Embracing the Golden State's brown
Replacing grass with fake turf won't do. Californians should let their thirsty lawns go dry.
Bless her, Jean Orban was only trying to be a good neighbor and a good citizen.
The vivid green grass in front of her pretty ranch house in Garden Grove? It was fake. Big deal.
Fake meant that her husband didn't have to mow it. Fake meant they didn't have to pay for the water to keep it as green as Oz.
So how was she to know that artificial grass was banned in Garden Grove?
This story starts out like one of those plucky little guy versus city hall tales we news folk love. Orban is a child of the Depression, and to that generation, waste is tantamount to sin. "Our governor says we need to save water," she told The Times fervently.
After she installed her artificial lawn, she duly filed for a $300 rebate from the Orange County Municipal Water District, which offers the dough to the civic-minded because artificial lawns save cascades of water.
That's how she found that, water district be damned, Garden Grove had banned fake grass since 1991. So do four other O.C. cities. Orban not only wouldn't be getting her rebate, she might have to pay a fine for her fake greensward.
Now, this is the point in the dramatic arc of heartwarming news stories where the city is supposed to apologize to Orban. Garden Grove and those other cities are rethinking their bans, given the drought. And the Metropolitan Water District, which serves 17 million people in Southern California (a lot of them in L.A.) is offering a bounty of 30 cents a square foot for putting in fake grass for apartment complexes and street medians. So surely, the story would go, the city fathers and mothers would be planning a photo op with Orban on her green plastic lawn, everybody grinning and gripping a great big cardboard check for that $300 rebate.
That may yet happen. But it shouldn't. The cities shouldn't rethink their fake-turf bans, and the MWD should rethink its bounty. Artificial grass solves one problem -- wasting water -- but it creates a different one.
Cities are already miserable hot spots. Every inch that we pave over, even with plastic grass, creates a patch of unnatural heat. The virtue of a grass lawn -- however thirsty -- is that it is a living system that helps the land keep its cool. It also allows what rain we do get to make its way into the soil, and the water table, not into the storm drains.
