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Las Vegas's new strategy for tackling drought – banning 'useless grass':
A new Nevada law will outlaw about 40% of the grass in the Las Vegas area in an effort to conserve water amid a drought that is drying up the region's primary water source: the Colorado River.
Other cities and states around the US have enacted temporary bans on lawns that must be watered, but legislation signed Friday by the state's governor, Steve Sisolak, makes Nevada the first in the nation to enact a permanent ban on certain categories of grass. Sisolak said last week that anyone flying into Las Vegas viewing the "bathtub rings" that delineate how high Lake Mead's water levels used to be can see that conservation is needed.
"It's incumbent upon us for the next generation to be more conscious of conservation and our natural resources, water being particularly important," he said.
The ban targets what the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls "non-functional turf". It applies to grass that virtually no one uses at office parks, street medians and the entrances to housing developments. It excludes single-family homes, parks and golf courses.
The measure will require the replacement of about 8 sq miles (21 sq km) of grass in the metro Las Vegas area. By ripping it out, water officials estimate the region can reduce annual water consumption by 15% and save about 14 gallons (53 liters) per person a day in a region with a population of about 2.3 million.
If you want grass, go live where grass grows naturally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:23PM
You're completely missing the point. British fashions didn't drive suburbia. They did however drive things like the notion of what a formal garden should look like, what the appearance of wealth would be and so on. Even chest-thumping american industrialists were surprisingly anglophile when it came to their markers of wealth, and even through the gilded age, inter-war period and so on, the fashion for how fancy houses and big gardens should look was heavily driven by cross-fertilisation from the UK. That then trickled down to people in the USA when they were trying to make suburbs work for people in the USA who didn't know a damn thing about the wool trade, but did know that swell folks had green lawns and driveways.