--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Summertime ain't what it used to be. By this point, we've grown accustomed to the fires, the dire warnings, even the deaths. But now, roads are melting. It's so hot in the UK, all flights into Luton Airport have to be diverted when the tarmac actually melted. We're discovering bodies. A woman walking on the newly uncovered mud found a barrel with human remains inside. The person had a gunshot wound and had likely been in the barrel since the late 1970s or early 80s. There's a ghost town? Police also believe they are going to find more bodies here because there is no end in sight to that mega drought that's causing this water level to fall. But we're still having trouble convincing people to water their lawns less.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today explained to Sean Rameswaram for him, we as a people have a whole lot of differences, but we're all united by our biggest problem, the warming climate. It's a problem so immense, people feel hopeless and helpless to turn the tide. But you got to start somewhere. And that somewhere might literally be just outside your front door. We have lawns turning brown. Kaylee Wells covers climate for KCRW Public Radio in Los Angeles. Lately, she's been covering lawns. Millions of us started facing outdoor water restrictions at the beginning of June. We've been restricted to only be able to water them once or twice per week. Now, lawns might feel irrelevant in light of wildfires and dust storms and death, but lawns are one of the few luxuries Americans are being asked to sacrifice as the world literally burns.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: I think that's true. I mean, yes, the only thing that's really getting restricted for most of us right now is outdoor irrigation. And that doesn't sound like a big deal, But usually that means that it's the first thing in possibly more steps to come as the summer gets hotter and the rain doesn't come. Governor Newsom said that the state could impose mandatory water restrictions and a full outdoor watering ban across the state as soon as September. The lack of rainfall is leaving fields so dry that crops are dying before they can be harvested. Farm workers are leaving the region in droves to find sustainable jobs.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: So what are the rules in Los Angeles where you're based? Well, it depends on where you live. We're talking about Southern California in general. Some cities aren't feeling it at all because the restrictions are coming from what's known as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is sort of an umbrella district that a lot of local districts like mine fall under. Even if your city does fall under those restrictions, though, your local water district has to curb their water use by 35 percent, and they can choose how to do that. So for one of the strict ones, it actually means if you don't comply, they're going to install a water flow device. So all of a sudden your showers are very unpleasant.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: It sounds like this is creating a system of haves and have-nots. Yes, but it's not sort of the more traditional system of if you're in a wealthier, whiter neighborhood than you have, and if you are not, you do not. It really just depends on where your city happens to get its water. If it gets more of it from the State Water Project and the Colorado River, it's problematic. If it happens to sit on a great aquifer like the city of Downey, which is southeast of Los Angeles, primarily people of color live there, they're fine. So it's kind of more luck of the draw.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: Are people flouting the water restrictions? There are some people who are flouting the water restrictions. There are threats of warnings and fines if you don't comply. But there are some people who have decided it's worth the fine to keep the lawn green. So that includes this one guy I spoke to, Michael Austin, who boasts that his yard is very green and very wet. And he says that he waters it about 10 minutes every day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'd say it's a very unique and fresh mix for Southern California. Very green and very wet. I'm going to go before the lawn is. They're going to take me away, and this is going to be an empty property before the lawn goes. Wow. Michael sounds like he's ready to die for his lawn. I know. It's quite a hill to die on, but... He wants to die on a very green hill. Oh, amen. Yes, he does.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: I'd like to say a yard is the reflection of who lives here, because we're given these portions of land. We own these portions of land. I think that it's our God-given duty to tend it and till it until our time is gone.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: Did he say it's his God-given duty to tend to his lawn until he dies? He did. He also told me that, you know, it's not his fault that the population in Southern California has grown, and it's not his fault that the climate is changing, so he shouldn't be the one to have to bear the responsibility for it. And surely there are other people who are making the sacrifice, who are committed to having a, you know, godly green lawn, but are transitioning away from it because it's wildly impractical and unsustainable.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: Absolutely Another person that I spoke to his name is Roger Gray and he exactly the kind of person who you would think would make this transition He is a middle school science teacher He is a master gardener He is a certified California naturalist And he a couple years ago ripped up all of his lawn and he replaced it with native plants So in the two years that he had his landscape while Michael Lawson is watering it 10 minutes every day, he's watered it six times total in two years.