Celeste Cantu: A 21st-century relationship with water

The 21st Century delivers unprecedented challenges to water, key to life, economy and the environment. Unless we examine our relationship with water, we will continue to take it for granted, waste and pollute it, says Celeste Cantu.

Celeste Cantu is the General Manager, for the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority and the Integrated Regional Watershed Management Plan called One Water One Watershed (OWOW) that addresses multiple issues and achieve sustainability in the Santa Ana River Watershed. Ms. Cantu has served as the Executive Director for the California State Water Resources Control Board and served as the USDA Rural Development State Director for California during the Clinton Administration.

In the fall of 2013, Ms. Cantu gave this speech at a TEDx event in Temecula.  Here is what she had to say:

Has it ever occurred to you that you may be in a dysfunctional relationship?

A dysfunctional relationship has certain qualities, I’ve learned recently. I went to a presentation about water given by a water engineer, and he taught us about dysfunctional relationships. The qualities are: you feel taken for granted, there’s always something that needs to be fixed in the relationship, who you are is diminished, you feel trapped, and you want to get away but you can’t. And when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s horrible.

And as it turns out, that pretty much describes our relationship with water.

I also learned that the best way to repair a dysfunctional relationship is through understanding, so let’s walk down and understand our relationship with water.

Well, what’s it to us? What does it do? Water is key to our bodies. The nutrients that we eat need water to break down. Water carries those nutrients to our cells; water carries wastes away from our cells. Water lubricates our joints; it also is a shock absorber for our eyeballs and our brains and our spine. Water does a tremendous amount of things for your body. If you go 3 to 5 days without water, what happens? You die. So when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, dehydration kills.

Water is critically important to our bodies, but what else does it do? What’s it for the economy? There are several major sectors in our economy that are highly dependent on water. Agriculture is probably the most well known. In fact 80% of all the water that’s beneficially used goes to agriculture; we like to eat food on a regular basis. It also goes to other water intensive industries like energy, manufacturing, and home building, and it finally ends up in your kitchen tap. So water is critically important for the economy. All of those goods, those outputs from those main water intensive sectors migrate throughout different parts of our economies, and their goods and services are transformed, produced and transferred through our supply chain until they arrive at the ultimate consumer, and that would be you. When we don’t have water, plants die and fields lie fallow. If that happens too much, we get very hungry. When water’s good, it’s very good. But when it’s bad, it’s horrible.

What else is water good for? How does it affect our daily lives? This is an interactive exercise here. This is a guessing game. Maybe you know the answers. How much water do you think it takes to produce one apple? (audience calls out answers) 19. How about a glass of wine? (more answers) 32. What do you think it takes to produce a cup of coffee? (more answers) It takes 37 gallons of water that goes to growing the beans, but also brewing the cup of coffee itself. You can see as we go around the cycle here, the gallons to produce it are going up. How about our favorite. A hamburger. 634 just to do the patty. So yes, you’ll be getting up to 1000 if you include the bread, tomatoes, and everything else. And finally, a car, 39,000 – this is the same as it would take to fill up two family sized swimming pools. So it takes a lot to produce the goods and services that we use every day.

You’re familiar with the water that you drink and that you use for bathing, cooking, washing and watering your yard. That’s your direct use of water, but there’s a lot of water you use every day that you get indirectly through these goods and services. Almost everything that you touch and any process that you see takes a tremendous amount of water.

So let’s get to know what water goes through to do all this work for you. This is the hydrologic cycle. This is the never ending cycle; it is today as it has always been since the beginning of time. It starts with a snowflake in the atmosphere that falls on the mountains and the rain that falls to the earth, creating rivers that replenish our aquifers. People and plants take that water up, it evaporates back to the atmosphere where it gathers as clouds and waits again to fall again. This is the process as it has always done. That drop has always made that cycle since the beginning of time. It is the same drop making that cycle as when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. In fact, that drop is probably dinosaur pee. Mother Nature has always recycled.

So as you can see, our water is finite. We are living in a closed system. And water is very old. We had water before we had the earth. First came water; then came the earth. Where’s the earthly home of the water drop? It is in the watershed. A watershed is a basin defined by ridges and mountains with a river that runs through it in the middle. All the drops that fall within this basin migrate through the soils, creating little streams and creeks as they gather together into rivers, and eventually find their way to the ocean. In this watershed, you have a lot of people living. Everybody lives in a watershed. Watersheds are made by nature and defined by geology; they cross city, state, and national boundaries.

In our watershed, we enjoy a Mediterranean climate. And what that means is that it doesn’t rain much, and the rain mainly comes in the wintertime. In our case, our two wettest months are December and January. This is a pattern we’ve adapted to. We are able to collect rain in our two wettest months for use in all the other months when we get hardly any rain at all. As we grew, we realized we needed to import more water from other watersheds than what would naturally fall on our watershed, so we import water from the Colorado River and from the north through the Delta.

Water is facing some tremendous challenges as we look into the 21st century. These challenges are so great that we characterize them as no less than the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So the first horseman is wearing red, and he represents the Colorado River, of course, because it’s color is red, and what we’re most worried about is that there is some recent information we received. The US Bureau of Reclamation has finished the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, and it has an ominous prediction. It says that in the year 2060, we can expect that our water demand and our needs will outstrip supply in the amount of 8 times what the city of Las Vegas uses today. This is very bad news.

The second horseman carrying the scythe represents climate change. We also have bad news in that department. We are facing increased aridity. We are going to be looking at longer and more intense droughts than what we have seen in the past. Low rainfall will be our new normal, and with this come higher temperatures. Higher temperatures cause increased evaporation which means each one of our drops is going to have to work harder, and it will give us the feeling of having more scarcity. Scarcity is one of the things that we’re planning for.

