EDITORIAL: Water Use Drops, but That’s Hardly Comfort in Desert

By The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson

May 13–The best news we’ve heard lately is that water consumption in Tucson has declined over the last year.

There are various theories about why we’re using less water, and our guess is that there’s an element of truth in all of the explanations.

For example, weather officials point out that we’ve had a lot of cool spells, and that’s probably why people are using less water for irrigation purposes. Also, we’ve had more rainy days so people are turning off their drip systems and watering less.

In addition, Tucson Water says its campaign to make users aware of the prolonged drought is getting through to people. It could be.

Reports of reduced water usage are something to cheer about here city, but we must not spend too much time patting ourselves on the back.

Water should remain an all-consuming topic for communities in the Sonoran Desert, especially for rapidly growing regions like the Tucson metropolitan area.

Predictions about Tucson’s water supply, which influence decisions affecting urban growth and housing and commercial development, are dependent upon such a wide variety of assumptions that their accuracy is debatable.

There are rules governing how much ground water a municipality can pump and how much of the total water supply must come from recycled effluent and how much will come from the Central Arizona Project, or CAP, that concrete canal that makes Tucson a beneficiary of the Colorado River.

But our dependence on CAP can make sense only to the extent that we can depend on the snowpack in the Rockies, the rate of annual melt-off in the spring, and the litigious proclivities of ranchers, farmers, Indians and the state and municipal governments of the upper and lower basin states.

Let us not forget the vagaries of the weather. We have no accurate way of knowing if rainfall will increase or decrease over the next 10 years. We have no accurate way of knowing whether users throughout the region will continue to consume less.

What we do know is that Arizona is the fastest-growing state in the nation, and that argues against the belief that our water use will decline .

Yet, under a state law known as the Groundwater Management Act, we are supposed to reach what it calls a “safe-yield” by 2025. The term refers to the idea that cities can consume only as much water in any given year as they can acquire either naturally or through a combination of natural and artificial (as in recycled water) recharge.

Here is the problem with this law and all related regulations: They require that everybody in the state — industries, commercial outfits, farmers, ranchers and homeowners — make a commitment to future generations.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this simple message, especially in a society that is, by and large, focused on tomorrow or next week, and rarely as far as next year.

The truth is that decisions concerning water will have relatively little impact on most people alive today.

Bluntly stated, responsible water management requires that today’s users care about what happens after they die. Change is essential.

Today, we are still a society that uses water for its economic benefits — to irrigate crops, run copper mines and extraction plants, build pretty landscapes and flush a million toilets. We do not yet have a society in which there is an economic benefit derived from eliminating or reducing the use of water.

Of course, homeowners who put a brick in the toilet tank save a few dollars a year, and those who cut back their watering schedule get smaller bills, and both conservation measures are commendable.

But what will make the most difference is linking the fate of those alive today to the fate of those who will be born tomorrow.

Since humans are by nature self-serving, the best way to achieve that goal is to make water conservation valuable, perhaps allowing major industries and consumers to earn bonuses for using less than a certain number of gallons per month.

Of course, that would be a small start that must be augmented by many politically unpopular strategies, including the creation of regional growth boundaries.

That we used less water in the last 12 months is a positive sign. All of us should set a goal to save still more in the next 12 months, regardless of what the weather does.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson

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