My classmate Kaylin writes about Texas and the drought in her blog entry titled, “Water De-Abundance.” She thinks that Austin, specifically, has done a decent job of dealing with the drought. Overall, Kaylin argues that because this is such an important issue, cities including Austin should be doing even more to conserve water.
Kaylin feels that more needs to be done about the decreasing water level like fining people who aren’t helping to conserve water. Even though there are limits on watering grass, it isn’t required everywhere. In my neighborhood it is only voluntary. Limitations on watering your grass should be required, or else it could lead to wasting our water. With this intense heat, it comes to a point where no matter how much you water, it’s not going to make a huge difference. This heat just dries everything out. Therefore over-watering your grass could be very wasteful and required limitations are necessary. I am in agreement with Kaylin that more needs to be done to ensure water conservation.
Because I think that watering your lawn is pretty wasteful in general, as a long-term approach it could be very beneficial to start transforming our front lawns from grass to rock (I only mention the front lawn because people may still need grass in their backyard for pets). Even though it’s not as aesthetically pleasing to the eye, it could save a huge amount of water. Rock lawns are very popular in Arizona because of the dry land, and could very well be something that we need to follow suit in.
These droughts are continuing to get worse and worse year-by-year. More long-term and short-term approaches need to be taken to conserve our water. Maybe with the upcoming hurricane season there is a glimmer of hope for rain. We can only pray!
