Water Purifying in the Parking Lots

Hi Duane, thanks for reflecting on this small lesson from the shuttle today.  One example of KISS in Nampa is the use of water on lawns in the area.  Neighbors frequently discuss the difficulty of keeping a lush, green lawn in the Treasure Valley during the scorching summer.  Rather than using excess resources and worrying about the density of the yard, we simply tilled the grass and put in river rocks and native plants.  Live amongst the landscape!  

"We live in a desert?!?! How come there are so many trees and green grass?" Every year I encounter so many students who are surprised to learn that their lawns and neighborhood parks with fountains and ponds, are not naturally occurring. 

The extreme lengths that people will go to create an artificial landscape never ceases to amaze me. All summer long sprinklers are running nonstop around the clock to ensure that lawns are kept vibrant and lush. We pay for the installation of the systems, the water, the maintenance of the systems, the sod, the maintenance of the lawns, etc. 

So my question is, why aren't we using xeriscape designs? It seems like commonsense when you live in an arid environment that you would choose landscape materials that include native drought and heat tolerant plants in your yard. Imagine how much our water usage could be reduced if half of our lawns were converted to xeriscape designs! Few of us even use our front lawns for anything more than space filler between our homes and the street. The video predicting the doubling of the population of the Treasure Valley by 2050 means that we need to be even more aware of our water usage patterns and look at easy ways to reduce our consumption. 

On another note, changing our landscape choices would help with some of our wildlife issues.  Just a few weeks ago two area ponds were closed due to e.coli in the water. One of the culprits was geese. Geese are attracted to the grassy spaces surrounding the ponds. Remove the grass and you reduce the goose problem. Also, do you recall the elk dying this past winter from eating the Japanese Yew? If we are planting native species we are actually achieving two things at once: 1. Reducing the spread of non-native plant species and 2. Reducing the loss of wildlife due to their interaction with harmful plants. 

I'm not a fan of the KISS method, as it implies that there is a simple solution to any problem. Certainly, solutions to problems can be over-engineered or over-thought, but truly sustainable solutions are rarely simple or obvious. Many solutions often seem simple and common-sensical in retrospect, like building swales into large parking lots, but if things were really that simple . . . why haven't we been doing it for decades now?

Our knowledge and public interest in protecting the environment has grown exponentially over the past thirty or forty years, and companies and public agencies have been working harder to research and implement solutions to various environmental problems, like polluted runoff from parking lots. Those swales are certainly pretty straightforward and simple to build and maintain, and have a great impact. But the foresight and knowledge to develop and implement them isn't simple at all, and many builders/developers still aren't using them due to ignorance or not feeling enough public pressure to offset the cost or space they take up.