Mountain View doesn't understand water

Every dry season when the reservoirs start to get low, Mountain View (and probably other area cities) send out glossy, professional-looking brochures about ways you can save water around the house. They're pitiful suggestions like taking shorter showers, watering the lawn at night, and not leaving the water running while brushing your teeth.

I find these mailings insulting because while I'm being reasonable and water conscious anyways, the city is completely covered with automated sprinkler systems. Also, the brochures probably took more water and energy to make and mail than their recipients can possibly make up in savings.

It's bad enough that we maintain a golf course and a ton of green lawns and even irrigate the grassy highway/road medians, but those sprinkler systems water as much concrete as they do grass. Their latest effort was to run a whole bunch of new plumbing for "recycled water" to use in those sprinklers, and put up signs in English and Spanish saying that it's not safe to drink. There's a lot wrong with that, obviously. Why has it not been treated well enough for it to be drinkable? If it's not fit for us, the water treatment plant is failing at their job. And if we've got that much wastewater available, why not use it for something better than watering grass?

I am a huge proponent of getting rid of green lawns and all
the waste that goes with them. This area is especially bad because we
went from being a major fruit producing region, to using the precious water we're bringing in from distant reservoirs to water lawns with automated
sprinklers, then mow them with gas powered equipment operated by
Mexicans*, then they gather up all the clippings and other biomass and
bury them in a landfill. It's inexcusable.

*I have nothing against Mexicans and their strong work ethic, but many of the people complaining about immigrants are paying them for landscaping.

If we're going to be using treated wastewater for irrigation, we may as well be irrigating food crops that we can then consume ourselves. People here are more likely to put solar panels on their roof than to
grow a garden, but I suspect that at the end of the day, the
importation of food costs more energy per household than those solar
cells could ever hope to offset.

One of the big problems is that even though the net area taken up by
green lawns is large, they're mostly tiny islands surrounded by
pavement, not well suited to any community agriculture projects. You'd
be hard pressed to find a contiguous half acre of dirt in Mountain
View, except in the public parks. Converting parks to gardens sounds
ok to me, but to really get meaningful local food production, we'd
have to do what [my father] suggests and replace one story houses with tall
apartment buildings surrounded by commons.

Funny thing is, we plowed under all the orchards to build a bunch of sprawl not that long ago.
California is the fruit and vegetable basket of the US, but you
wouldn't know it if you were visiting silicon valley. They used to grow
huge quantities of citrus here, mustard plants up in the
drier parts, strawberries on the west side of the Santa Cruz mountains
(they still do grow those, at least), etc. What they did to this place
in the 20th century is just criminal. Mountain View was home to a
giant garbage dump and a number of superfund sites
(we have the most concentrated superfund sites in any one area! go us!),
and the nasty stuff leaking out of
Moffet Field and the nearby Air Force base, and probably gasoline
loaded with MTBE (now outlawed) leaking from all the gas stations, and
all the horrible things that go with having such a crazy high density
of cars on the road, and topped off with countless miles of what can
only be called the textbook definition of sprawl.

I think that things here are actually near a turning point, or will be
soon, because we trashed the place about as much as we could while
still living here, and a large and growing number of people are
feeling at least SOME remorse. At the very least, the rate at which it
will be further trashed will probably slow down in the coming years. If interest in local food grows, we'll probably be hearing a lot more about the contaminated soil and people will all be blaming each other for that...


If I were in charge, I'd:
- Tear out all the publicly owned sprinkler systems. Let whatever can grow do so without the aid of irrigation.
- Either make the golf course grassless, or if that's not possible, just shut it down. Scotland can support golf because it rains a lot there. Mountain View (and Las Vegas, and Death Valley...) just shouldn't have these things.
- Encourage people to replace their inedible lawns with gardens.
- Provide huge subsidies for waterless urinals and composting toilets.
- Treat the wastewater so well that we can just put it back into the supply.