Fresh ideas, fresh water

Re “Drought, the sequel, is here,” Opinion, May 17

One only has to travel out of the urban basin to notice we’re in a drought (the “D” word). There’s no snow where there should be, trees are brown, farmers’ pumps are sucking mud.

But don’t ask the power elite downtown and in Sacramento about the “D” word because that would mean something would have to change. Homes couldn’t continue to flood irrigate using sprinklers like 1970, when there were 15 million fewer people here. Without that flood irrigation, homes would stop polluting the ocean with runoff and our sewer systems wouldn’t keep busting at the seams.

Urban water reuse could beat a drought. Tax credits through Assembly Bill 1132 this session could even jump-start the water reuse fad.

As private equity catches up with our collective desire for reuse, new, high-paying industries could come out of the proven but heretofore peripheral world of the green building industry. My goodness, we could even have progress. But if you start using the “D” word, that change will not be coming. At least until the taps run dry.

STEPHEN WILLIAM

BILSON

Founding member

Protect Our Water and

Environmental Rights

San Diego

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Although rain in the L.A. Basin is useful to keep down the brush fires, why do we need it otherwise? The whole Southland, including riverbeds, is so covered in concrete, most of the rainfall just flows to the storm drains, not the aquifers.

Why pray for rain when all we use it for is to wash off the streets? Conservation isn’t the whole answer, and neither is prayer. Why not begin to think outside the rain cloud just a little? We live next to the biggest water puddle on Earth; how about desalinating some of it?

TIM AREHART

Villa Park