The third horseman is carrying a skull. He represents population growth. The California Department of Finance’s recently released report says that California’s population will surpass the 50 million mark in 2049. That increased population will exceed the population currently in either Illinois or Pennsylvania. The number of new residents, if you were to put them in a state today, would be the fifth largest state in the union. We will have exactly the same amount of water then as we do now. Riverside County is going to be the fastest growing county in California, so we have to really make our scarce, vulnerable water work much harder and go much farther.

The final horseman is wearing the helmet with two horns. One horn represents the Sacramento River and the other horn represents the San Joaquin River. Those are the two major river systems that go through the Delta and is the water that we import from Northern California. We are at the point today of making a major decision about how we manage the Delta going forward. If we hesitate or if we get it wrong, the consequences are enormous. This is probably our biggest threat for us in Southern California.

We don’t face these challenges alone in this watershed. Much of California faces the same challenges. What we’re looking at is the perfect storm of all these four major challenges that we might be able to manage independently, but all four of them coming together at the same time tells us that the 21st century is going to be very, very challenging to us. 97% of all the water on the earth is in the oceans, so it’s salty, you’d better not drink it. 3% of the water on earth is freshwater. 2.4% of the water on earth is frozen in glaciers at the polar ice caps, not very accessible to us. We have less than 1% of all the water available to us as freshwater for our drinking and for making apples and wine and all the other things that are important to us. Less than 1% of the earth’s water.

Our water districts have been very successful and they’ve been very good at producing and providing for you abundant high quality drinking water that you use in your everyday life. But there’s been a side effect of that success, and that is that we take water for granted. We really have lost our relationship with water. Our great grandparents, they had a very strong relationship with water, because they had to find it, and keep it clean, and worry about it every day. Not so today. That relationship is something we need to reconstruct.

One of the things we learned about a dysfunctional relationship is there’s always something that needs to be fixed in the relationship. And this is a sign we see way too often. A broken sprinkler head, flooding the sidewalk and the streets. You may think this is just an incidental effect, but taken together, all of our leaking and broken sprinkler heads and all of our overwatering of our yards represents about 40% of all the water that is delivered to our homes. It is a very significant number. So when you think about it, we have got to stop this dysfunctional relationship and end taking water for granted. We have to realize that its quality is precious, and it is finite and we’ve got to start thinking about it almost on the molecular level.

So how do we do that? What’s the first step in changing our relationship with water? It really boils down to it’s all about your grass and how you irrigate your grass. This cool weather turf that you see here does not naturally grow in our area, lush and green like you see. It only can be lush and green when you add a lot of water. People generally put about 100 inches of water on their grass because it’s all automatically done with sprinkler systems. 100 inches is a lot – that’s for every square inch of grass, that’s 100 additional inches of water throughout the year piled up on top of it, so very high. And that’s over and above any normal rainfall you might get.

Now here’s the interesting fact. Water needs are about 55 inches a year in our area. People put almost double. So where does that water go? It runs off the grass, carrying pet waste and fertilizer into the streets, picking up heavy metals from our cars and all kinds of pollutants, and water doesn’t’ go away. It just keeps rolling downhill, and it finds its way to the river or the ocean and it hits it with a toxic slug of pollution. And then we have to clean it up, which is very expensive.

We live in Southern California, and maybe we should landscape as if we did in fact live in Southern California. All in all, 60 to 80% of all of our water goes to our outdoor residential landscape. And as you remember, half of that is not needed. And that’s appropriately irrigating grass. Half of that’s not needed, and not only is it wasting water, it is mobilizing pollution and causing other pollution when it hits the river.

So this is an alternative for you. We could think about chipping away at our grass, or even taking it out altogether. What you see here in the bottom right hand corner is not grass; it is red apple. Red apple is a drought tolerant succulent that stores water in its leaves, so not only is it a water saver, but it’s also a fantastic fire retardant. It needs no fertilizer, very little water, you don’t have to mow it, and it feeds the birds and the bees. So if you want green, that might be a good choice.

If the only person who walks your grass is the person who mows it, you should really think of an alternative palette, and we’d recommend a Mediterannean California plant friendly palette.

We have an easy formula for grass. When you get ready to go to work, you walk into the middle of your yard and you step in the middle of your grass. If it goes squish, go back into the garage and dial back that sprinkler timer by half. Next week, do the same thing. Monday morning, go out there, step in the middle of the grass, do it again. Keep doing that every Monday morning until you hear crunch. Then you can give it one more minute. Do this every other month as the seasons change and you will find that you will be saving a lot of water and a lot of money.

Musuem picture framedSo we hope this is going to be a picture you’ll see in museums in the future. This is a 20th century yard with 20th century grass. It is the biggest water guzzler around. Did you know that the number one crop grown in the United States is grass? And it feeds no one.

So we’re really hoping this will be the thing of the past. Your water resource managers are working desperately hard like never before with the wastewater people and the stormwater people to create efficiencies and synergies using the 21st century technologies and processes that will go far to give us the water that we need with the population growth that we expect.

Peter Senge is a systems guy at MIT and he writes about all kinds of systems, and he says, ‘problem solving is about making what you don’t want go away, but creating anew is bringing a vision that you desire into reality.’ We need to work really hard at bringing new vision into reality, because the 21st century is demanding that of us, and I don’t think it’s asking too much.

There’s a cultural shift happening that is dramatically changing the way we think about water, and the way we use it. If we can get this cultural shift to touch all of us, we will be just fine in the 21st century.

  • You can watch Celeste Cantu’s speech at TEDx on YouTube by clicking here.

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