In the midst of California's ongoing drought, one woman has earned the informal title of "water czar."
is the chair of the California Water Board. Her job, in part, is to get people to use less water, and she's had some success so far. For example, California residents reduced water use in July by more than 31 percent, compared with July of 2013.
But will that be enough? And will our resolve to conserve dribble away if predictions of a wet El Niño season prove true?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
On what she thinks of the "water czar" title
I do not like that title, thank you for asking that question. Because I actually work as part of a team, and multiple teams. The State Water Board is a board of five people, not one. But even within the administration there are a lot of people working [on this], this is an all hands on deck effort... I don't get to make any decisions by myself, but I am the person out front.
On how well conservation is going, on the local level
Communities now, people are in gear. The average across the state for last July was 31 percent. Now, that's really high. The target is 25 percent cumulatively. But most of water we use is in the summer months. So it's key to bank those savings, so to speak, in the summer months so that as we go through the fall and the winter when people don't tend to use as much water, we maintain that savings.
So people are hitting it out of the park all over the place. I mean there are some places I'm a little worried that they're going too far. People are saving 40 percent, but they're not watering their trees. And so we've been desperately trying to get the word out that people should be cutting back on watering their lawns, putting it on a diet. It won't die, it just doesn't have to look like St. Andrews. We douse our lawns with water to trick them into thinking they're in Ireland or something. I mean, it's nice, it's pretty, but in the scale of things it's something of a luxury during a drought. But watering our trees is really important, we don't want to lose our trees in the drought.
On whether it's helpful to focus on how much water it takes to produce specific foods (like almonds) or products (like bottled water)
I think the media went through a period of sort of the classic, simple, 'Oh it must be somebody else's fault, it must be an almond, it must be all that bottled water,' or whatever. The fact of the matter is that we're in the drought of the century and we all need to do something about it...
The thing that's fascinating about it, is that we live in an interesting time, in civilization essentially, where our water agencies have been so successful in bringing water, particularly our large urban areas are hundreds of miles from where their water comes from. And they've been so successful doing it that people don't even know where there water comes from, or that it's vulnerable, or what the mix of it is.
Similarly, folks take for granted that they can get healthy fruits and vegetables and food at the supermarket. Where does it come from? It comes from agriculture. So people will take a fact that a nut, say, is a gallon per nut, that seems like a lot, well I'm sorry the burger you had the other day is hundreds, the steak [is] 1600. An avocado has a lot, don't take my avocados away from me for heaven sakes.
And there's nothing wrong, I understand people jumping to that conclusion, but the fact is, we're so separated from and so lucky that we can take our food and our water for granted that it's actually a much more complex picture.
On whether California needs to rethink what crops we grow and how much of them
I wouldn't say we should put a limit on what we can grow any more than I would say what we should put a limit on what we import. The water of every good and service, all our electronics... I mean, just the water used to make the cell phones we use in California may actually be more water than the agricultural production. So we live in a much more complex world than that. And there are times when I wish I could be a czar on some things, but we don't have a planned economy like some other countries where we can tell people what to grow and where, or what to buy and where.
On whether a wet El Niño winter will cause people to conserve less
I'll take as much precipitation as we can safely handle, so the fact that it messes with messaging is really a good problem to have. The problem is that there are El Niños and there are El Niños. Some times [they're] wet, some times [they're] dry... But the precipitation may end up stopping somewhere in Southern California because that's the higher probability.
So we could end up in a situation, it seems most likely, although we don't know, I keep saying 'It ain't over 'til it's over,' where it gets very wet here [in Southern California], but up in Northern California in the Sierras where we have all the major reservoirs that are responsible for a third of the water that Southern California uses, won't get any and we'll still be technically in a drought.
I just think we will need to get to the next level of sophisticated messaging. I also think people don't go back once they know they can make due [with less water].
To hear the full interview with Felicia Marcus, click the player above.