| I totally agree that people need to feel like they have skin in the game. And I wish lawn-watering laws did that, but they don't seem to. I think the natural result with mankind–at least with Californians–seems to be that people then feel like they've done their part, and can go back to watching television. The state has a long history of such behavior across a variety of issues, and I don't think this one's any different, unfortunately. It's a fine line, but Californians need to be having difficult conversations about the composition and nature of their economy, and the true long-term environmental impact of those choices, instead of feeling good about feeling bad. Sending city employees out to fine people for watering their lawns, while legislators continue to enable a billion-dollar industry on land that can't support it for much longer, is what's happening. The state's supposed to be at the forefront of environmental restraint, but can't ever seem to make do with what it has (whether it's water, money, or otherwise). So what does it do? Same thing it always does: Sweat the small stuff to win the PR game and fill the public coffers, sell bonds to fund boondoggles that won't attempt to solve any root causes, and seek reelection: something made considerably easier by the first two. |
Once people can't water their lawns you can quite easily say "You can't water your lawns but look at this footage of MegaAgriCorp flooding this near desert field for days on end(I saw this near Delhi where a maybe 10 acre field that was rock hard was covered in plastic and flooded for a week then planted) just to get an extra few acres of land." and you will have a lot more advocates for change even if most people just go 'Meh'.