the drought, Bunton named a special master to create an emergency reduction plan. He was Todd Votteler, an environmental scientist whoad worked as a special a.s.sistant to the court during the Endangered Species Act litigation. Looking back, Votteler remembers that Texans across the region viewed Buntonas rulings aas the end of the world. They said, aIt canat be done.aa24 Twenty years later, itas clear they were wrong. San Antonians are still overreliant on the Edwards, says Votteler, now an executive with the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. But there is no question theyave begun to undergo the afundamental change in the value the region places on freshwater.a25 Few people know that Bunton, a judge with a sense of humor who was known to brandish squirt guns in his courtroom when lawyers misbehaved, asked for updates on the Edwards until he died in 2001a"even though the Endangered Species Act cases were no longer active.26 To this day, some landowners still battle in Texas courtrooms over the late judgeas rulings and the groundwater protections they brought about. Theyare fighting to hold on to their right to the Biggest Pump as desperately as if they were back at the Alamo in 1836. But the odds, much like those at the Alamo, are near impossible that San Antonio, or any part of the United States in the twenty-first century, will ever return to the no-holds-barred pumping of the twentieth.

Take a drive around San Antonio, and itas clear that most people here have come to value watera"in much the way Judge Bunton envisioned.

On a big-sun late afternoon in June, I head north of San Antonioas city limits to find the biggest communities behind the biggest gates in the suburbs. These are typically the places most wedded to their all-gra.s.s, all-green, all-the-time lawns, even during drought. I expect to discover that not everyone is doing their part to contribute to San Antonioas dramatic water reductions. I steer into Cibolo Canyons, a ma.s.sive, master-planned community with a J. W. Marriott Resort & Spa and a TPC golf course, expecting it to glow green on the horizon like the Emerald City of Oz. Cibolo Canyons isnat glowing. Instead, it fits in earth-toned sync with the burnt-orange sky. The developmentas entrance is planted with Bermuda gra.s.s, straw colored in this dry period. Inside, the medians are landscaped with drought-tolerant clumps of muhly and Mexican feather gra.s.ses. Farther down the main thoroughfare, the developer left alone some hundreds of acres of native oak-juniper forest near the recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer.

The wise water practices were negotiated with the San Antonio Water System, the public utility that handles water and wastewater for 1.3 million residents. Locals call the utility by its acronym, SAWS. The Alliance for Water Efficiency in Chicago describes SAWSas conservation efforts as the farthest reaching in the nation.

With legal limits looming on groundwater pumping from the Edwards, the city created SAWS in 1992 in a consolidation of traditional water boards and districts. Part of the idea was to make conservation a mainstream water-supply strategy. SAWSas conservation department, run by a former Texas A&M University Extension agent named Karen Guz, got a prominent position in the utility from the start. Its first conservation program, still ongoing, was called Plumbers to People: low-income residents with leaking pipes can call out a plumber to fix leaks for free. SAWS has spent about $1.7 million on the program since 1994, with a total water savings of more than 350 million gallons.

In 2005, SAWS led the city to pa.s.s an unprecedented water-conservation ordinance after a three-year collaboration that won the full support of stakeholders ranging from homeowners to the irrigation industry. The most unique part of the ordinance also makes the most sense: itas outright illegal to waste water in San Antonioa"illegal to let water run off into a gutter or a ditch, illegal to have a gus.h.i.+ng pipe and not call someone to fix it.

Other parts of the ordinance dictate that in restaurants, a gla.s.s of water comes by request only, and that charity car washes can be held only at actual car washes. (Full-service car washes are so efficient here that they use as little as eight gallons of water per car, with half of that recycled, compared with automatic car washes, which use up to ninety gallons per car.) There are rules for everything from pools to power was.h.i.+ng. The laws limit irrigated areas, restrict irrigation to between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m., and tell residents what type of gra.s.s they can plant around new homes and businesses. (They are gra.s.ses that will come back after a dry summer or a drought: any buffalo gra.s.s, many types of Bermuda, zoysia gra.s.s, and only one variety of St. Augustine, known as Floratam.27) New homes and businesses also have to install high-efficiency toilets and follow other conservation practices. Air-conditioning condensate turned out to be such a big source of savings that all new commercial businesses now have to capture it.

Overall, SAWS officials estimate that San Antonio has saved 121,000 acre-feet of water in the twenty-five years since it began in earnest to lay off the Edwards Aquifer.28 San Antonio is not the only city in the United States to have forged a water ethic. But a communitywide ethic is rarea"the exception to the rule. Sarasota County, Florida, an upscale, art-loving community with bungalow-style homes and a subtropical climate, once had as many sod-carpeted lawns as any other city in the Southeast, and average daily water use of about 140 gallons. Two droughts ago, in 2002, it experienced its own blue revolution when the countyas all-Republican commission pa.s.sed one of the strictest lawn ordinances in the nation, with once-a-week irrigation and a requirement that new landscapes contain no more than 50 percent sod.29 Other local governments in the drought-ravaged Southeast also slapped down watering restrictions. But when the rain started falling again, almost all went back to letting residents soak their lawns. Commissioners in Sarasota didnat want to have to change their ordinances again next drought, so they kept them on the books. The combination of landscaping rules and conservation-rate pricinga"customers who use a little water pay a little, those who use a lot pay a lota"has now lowered daily consumption to eighty gallons per person.