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: The plants in here are mostly all chaparral or coastal sage scrub. And particularly the chaparral plants tend to throw deep roots looking for water. And so the more water we can put in the soil during the rainy season, the more access they'll have to it, three, four, five feet down. The birds in the background sound happy. Did it look like a nice garden? Oh my gosh, yes. So if Michael Austin's was a painting to walk into of beautiful green lush landscaping, his felt like a celebration of nature. I loved being there.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: We don't need to water all the time. Water less frequently and more deeply. That's better for the plants. A little sprinkle every day is terrible.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: What about like mega water users like, I don't know, golf courses in Southern California? What are they doing right now? I was able to speak with a golf course representative and they said that one of their strategies is to sort of brown the edges to prioritize keeping the fairway green so they're not losing business, even though it probably doesn't look as nice.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: But even if you're not a golfer like me and golf is not a huge part of your life, cemeteries are. And I spoke to someone named Bruce Lazenby at Rose Hills Memorial Park in a city right outside of Los Angeles here. And they started using recycled water because they said they couldn't let their lawns turn brown. People want to come here. They come here to visit their loved ones or do memories or just to be comforted. So I think the park-like environment is what they expect.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: We can't let this place turn brown. Not everybody can afford that kind of infrastructure of getting all of this recycled water to their many, many acres of property. And I went to an old cemetery that falls into that boat. This place was called Lincoln Memorial Park. And they don't even have sprinklers. So this is literally a guy during his allocated 20 minutes twice a week who's going around with a hose, watering as much as he can in his time period. His name is John Michael Mintz, and he says that people are not happy with the way it's looking these days. People have gone to the Department of Consumer Affairs complaining that the cemetery is dry. If you'd asked me 10 years ago, would you bury somebody here? Well, yeah, this is a beautiful place. But it's gone to sea.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's going on is just heartbreaking. I mean, it sounds like this is heartbreaking right now for people like Mike and for people visiting the cemetery and certainly for Michael Austin, who's, you know, trying to exercise his God-given duty to water his lawn. But this stands to get a lot worse in the coming years, no?
--:-- Kaylee Wells: We know that it can get worse, and federal water officials keep warning us that Colorado river cuts are on the way, and we rely a lot on that down here. And if the drought continues to get worse, these water ordinances have plans in place to cut back more. So the water restrictions in place now are really just the first step.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so all told, it sounds like despite this situation in Southern California and this increasingly grim mega drought situation in the American West from Colorado to Nevada to Utah to California, there hasn't really been a shift in philosophy yet, at least where you report in Los Angeles. I think that is true for a lot of people. That being said, though, we did face more strict restrictions before and people really did rally around them. And we really did meet our water reduction goals before. And we did stop watering lawns and they did turn brown. And we know that Southern Californians can survive that reality. So, yes, I think people are hesitant to recognize that we are heading that way. But we've been there before and we know that we can get out on the other side.
--:-- Kaylee Wells: Kaylee, Wells, KCRW, Los Angeles. But it's not just Los Angeles. The American West is desperately short on water. More on the mega drought in a minute on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting. Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun. That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you. It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. Add a statement shoe to your collection, like the calf hair loafers from Steve Madden, or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC. You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris. Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads or you just craving a new vibe to switch things up Macy has got you covered this season Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy Fall Fashion Style Guide Shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Rachel Becker: So if you look at the drought map of the United States, it looks like most of the West Coast and Southwest are painted in shades of orange to magenta, showing the degrees of deepening drought. This is Rachel Becker. She reports on water at CalMatters. At the beginning of July, 39 states were seeing moderate drought or worse. That means 118 million people in the U.S. whose homes and yards and jobs and crops are parched right now. You can see swaths of severe, extreme or even exceptional drought, which is the most dire drought category, kind of creeping its way across the country from California and Oregon to Nevada. Nevada lawmakers declaring a war on useless grass in an effort to conserve water. Utah and a vanishing Great Salt Lake. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is shrinking and the state could face an environmental nuclear bomb. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. Officials in Texas are hoping the power grid can hold as they forecast today to be an all-time high for demand. We're talking widespread crop losses, water emergencies because of supply shortages from reservoirs and streams and wells. So drought is hitting far and wide.
