In defense of “behavior modification”
APPEARING before the City Council yesterday arguing for a new plumbing ordinance, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials illustrated the fundamental difference between Them and Us.
One, they are working hard to keep us in water. Two, we their customers cannot be relied upon to worry about how this happens.
The gist of the new (and wholly laudable) water saving ordinance was that the Department of Water and Power would conserve for us by changing plumbing codes. Or, to use their phrase, this conservation solution did not require “behavior modification.”
By behavior modification, they mean our ability to change wasteful or detrimental habits on our own. Southern Californian water managers are particularly skeptical about our ability to change the way we garden.…
LA votes for lower low flow plumbing ordinance
Reporters tour a mens room in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Urinals once requiring 1.5 gallons per flush now require 1/8th of a gallon. Savings at the Convention Center's 190 urinals alone are estimated at 1 million gallons a year.
LOS ANGELES: Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti, City Councilmember Jan Perry, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power General Manager David Nahai and representatives from the environmental and business community gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center this morning to introduce a water conservation ordinance capable of saving an estimated billion gallons of water over the next 20 years.
The ordinance, which was passed unanimously hours later by the City Council, will set yet lower low flow plumbing standards for toilets, urinals, faucets, showerheads and dishwashers in new buildings and retrofits of existing properties.
Individual families installing the latest toilet models should expect savings of $90 per year.…
News you can’t use
“MWD stops paying rebates for water-saving devices”
TO THOSE confused by the Los Angeles Times headline today on page A7 of the print edition asserting that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has stopped paying rebates for water-saving devices, you’re right to be scratching your heads.
That report along with its varying online incarnations dated from July 17th to July 20th are all more than a month late, and wrong.
…
“You’d better put your money on conservation”
THE PREDICTION this month of an El Nino weather system capable of bringing much needed rain and snowpack to California reminds Bill Patzert of another time that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast an El Nino. That was September 13, 2006 (announcement art, left). “That was the driest winter in the historical record with 3.21 inches,” said Patzert.
As a climatologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Patzert is part of the team of scientists contributing to El Nino forecasting for NOAA. However he has become a well known dissenter, calling previous El Ninos forecast by the administration “El No Show” and “El Wimpo.” Nothing he sees this year encourages him to believe that we’re in for anything like the rainfall of the classic El Nino years of 1997-98 (31.01 inches in Los Angeles) or 2004-05 (37.96 inches).
“I’d love to be wrong. At this point it …
The Dry Garden: Gravel is so much more than a way to cover up dirt
David Fross's garden at Native Sons Nursery in Arroyo Grande, CA
WHEN the son of friends began using his mother’s cellphone to photograph the ground at a Sunday lunch in the garden, we grown-ups laughed. “Look at Leon.” But when Leon’s mother began looking at her son’s photographs, then showed them to me, Leon had the last laugh. There, frame after frame, were abstract compositions of mesmerizing beauty. Were Leon’s downward-looking portraits to have a title, it might have been: “Dappled Sunlight on Gravel and Fallen Leaves.”
Gravel is so much more than a way to cover up dirt. As Leon noticed, its ability to catch light makes the garden floor a dancing field of shadows. Gravel also transforms the way heat, coolness and water are retained. Then, as powerfully as anything, gravel brings music to the garden. There is nothing at once so pleasant and intriguing as the sound …
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