Category Archives: Water Conservation

The Dirt Makes the Difference.

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“Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root. In the long run, the solution to each is restoring…the soil.” Rattan Lal

Soil/Water Conservation: Coming in from the garden this weekend, I went straight to the sink to wash my hands. Carefully turning off the tap while soaping, I readjusted the faucet, and rinsed off the gritty brown lather.

Ironically, it is the dirt, not the act of turning off the tap, that really saves water. Yes, my friends, some of the most effective things for water conservation are not the most intuitive. The soil in our yards and gardens is one of the most powerful forces we have for water conservation and pollution prevention.

Not that I shouldn’t wash my hands regularly and with care.

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Weddings, weird weather, and where to fit everyone

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“Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.” – William Jennings Bryan

I’m calling 2012 “the year of weddings and babies” – there are dozens popping up on my facebook.  It’s also the year of the dragon, and my friend from China says many couples purposely plan and wait to have “dragon babies.” There’s a feeling of exuberance in the air.

Flower girl Noli, at a June wedding.

And so, with celebration, the population grows. Much has been written about global carrying capacity, but we are human, here and now.

Where will everyone live? Some are moving here – BC Stats says 45% more for the Central Okanagan by 2036 – maybe 70,000 or 80,000 new people. Other regional districts may grow more slowly, but this seems like a good proxy for growth up and down the urban core of the valley.

It’s a beautiful place to be. We actively try to attract young families and workers; and the retirees come with little coaxing. It’s part of a great global migration.

And what about the water? This year there is no lack of rain, but it always pays to be thoughtful about essential resources. As we have more people, we’ll need more clean drinking water, and more fresh fruit and vegetables.We’ll have more neighbours to feel the effects of floods and shortages, and more of us will be out hiking and biking in the watershed. We’ll have bigger demands for lumber and gravel, more boats on the lake, more everything. Continue reading →

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Learning from the landscape: cultivating a sense of place in the Okanagan.

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“I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.” Dorothea Mackellar

If you want to understand water in the Okanagan, don’t look at the lake, look at the hillside.

Above the lakes and vineyards, the beauty of the Okanagan is marked by sparseness.

Sometime last week, I found myself scrambling up a rocky slope near Okanagan Falls – skirting patches of cactus, breathing heavily, but managing to keep up. It was late afternoon and we were trying to make it to the rattlesnake den before dark.

Off toward Skaha Lake, swallows circling on the updrafts; underfoot, wildflowers exploding through the sagebrush and bunchgrass: shootings stars, locoweed, and tiny desert annuals with almost-remembered Latin names.

This is a dry, bony landscape.

Although my work has led me to water, for a long time I was a student of the desert – how life hangs on in these harsh conditions.

This huge mother snake waited unperturbed while Brock Dolman took her picture.

That afternoon, the snakes cooperated. We saw five or six, coiled in rest, or moving slowly to deeper crevices – there were a few gentle rattles, but we’d come in peace and with an attitude of respect. I let the herpetologists lead the way, keeping a conservative distance.

Just as the light began to fail the clouds opened up, and we ran back to the house in the rain. Continue reading →

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Water and the Future

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“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.” – Jim Dator

Sometimes I can’t resist philosophical bones thrown by speakers on the internet. One recent video was on changing spending behaviour to save money, but it introduced the interesting idea of a wrestling match between our present and future selves.

A thoughtful woman writer from a Pompeii fresco. Someone who might appreciate a bit of advice from the future.

It’s an unequal competition.  In the present, I want to have hot apple pie and lie on the couch. My future self would prefer me to eat lightly and exercise more, but she isn’t around to speak for her interests. Instead, she relies on my fuzzy and sometimes skeptical sense of cause and effect: “Will this latte really make me fat and broke in 20 years?”

We regularly remind each other about saving resources for our grandchildren. There are many changes, small and big, that individuals and communities can make, adding up to water savings, energy savings, and money in the bank. But how do we move from “knowing what to do” to actually doing it? Continue reading →

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Water communication: making water visible.

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“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
Steven Wrightfont

I’ve been thinking lately about the incredibly complexity of our water systems. Any town or city, treating millions of gallons of drinking water, pumping it to our homes, then pumping it back for re-treatment and recycling. Millions of gallons – out of sight, out of mind – taken completely for granted.

It was a matter of civic pride to have these invisible systems, a sign of progress, where at the turn of a tap, water (hot and cold) arrives instantly at any sink in the house.  Now, funnily enough, every municipality has a water awareness campaign emphasizing the value of water and how people need to get informed, stop wasting water, and reduce pollution.  We are busy making water visible again.

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Adapting to climate change – Part 1 of many

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This farm, in New South Wales, has a whole array of soil moisture probes, linked to a computer monitor. The grower adjusts the irrigation system to keep the soil moisture at the optimum level.

As Mark Twain said: “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it”.  This is wonderfully absurd at first blush, but lately it has been making me think. Suddenly, we are all having serious discussions about the weather and what actions we can take. And it isn’t just policy wonks: last week, I even heard some body builders at the gym talking about it.

There are two sides to climate change –  mitigation (to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and climate change overall) and adaptation (to deal with whatever comes down the pipe: from droughts to floods). When response to climate change really began to enter the public discourse (at the local level) in the early 2000’s, adaptation was viewed as appeasement – or giving in – and the action was all around mitigation strategies. Increasingly, it seems grossly irresponsible to not prepare in advance for potentially serious outcomes. Continue reading →

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