--:-- Rachel Becker: And how long has this current drought been going on? It depends on where you're looking and how you count it, right? There was this great paper that just came out from Park Williams' lab at UCLA that looked at megadroughts in southwest North America. Megadroughts. Megadroughts. So a megadrought is about as bad as it sounds, which is an exceptionally long-lasting, severe drought, worse than any we've seen in 20th century western North America. And so this paper looked all the way through most Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, as well as down through southwest Mexico. Looking at average soil moisture across the southwest region, Williams' team found that 2000 to 2021 was the driest 22-year period in the past 1,200 years. Wow. They also reported that human-caused climate change has made things worse. The Williams lab used climate models to estimate that about 40 percent of the western megadrought severity is coming from human caused climate change and 60 percent to what he said in an email is regular old bad luck, which can be shaped by a number of things, including temperatures on the tropical Pacific Ocean.
--:-- Rachel Becker: But, you know, what is clear is that climate change drives temperatures higher. The atmosphere gets thirstier. Things dry out even more. And in California, climate scientist Daniel Swain at UCLA and others have shown that we're seeing a really big shift in precipitation, including a shorter, sharper, rainier season, which we saw this year. You know, the main reason why droughts are getting worse, and this is true across much of the western U.S., and in fact a lot of places on Earth where droughts are in fact getting worse, is the rising temperatures themselves, which increase the evaporative demand of the atmosphere, meaning that essentially it increases the propensity of the atmosphere to act as a giant sponge extracting more and more water out of the landscape.
--:-- Daniel Swain: So unless you're getting a lot more precipitation to counteract that, you're getting much drier hydrologic conditions, much drier vegetation. I call this precipitation whiplash. So you're getting wetter wets, but also drier dries. But in practice, that doesn't really even out. It does not come out in the wash, as you might say. So there really is a difference between getting all of your precipitation in these increasingly short but sharp bursts and having it more evenly distributed throughout a longer period of time.
--:-- Daniel Swain: You know, we got a pretty spectacular atmospheric river in October, but then from January through March, there was pretty much nothing in terms of meaningful storms. Because the more intense it is and the shorter bursts you have, the more time in between those bursts you have for evaporation, and so the drier the soil gets, And the less of that water actually soaks into the ground, because it's falling so intensely, that much of it just runs off immediately into rivers, lakes, and streams.
--:-- Rachel Becker: Where else does the American West get its water from other than rain? About 25 million people rely on Lake Mead, which is mostly supplied by the Colorado River and delivers water to Arizona, California, Nevada. And conditions are pretty dire there. It is the primary source of water here, and it has become the incredible shrinking river. The lake is so low that a body in a barrel and a World War II-era landing craft have risen from the water. Right. But it begs the question, how many more bodies will be found now that the lake is at record low levels? And along with Lake Powell, Well, these massive reservoirs are at historically low levels right now.
--:-- Rachel Becker: But water supplies really vary even within states. In California, we rely on this pretty remarkable source of water in our snowpack, which is sort of a reservoir for spring and summer as the snow melts and flows into our storage. Think of the snowpack as a frozen reservoir. The state says it's responsible for about 30 percent of California's water, including drinking water. We also have parts of the state that rely heavily or exclusively on groundwater, which sees some pretty serious depletion during drought when surface water supplies dry up and people start pumping more. When this much water is pumped out of the aquifer below ground, the clay between the pockets of water collapses and the ground starts to deflate like a leaky air mattress. The sinking is buckling the walls of irrigation canals, damaging pipes, creating giant sinkholes, and cracking homes.
--:-- Rachel Becker: When you're talking about things like Lake Powell or Lake Mead or the Colorado River, who's in charge? Who dictates who gets how much water? Yeah, that's the million-dollar question, right? Who controls the water? And it vary depending on the type of water too whether we talking rivers streams groundwater federally managed water state water It a mess So looking at the West we got decades even century agreements and court decisions that govern the use and the management of the Colorado River. In California, we've got the state managed state water project that pipes water from reservoir south, federally managed Central Valley project. And then we've got, you know, rivers and streams that are governed by this sort of arcane and incredibly complex system of water breaks that go back to the gold rush when it was essentially finders keepers when it came to water.
