Waste Not : Water Savers Have Taken Up Cause With a Vengeance, Turning Vigilante in the Process

Name your crisis. This one is drought. Common wisdom holds that crisis brings out the best in us, and the worst.

What is most astounding is that it brings us out at all.

In Los Angeles, city of elusive eye contact, where an injudicious lane change may get you murdered, the unspeakable is being spoken, the undoable is being done.

Angelenos are saving water. They are also telling other people to do the same. From the second-floor window of a West L.A. home. From a car phone on the freeway. From a sidewalk in Echo Park-- turn it off .

This is at variance with the detached meekness that urban life enjoins. Not since the anti-smoking rage have people felt so free, felt obliged, to lecture:

Someone who would rather dine naked than challenge the parents of a baby squalling at the next table, who would endure hearing loss before daring to ask the man in the next lane to turn down his car stereo, feels sufficiently deputized by community welfare to tell neighbors, gardeners, strangers, that it’s against the law to hose down that driveway.

Just you give me an ID card, right-minded citizens have told the Department of Water and Power. I’ll find water-wasters for you.

What is going on here?

The drought is at the edge of a communal morality, shared responsibility for a shared resource.

Says Harvey Molotch, an environmental sociologist at UC Santa Barbara:

“It’s hard to walk up to another human being who is a neighbor and who is decent, legitimate folk--and someone standing with a garden hose is almost by definition Ozzie”--the amiable 1950s TV neighbor Ozzie Nelson--”and say to that person, ‘I’m complaining to you about your behavior.’ It’s a real dilemma for people as to how you would respond to someone you’d see doing something not in the public interest.”

“ W e’ve been very conscious of it, especially lately . . . . They serve water here when we play bridge. We don’t think they should change the (water) glasses but just refill them (when they’re empty). We’re after them to stop that.”

-- Mrs. William D. Griffith,

Los Angeles native and Pacific Palisades resident, at her Tuesday bridge group at the Wilshire Country Club.)

In spite of the great thirsts of industry (250 customers use 18% of DWP’s water), in spite of deplorable water systems and heavy agricultural use and problematic growth policies, the public still believes water-saving begins at home.

“People have a certain willingness to kick in because they understand the drought,” Molotch, says. “This is not a very esoteric crisis, like the greenhouse effect. People can see for themselves it did not rain.”

“I know we can buy the water from someplace else . . . . Texas, they got too much. . . . It’s no big deal, we can buy it . . . it’s a business transaction.”

-- Mario Estevez, Beverly Hills banquet coordinator)

Angelenos talk about water-saving like Scouts reciting their merit badges: “I use my dishwater to water the lawn, and my washing machine water too.” . . . “I’m taking a max of a three-minute shower, only doing very full loads of laundry.” . . . “Everyone at home is trying to go to the bathroom at the same time so you only flush once.” . . . “I don’t feel I’m doing as much as I could, but I feel I’m doing something.”

You, too, can score easy do-gooder points. Put something in the toilet tank, take fast showers, limit watering--and instant model citizen. The older woman who called the DWP to let it know she was doing her part by showering with her husband just wanted to hear someone say, “good for you.” The DWP’s new ad campaign slogan, “Save Water--It’s Easier Than You Think,” appeals less to mutual sacrifice than to personal convenience.

“And how, I’m saving water. I hate to say it, but when you go to the toilet, you don’t flush it all the time. We set out 15 or 20 white gallon buckets for rainwater. My wife saves the wash rinse water, she uses it for her plants. . . . Those (people) on top of the hill, they use more water just washing out their trash cans. . . . You can’t tell them, neither, you can’t provoke people or you got problems. People need the discipline.”

--Frank Frontino, 77, L.A. native.)

Drought can be marketed like a World War II scrap drive. Ordinarily, Americans don’t fret about shortage or crisis, Molotch says, because “nothing much happens here in terms of threat, so there’s really no urgency to pull together.”

“It’s one of the few things that everyone could agree on in L.A., one cause,” says Barbara Cadow, a USC psychology professor. “(Water) crosses political lines. Everyone’s concerned about the water, every socioeconomic group. For that reason I think it can be very unifying.”

And, frankly, you may use cloth diapers and recycle soda cans and shop for peace till the organically fed cows come home, yet still doubt deep down that you’re making any kind of global difference.

Modern life looks so vastly disordered, way beyond anyone’s influence. China needs reform. Eastern Europe is a polluted sump. Most of Michael Milken’s $600-million fine may be tax-deductible. But water--now, that, you tell yourself, I can do something about.

“People do want to feel a personal sense of connection to the environment,” says Tom Graff, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund in Berkeley, the organization that mediated an agreement between Los Angeles and Mono Lake over Mono’s water.

“And if you’re an urban dweller, in L.A. or San Francisco or wherever, that connection tends to be kind of remote; you’re reminded of it (only) when there’s a drought or an earthquake. Nature has a way of every now and then reacquainting itself with you. Then it is sort of real in a way some aspects of living aren’t.”

“We always rake. . . . I have arthritis, knees and wrists. (Using water), it really hurts your bones. . . . Once we heard it (about the drought), we didn’t use water any more. . . . We used water sometimes before (to hose driveways and sidewalks), but now we can tell (customers) it’s against the law.”

-- Anna Garay, Salvadoran-born gardener.(

Issues hashed out in smaller communities at town meetings must be handled here among strangers. Enter Carmela Quinones and her telephone, the DWP water conservation hot line. Most of the 50-plus callers a day are “quite upset.” They have been cited by the department’s roving Droughtbusters, usually for hosing down driveways or sidewalks. “Like everyone, when we get caught doing something wrong,” Quinones says primly, “it bothers them.”

