CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : A Parched Visitor Weighs Our Sins : Water: Up north, the taps only trickle. Here, lawns are lush. Isn’t this almost criminal?

As a small farmer from Northern California, visiting Los Angeles on business, I am startled by the hair-raising lack of personal responsibility about water that I’ve seen.

Beyond the newspaper articles and brown patches along the freeways, beyond the few concerned citizens and officials who stare into empty reservoirs, I see little sense of personal emergency. In wealthy areas, lawns are uniformly lush and fertilized. Thousands rushed to refill pools and spas before rationing started. Many plan to incorporate water fines into their overhead. I even saw a number of sprinklers going during the recent rain.

In the mountains of Mendocino County, where I live, water is not some abstract commodity in a remote dam, processed by some bureaucracy in the city. Water trickles right out of your own mountainside. You develop the spring, and you care for it, so your family and livestock candrink it. It’s very simple.

Our spring is so personal that we gave it a name: Sprite. In wet winters, Sprite whoops along at 15 gallons a minute. But by last August, it had shrunk to a trickle. It took 10 minutes to put a quick shower into the holding tank, a whole hour to float a machine-load of clothes. Now, after the dry winter, Sprite is already down to one gallon per minute, and we are developing back-up springs on the land.

Life looked deeply into our eyes with Her own lovely eyes and She said, “You cannot evade my arithmetic.” So we killed and ate our ducks and geese. Neighbors are doing the same--dust hazes the air as they load cattle trucks for market. The overgrazed mountains are eaten down to the dirt.

Right now, people are pointing the finger at agriculture, shouting that it gulps too much water. Yes, farmers do need to get more responsible and sophisticated with water use. But there’s no evading the arithmetic on the minimum water needs for basic foods. According to the UC Davis Extension Office, it takes 65 gallons of water to produce a single eight-ounce glass of milk for a child. To fill one of Los Angeles County’s 270,000 swimming pools takes an average of 18,000 gallons. Where are our priorities? Is it to be swimming pools or milk?

In every war, there are the refugees who try to drag along every last valuable possession when they flee. These fools wind up strafed to death alongside the littered highway. Why? Because they value their lifestyles more than their lives.

It’s like that with water. We have too many people trying to drag a tropical, water-bloated lifestyle into a future that demands desert living and canteens.

As a Californian whose family’s life depends directly upon a few fragile seeps in a mountainside, I come to Los Angeles and look around, and I feel a choking rage. As far as I am concerned, people who waste water are as criminal as drug dealers.

It’s time for all of us to do the personal arithmetic. How many Californians will have the guts to stop being fools?