Ironies of Water Conservation: When More is Less
For the past two years I have been contributing $15 per month on my water bill to the City-sponsored Santa Fe River Fund, money to help purchase water rights to revive our normally dry river. [Note to readers outside the Western US: Water is bought and sold here, rivers have no inherent rights, and the only use for water is to make a profit.] Today I stopped my $15 contribution. It's not because I no longer care about our local river, which is a dry ditch because ithe entire flow is impounded upstream in water supply reservoirs. The policy of killing the river to meet urban water needs is the kind of short-sighted "us or them" ethic that earned our river the distinction of being named the Most Endangered River in America in 2007. I spent most of the past 4 years serving as director of the Santa Fe Watershed Association in an effort to change the policy of dewatering our river.
I really do care about the river, but I finally decided that my $15 per month wasn't going to help. What changed my mind was the realization that the City's new water conservation program is working at cross purposes with the City's River Fund. Under the Water Conservation Credit Program (See pp. 9-12), customers receive a hefty subsidy on water-saving devices like front-loading washers and low-flow toilets. That part sounds like a good thing, but what happens to the saved water? It doesn't get put back into America's Most Endangered River. Instead, the water savings are added up and sold to developers who want to get service from the City-owned water utility. The City has a golden opportunity to use that newly saved water to help re-establish a sustainable river ecosystem, but they don't. What are they thinking?
Faced with policies that allocate water to everything except the river that needs it most, what's a reasonable response? Wasting as much water as possible can't do any more harm to a river that's already dry, and at least serves to keep that amount of water from being permanently committed to new development. Wasting water becomes a sort of water security strategy, in the absence of sensible policies.
I hope I'm describing an exceptional case that perhaps "proves the rule" that water conservation is usually a good thing. But the point that I feel is generalizable outside this bizarre local water context is that we need to be concerned with the end use of the water that we conserve. I invite any comments: How can we ensure that Nature benefits from our individual water conservation efforts?
Here are some resources about the larger context of conservation: Alliance for Water Efficiency has info about overall water resources planning as the "parent" of conservation programs. The WaterCulture webpage on urban and domestic water use, has links to some innovative programs internationally (the SWITCH project ) and within the US (Tucson, Arizona's "conserve to enhance " initiative).
I really do care about the river, but I finally decided that my $15 per month wasn't going to help. What changed my mind was the realization that the City's new water conservation program is working at cross purposes with the City's River Fund. Under the Water Conservation Credit Program (See pp. 9-12), customers receive a hefty subsidy on water-saving devices like front-loading washers and low-flow toilets. That part sounds like a good thing, but what happens to the saved water? It doesn't get put back into America's Most Endangered River. Instead, the water savings are added up and sold to developers who want to get service from the City-owned water utility. The City has a golden opportunity to use that newly saved water to help re-establish a sustainable river ecosystem, but they don't. What are they thinking?
Faced with policies that allocate water to everything except the river that needs it most, what's a reasonable response? Wasting as much water as possible can't do any more harm to a river that's already dry, and at least serves to keep that amount of water from being permanently committed to new development. Wasting water becomes a sort of water security strategy, in the absence of sensible policies.
I hope I'm describing an exceptional case that perhaps "proves the rule" that water conservation is usually a good thing. But the point that I feel is generalizable outside this bizarre local water context is that we need to be concerned with the end use of the water that we conserve. I invite any comments: How can we ensure that Nature benefits from our individual water conservation efforts?
Here are some resources about the larger context of conservation: Alliance for Water Efficiency has info about overall water resources planning as the "parent" of conservation programs. The WaterCulture webpage on urban and domestic water use, has links to some innovative programs internationally (the SWITCH project ) and within the US (Tucson, Arizona's "conserve to enhance " initiative).
Posted by Dave Groenfeldt at 10 May 2010, 7:29 PM 
Categories: Santa Fe River, urban water use, water conservation
Tags: water ethic water efficiency values water conservation
Categories: Santa Fe River, urban water use, water conservation
Tags: water ethic water efficiency values water conservation
I also live in Santa Fe and am really glad to see this issue raised. I often wonder about this while starting a load of laundry or doing the dishes, and have been frustrated by the lack of options available to me as a citizen who would like to see our river made of water rather than sand and shopping carts.
I would be interested to see more analysis of your statement that this is an 'exceptional case which proves the rule' as i am not convinced that this is true. It seems that the same paradox - conserve in the home to increase the number of demands on a source - could be applied to aquifers, another resource being dried up and sold off in direct proportion to the conservation measures taken by cities such as Albuquerque and Rio Rancho (cities whose economic viability seems to be tied to growth in the same way that a Ponzi schemes links these two).
At the Water Dialogue meeting a few months ago, i remember that you were part of a conversation about shifting the focus of water conservation away from per-capita use and toward net-use by a municipality. It seems to me that this sort of reporting could be bring more transparency to this issue and i would like to see this shift occur in the conversation about water use in New Mexico and throughout the arid west.
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Well put. I have been arguing with myself and others for years that as much as I would like to, I cannot come up with a reason why I shouldn't waste resources as fast as I can. The argument goes something like this: we are headed for a bottleneck, and the resources available on the other side of the bottleneck are the key. And we are reactive not proactive, so if I can expand my footprint before the bottleneck, and speed the onset of the bottleneck in which presumably we figure out how to stop consumptive growth, then decrease it on the other side of the bottleneck, we will have more resources to utilize in that enlightened state! I use it to justify my irrigation from a ditch in Albuquerque for a green yard, but have a lot more trouble with it when it comes to nonrenewable resources. I actually don't like the fact that it is a reasonable argument, but no one has been able to talk me out of it.
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