Once the caller realizes the citation is not a fine but only a warning, however, “that kind of pacifies them . . . then they say, ‘My neighbor has been hosing.’ They turn in a lot of other people.”

Quinones’ other callers already “feel very responsible” about water. “They feel, ‘I’m doing what I possibly can, and I can do a little bit more by making DWP aware of waste.’ ” So, pacing their own streets, checking their own neighbors, Quinones’ regulars call every couple of days, and drop a dime on scofflaws.

A downtown businessman drives to the office with a note pad on the seat. He takes down addresses when he sees water burbling away untended, and phones them in. A woman turned in her neighbor for having tidal-flow sprinklers--the nerve!--when she won’t even let her husband rinse out his glass after taking a drink of water.

“I grew up where we had to carry water. (Later) I would go to visit someone, I’d see a tap dripping, I’d go turn it off. That was nervy of me to do it, I say, ‘You’ll have to forgive me, I come from where I carried water.’ You remember those things.”

--Sophie Levin, 94, born near Minsk, in Imperial Russia.)

When they peddle the gospel according to the city of Los Angeles, they do it at a risk. “Sometimes they get cussed at and talked to pretty nasty,” Quinones says of her callers.

More motives are at work on Quinones’ phones than Agatha Christie could attend to. A man turned in by a neighbor for hosing down his driveway confesses. He did it, but “that guy was trying to get back at me for something I did in the past.” A landlord who fails to repair a dripping faucet hops to it when the DWP makes the request, tipped by a call from the tenant.

A waiter, upbraided last week for serving unsolicited water, turned the topic to his advantage: “Somebody told me I can call the police and report my landlord. He’s out there spraying down the gravel. Now, that’s really awful.” He gazed off, engrossed in the happy fantasy of his landlord, chastened and penitent. “Hey--I’d get my $850’s (rent) worth!”

The only bounty for hydro-vigilantes is paid out in satisfaction. Please, some ask Quinones, call me back and tell me what happened to the guy I turned in.

This is where it can get ugly.

Inevitably, some use drought, “to feel important,” says USC professor Cadow. “People who need strokes use this as a way to feel good--I’m helping out the environment,” yet they also “need power and control” and “are probably loving this.”

At the other end is someone feeling “deprived.” “They’re feeling they don’t need to conserve water, it’s for someone else. That makes them feel above it,” Cadow says. “One feels deserving of every drop of water, and the other (feels) the right to police . . . if you put those two personalities together you have quite a shouting match.”

And so the telephone voices sing with annoyance, “angry because they have made it a point to install low-flow shower heads”--and others have not, Quinones says. The voices sear with venom--one young man snarled, “It’s my water and, as long as I pay my bill, you’re not gonna tell me how to use it.”

“If we’re really going through a drought. . . . Look at Disneyland, the water (at) Pirates of the Caribbean. How about Raging Waters? They must use tons of waters a day. Why not start cutting there? They always go to the little people who live in an apartment--I don’t waste that much water. I have one of those water-saving devices. . . . I’m a little conscientious about it, but you’ve gotta wonder if it’s true or not.”

--German Alonso, 39, at the carwash cleaning malathion off his white Toyota Corolla.

Within those wide margins are individuals for whom drought is one more worthy austerity, for the planet’s sake, for their children’s sake. They already recycle. They already car-pool. They boycott veal and build solar. As a student, Molotch traveled with friends and the “Europe on $5 a Day” guidebook. “We got it down to 70 cents (a day). We got into competition, into who could live on the least.”

In Santa Barbara, many practice conservation as “an art form, how every ounce can be used,” fairly boasting of dying peach trees, of lawns that look like bad haircuts. That water-saving “is not due to policing,” but “to people being very willing to police themselves,” Molotch says.

“This is not a scam . . . En masse, it’ll work. One or two people, it won’t work. (On a group business trip to Phoenix) I heard one guy in the shower for 10 or 15 minutes. I said, ‘Do you do this all the time?’ I was kidding, but I was serious. He said, ‘But I like my shower.’ Well, so does everyone else. I notice my neighbor hosing things, letting the kids let the water run. They say, ‘Well, I can’t watch the kids all the time.’ Resentment comes from initial guilt. They know they’re in the wrong.”

--Victor Ralys, 36, church musical director, washing malathion off his 14-year-old Saab; he sold his newer diesel car because it polluted too much.)

The risk: A public belabored by worthy causes may be scolded into indifference. With good intentions or bad, a legion of those who “turn in people or go snitch on (the) neighbors,” can give environmentalism a bad name,” Graff says. “Adversaries and sometimes friends think of environmentalists as kind of nannies.”

What can work, says Elliot Aronson, is getting people “to feel like hypocrites.”

Aronson is a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz, where “students are forever saving the whales and the redwoods and everything.”

“Most of us fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing OK,” being sensible about smoking, drinking, exercise, when we are not, he said. Aronson’s study found that of 80 women heading for field house showers after exercising, only those who were stopped en route, questioned about their water use, then asked to sign a petition saying, “If I can do it, you can do it,” cut their shower length to 3.5 minutes, half as long as the other students.

“It got them to realize they were not practicing what they were preaching,” Aronson says. “If you allow people to realize their behavior is out of line with their beliefs, they change their behavior.”

The “straight communications” from billboards and TV have “a very short effect, if at all. We’re talking about self-persuasion. We’re not giving them a lecture saying ‘you have to conserve water to be a good person.’ We’re getting them to persuade themselves they should be doing this.”