--:-- Rachel Becker: And how are these arcane laws doing now that we're seeing the most extreme conditions we've seen in, it sounds like, over a millennium? We're seeing them really put to the test this year. parts of California in the Sacramento Valley have really typically been immune to drought because of this Byzantine water rights system and because of a deal they cut with the federal government you know decades ago and because of that they typically can't be cut by more than a quarter when it comes to their water supply so even during the most dire of droughts their water supply is pretty good. But this year, they've been cut 82% or more. And I spoke with one rancher who bought this beautiful piece of land with a view of Mount Shasta, and he bought it because it had a water supply that was virtually guaranteed because of this deal. It had never seen cuts to its water supply of more than a quarter. And this year, the first time ever, it's not getting any water.
--:-- Rachel Becker: I mean, we could see even steeper curtailments of growers and cities that pump directly from rivers and streams. And already many have seen cuts, really severe cuts this year. So it could be even worse next year, which means, you know, more crop following, which means steeper conservation orders in cities and towns. Earlier, deeper curtailments for those relying on river water. I mean, it's getting hotter, right? Heat waves are getting worse. The dries are getting drier. The West are becoming more extreme. And, you know, the West as a region is aridifying. And it's this combination of human activity and climate change and also nature.
--:-- Daniel Swain: I was talking to a climate scientist, Daniel Swain at UCLA, though, and he said he doesn't like the phrase, the new normal. And I'm quoting him because it suggests we've arrived at some new stable state. We have at least a few more decades of significant warming and significant increases in extreme weather events and significant changes in precipitation patterns and the occurrence of drought in different regions. And we've seen an example of this, you know, as recently as this past week, where London saw unprecedented record-breaking temperatures that would have been unforeseeable as recently as a couple of years ago. You know, there are fires burning structures in the city of London this week, and that's not something that we had really ever seen before.
--:-- Daniel Swain: If you told me I was in Southern California with wildfires by the highway, bone dry vegetation and temps hitting 100 degrees, I might believe you. But this, this is London and people are shocked. So the new normal is really a moving target depending on continued fossil fuel use.
--:-- Rachel Becker: Reading about this story and having some personal experience with like a mom who loves to water her lawn in los angeles i just feel like the the biggest issue here outside of ranchers who no longer have the water they thought they were promised is that people moved out west and were promised a way of life that was entirely unsustainable and that idea is just hard to wrap your head around, that my way of life is unsustainable.
--:-- Rachel Becker: When you talk to the smartest people in this field, what do they say about the sort of sea change in thinking that needs to occur in a moment like this? I think one of the sources of, I don't know if I want to say hope, but, you know, sources that there are ways to conserve water, which is only one part of this equation, but is that after the last drought, I remember reporting in the spring of 2021 when this drought was really taking off, that at that point Californians were still using about 16% less water than in 2013 when the last drought was getting going.
--:-- Rachel Becker: So did those regulations that Governor Jerry Brown put in place the last time California had a drought, let's say, did they work? The mandatory call for water conservation did work. So we saw that after that order, savings from June 2015 to February 2016 were about 24 percent compared to those same months in 2013. So California stepped up and they conserved. Some of those conservation gains stuck around, too. And some of that was because of really fundamental changes to things that last, like fixtures, replacing water guzzling toilets, changing to landscaping and irrigation. that was motivated and funded by mandates and incentives during the last drought. And so it does show that California's water use can change. You know, did it change enough? Probably not. But it did change. And talking to folks, you know, they point to recycled water projects. They talk about building gray water and water reuse into planning. So it does seem like there are ways to improve California's water situation. It may take, you know, really kind of reimagining what California looks like beyond the kind of endless stretches of turf. But it's possible to see that change.
--:-- Rachel Becker: You also heard from UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, Go Bruins, and Kaylee Wells from KCRW. Our show today was produced by Avishay Artsy. He had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Paul Mounsey. It's Today Explained. Stay cool. Thank you.
