Last Updated on February 20, 2025 by Brian Beck
Colorado has a lot of problems when it comes to water. Colorado has 158 named rivers and all of those but two originate from within the state. We have a lot of water but do not keep but a little over a third of it. So where does all the water go? Through Federal laws and demands from other states, most of our water flows out of state and we don’t have a legal right to use it. Colorado has not done a very good job with water storage either, transporting water over long distances to where there is water to where there is not enough. Colorado produces about 13.7 million acre feet of water (325,850 gallons per foot acre), that’s 4,464,145,000,000 (TRILLION) gallons of water! Approximately 86% of this goes to agriculture and approximately 3% goes to landscaping. Here in Colorado Springs the total water usage is 70K acre feet, the County being 100K total, about 40% is used for landscaping purposes as we do not have a strong agricultural presence here. Within the landscaping realm, approximately 50% of the water used ends up wasted in evaporation between poor water habits and a dysfunctional soil that cannot hold very much water. There are a lot of poorly written water policies written by corrupt politicians, over allocation and scarcity driven largely by bureaucracy. Water in Colorado has almost become weaponized.
The municipalities that allow expansion without adequate water resources create pressure on government to put pressure on the citizens using it which are subject to rationing, high expense and institutional shaming for using water to irrigate landscapes. This is why you not only feel like you are getting ripped off but why you feel like you killed someone’s dog after you water your lawn. The blame has been shifted and the responsibility and accountability has been neglected. Ad campaigns, in the name of saving water are produced to encourage you to rid your landscape of green things land on your TV just in time for you to get browbeat when you get off of work. You get automated calls from the water authority harassing you to let you know that you have wasted some arbitrary amount of water and the Karen down the street that turned you in during Covid for playing football with your kids has now become the neighborhood informant rat. All you wanted was to just have a nice American lawn, why all of the hate?
As if this was not enough, the ones that have control over the water supply and the message of alarm that tell you that the act of watering a plant in your lawn is harming the environment hold a dogmatic world view and an outdated concept of managing plant care and are highly reluctant to entertain a solution to eliminate the waste and continue with the heavy handed message of conformity rather than efficiency. I mean why would you want a lawn in the first place? Good grief, it almost makes getting a root canal, an audit or a colonoscopy something to look forward to.
In a perfect world, we could store more water and tell the states downstream to move closer to their own water source, use drip irrigation for agriculture, eliminate human greed that drives corruption, plan better and overcome laziness and incompetence but where does that leave landscaping? I mean when did watering a tree, a rose bush, or a lawn become evil and wasteful and kill chipmunks in the mountains? Are you calling for a double standard Brian, hypocrite??? This is the effect and mindset of a culture that as been browbeat and led to believe that photosynthesis and transpiration is somehow malevolent and driving the suffering of Mother Earth, if that is even possible. I am going to issue a bold statement that we need more plants, not less and I will tell you why. Rather than shift the blame in hopes of championing a bad political ideology, why don’t we take the time to observe what we are doing when we kill off green things in an urban environment. As a city grows it displaces water that would normally go into the ground and downstream. The infrastructure of the city, the buildings, cars, pavement, etc., contribute to the building of heat banks that drive up the temperature of a city and in doing so disrupt the water cycle, or the ability of rain clouds to form and precipitate water. This progression drives not just heat but desertification of a landscape. So what is the antidote? Plants and a lot of them! Plants exhale water as they breathe and in doing so cool the air in an evaporative cooling effect. Trees do this and grass does this on a much bigger scale. Grass also produces many time more oxygen as trees do as they are much more efficient and photosynthesis and therefore are able to grow faster. But what about the water you ask???? Ok, pipe down here is the solution. Dysfunctional soils that are high in pH, low in soil carbon that are treated with synthetic fertilizers( that destroy soil carbon and biology that are responsible for increasing water carrying capacity) cannot use water efficiently, or store it very well. As a matter of fact for every 1% increase in soil carbon will enable the soil to hold an extra 615 gallons per 1000 square feet of turf! You see the wasted is not the grass, it is all of the poor minded information propagated by those who are enabling the wasted through ignorance, bureaucracy, corruption and dogma. The answer is in the soil and not ad campaigns designed to make you feel guilty for running your irrigation system.
