\u00a0<\/em>Perhaps it is because we do this so often and so easily\u2014 we English speakers\u2014 that we see green lawns and lush orchards and huge golf courses as simple, detached units in themselves not as a form of water.\u00a0 If we always spoke of water as the whole that it is, as immersive to us as air, would we begin to experience our own bodies as walking water, our eyes as floating light-filled bubbles, our fingers as crooked creeks?\u00a0 And would those green lawns, orchards, and golf courses be as startlingly wet to our eyes as a lake, green expressions of our very own body\u2019s water spilling and running over the landscape?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I don\u2019t think we can change how English works\u2014though this is sometimes the role of poets, to shake English up and give us visions\u2014but maybe we can begin to change how we see green lawns, lush orchards, and golf courses.\u00a0 We can shift our aesthetic values to start looking at how our water exists in this place, the arid Okanagan.\u00a0 Let me see my lawn as a great green pool lying loose and profligate on the landscape. Suddenly, that wet green thing burning in the heat of an Okanagan summer sun seems worrying.\u00a0 Green, grassy water lying up and down every suburban street is awfully exposed, drying up like great sheets in the sun.\u00a0 Why do we keep pouring our body\u2019s water over them, as if they are the fevered brows of our children? Is a lawn that precious?<\/em><\/p>\n Now the prickly, dry hills that hoard the water in dry needles, spindly vase-like bunch grass, and crusty shells of moss seem so much more loving of water, less loose and wasteful and reckless.\u00a0\u00a0 The dry plants of the Okanagan seem to be more tender in spirit, more careful.\u00a0 They are beautiful those brown, dry hills\u2014they are austere, bent over the hot hill, collecting and nurturing their little bits of shade.\u00a0 They are busy devoting their lives to water.<\/em><\/p>\n Thanks Nancy!<\/p>\n I think that a lot of the ways we use water are just routine things we do. \u00a0We don’t often debate the right and wrong of the length of our shower. \u00a0We spend the time in the shower thinking about the day ahead, not about how much water we should be using. \u00a0When we flush the toilet, we are more worried about the smell if we don’t – and hopefully doing a good job of washing our hands – than about how much water that flush will use. \u00a0Changing a habit takes a lot of work. \u00a0However, once it is changed, it doesn’t take much to sustain it. Changing those habits may involve a moral or financial calculation, or it may just be absorbed from what we see as common practice around us. \u00a0If we look around at the natural place we inhabit, we see that water conservation is just the natural way of life here in the Okanagan. \u00a0Being part of this place means conserving water.<\/p>\n In my own research, I’ve found that many people in Kelowna do devote time and money to water conservation. You can see some of the results as part of a presentation I gave recently (Canadian Water Resources Association presentation<\/a>). \u00a0The tables that follow \u00a0summarize water conservation choices in Kelowna among the people I surveyed:<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcowatershed\/files\/2013\/03\/IndoorTable.jpg\")
<\/a><\/td>\n![](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcowatershed\/files\/2013\/03\/OutdoorTable.jpg\")
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