Shannon Staub, whoas served on the Sarasota County Commission since 1998 and helped spearhead the ordinances, has watched an about-face as community developers, lawn-business owners, and others who once vilified the rules now tout them as a.s.sets. Anecdotal evidence has her convinced that drought-tolerant landscapes are more attractive to home buyers than water-hogging lawns. The county does have some of the most attractive yards in Florida. County governmentas action, too, made it easier for other local munic.i.p.alities to acta"when the Florida legislature has been unwilling to establish any sort of statewide conservation ethic. The water ethic astarts at the bottom and spreads,a says Staub.30 Another s.h.i.+ning exception is Monterey, California. The water-loving city, home to Fishermanas Wharf, Cannery Row, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, has reduced its daily draw to among the lowest in the nation: seventy gallons per person. Under private utility California American Wateras rate structure, anyone who uses more than a basic amount of water indoors, and practically any water outdoors, pays significantly higher prices. The utility and the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District offer rebates to customers who tear out lawns and replace them with synthetic turfa"at $1.25 per square foot. They also rebate rainwater-catchment systems and other water-saving technologies. Parent company American Water, the largest publicly traded water company in the United States, saw 5 percent annual revenue growth between 2007 and 2009 even as its customers conserved more water than ever before.31 At SAWS, Chief Financial Officer Doug Evanson also does not decry water saved as lost revenue. Just the opposite. He calculates that by saving 120,000 acre-feet over the past quarter century, the city has deferred spending $3.3 billion on alternative water-supply projects. Less water used also means less running into the sewers. Conserving the 120,000 acre-feet has saved the city an additional $1.1 billion in wastewater treatment and storage costs, Evanson estimates.32 Every drop a utility sells costs something. And like all water utilities, SAWSas future water costs will be increasingly expensive. For example, the annual cost of one acre-foot of water from the Carrizo Aquifer, from which SAWS now pumps about 2 percent of its total supply, is $1,175. A permanent water right from the Edwards costs nearly $5,000. The yearly cost of an acre-foot of desalinated sea-water, which SAWS hasnat yet tapped but may have to, would be $2,822.33 SAWS looks at conservation as acquiring new watera"at $400 an acre-foot or less. aIf you have a growing population and your primary source of water is not growing with you, conservation will save money,a says Guz. aNew supplies are incredibly expensive.a34 One of the best ways SAWS officials have come upon to buy conserved water is a commercial-rebate program for business, industry, and other large inst.i.tutions. Businesses that install water-saving equipment, from low-flow toilets to systems that capture AC condensate, are reimbursed by SAWS at half the cost or $400 an acre-foot saved over ten years. The businesses get below-cost upgrades, and SAWS gets much cheaper water.

Take Frito-Lay, the snack-chip maker whose Fritos started off in a San Antonio kitchen in 1932. In 2000, the company, now a division of PepsiCo, became one of the first major manufacturers to take advantage of SAWSas commercial rebate program. Frito-Lay spent $1.4 million on water-saving upgrades at its potato chip plant on the cityas east side, including recovering steam condensate and switching out various manufacturing nozzles and washers. SAWS kicked in a rebate of $264,207. All told, the changes save forty-three million gallons of water every year. Thatas enough to supply 460 city households annually. And the company saves $138,000 a year on its water bill.35 Necessity has led to invention in many cases. Severe drought in 2006 brought emergency water restrictions, such as the shut-off of any fountains fed with potable water. Engineers like Rex Poppy at Concord quickly figured out how to reroute AC condensate to keep water features running. aWeare charging our retail tenants money, and they donat like it when their amenities are shut off,a says Poppy. aWhen I can keep the gra.s.s green and keep the fountains running and not have to pay for watera"whatas the downside?a36 In a cost-sharing agreement with SAWS, San Antonio retrofitted its extensive downtown fountain park to run recycled water as well, buying the utility thirty million gallons of new water per year.37 In twelve years, the commercial rebate program has paid off in more than 580 million gallons saved in manufacturing plants, hospitals, laundries, hotels, and lots of other businesses you wouldnat imagine. A local granite company figured out a way to recycle the water used in its wet saw, which saved 2.3 million gallons per year. Other local stonecutters now have followed suit. A dentist realized that old adental vaca machines wasted an inordinate amount of water compared to newer models that SAWS would help pay for. Other dentists are now switching. Hotel managers have booked some of the biggest savings, switching out thousands of showerheads and toilets around the city.

The water ethic has flowed across San Antonio this waya"granite cutter by granite cutter, dentist by dentist, hotel manager by hotel manager. In the spirit of the Extension agent she once was, Karen Guz is convinced that water consciousness catches as it spreads, becoming a belief system that is just as important as rules and rebates to building a communitywide ethic.38 People in San Antonio donat let water run down the sidewalk anymore. The average person is interested enough in the health of the Edwards Aquifer that groundwater levels run every morning in the local newspaper, every evening on the television news. Even in older neighborhoods built during the heyday of the green lawn, yards seem to run only about one-third gra.s.s.

These days, SAWS relies on the Edwards for 60 percent of its water supply. Recycled water accounts for another 20 percent. Aquifer storage and recovery makes up another 15 percent, and the rest comes from three smaller aquifers. Alexander Briseo, the former city manager who is now SAWS chairman, says the utility is planning for diversified infrastructure projects that are sure to be costly. aBut we have changed as much as anyone,a he says. aWe now start the conversation by asking, aHow can we conserve more?aa39 The Aquavores If, like me, youave ever scratched your head over why Texans are so in love with their dry, cactus-filled, monotonous state, a drive through the Hill Country will clear up the mystery. The sky is outsized, as big as Australiaas. The two-lane highways wind through wildflower valleys and oak-forest hills. They occasionally cross a gla.s.s-green river moving over a rocky bed. Less frequently, they hit a small, vintage cowboy town like Johnson City, where the welcome sign boasts aHometown of President Lyndon B. Johnson.a More than a hundred miles pa.s.s without one golden arch, just the lonely iron arches that announce the names of ranches.

A few miles east of Johnson City on Highway 290, a patch of brightly painted domes appears on the horizon, out of place with the earth-toned ranchlands that hav