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For California’s Iconic Lawns, Brown Is the New Green
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For California’s Iconic Lawns, Brown Is the New Green
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For California’s Iconic Lawns, Brown Is the New Green

Some lawns are changing their tone in light of the drought.

May 11, 2015 Willy Blackmore
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CalPERS Building Sacramento

CalPERS Building, Sacramento

The Sacramento headquarters of CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund, fully embraced the spirit of water cutbacks even before Brown announced mandatory reductions for urban use. “The ‘browning’ came about as part of our operational sustainability efforts over the last few years,” Bill Madison, an information officer at the fund, said in an email. Letting the lawn go brown, as well as switching to drip irrigation for other landscaping and installing low-flow plumbing fixtures inside buildings, is CalPERS’ way of “doing our part to help with California’s drought crisis and to meet the governor’s water reduction requirements for state agencies,” Madison continued.

In 2014, the Sacramento campus used 30 percent less water than in 2013—saving more than 9 million gallons.

(Photo: Kevin Cortopassi/Flickr)

Mormon Temple Los Angeles

Mormon Temple, Los Angeles

The 98,000 square feet of manicured, sloping grass in front of the Mormon temple on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. is hard to miss. Recently, however, the lawn’s meticulous care has lapsed: The sprinklers have been shut off, and the expanse of green has turned drab brown.

“It was definitely a difficult decision to let that lawn go unwatered because of what the temple represents to us,” Eric McGougan, the temple’s engineer, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a sacred place. But our intention was to join with the rest of the citizens of California and do our part to help conserve water.”

The temple plans to reduce its water usage by 25 percent, McGougan told the Times.

(Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

State Capitol Building Sacramento

California State Capitol, Sacramento

After Brown declared a drought state of emergency in January 2014, “we wanted to set an example for all Californians in our front yard, the state capitol,” said Brian Ferguson, deputy director of public affairs at the Department of General Services, which manages the building and surrounding park.

While the lawns around the Capitol usually are not irrigated in the winter months, DGS turned off the sprinklers altogether more than a year before mandatory water cuts came into the picture. In addition to letting the lawns die, fountains and other decorative water features have gone dry, and flowerbeds that are usually planted with annuals have been fallowed. The property’s historic trees, some of which are well over a century old, and other long-lived shrubs are watered with a high-tech drip irrigation system. There are 2,000 signs posted around the ground informing visitors of DGS’ conservation measures.

Ferguson said the department used 40 percent less water on the Capitol grounds in 2014 than in the previous year.

(Photo: Kevin Cortopassi/Flickr)

Gleneagles Golf Course

Gleneagles Golf Course, San Francisco

Fairways at this city-owned golf course in southeast San Francisco went brown last year—but not by choice. The nine-hole course was already facing financial problems when the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission jacked its water rate by nearly 50 percent last summer.

“We adopted a firm-and-fast style of play,” Tom Hsieh, who operates the course, told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. “We use a lot less water than previous owners. We water a lot less in places where the ball should not be. A ‘real’ golf course would probably use twice as much.”

Recent images show a greener fairway, and a Yelp reviewer wrote in February that “the fairways have rebounded nicely from last summer’s drought.”

When called for comment, the person who answered the phone at the club house said media inquiries had to go through the manager, who wouldn’t be in the office until Friday. He would not say if the course was currently green or brown.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Coachella

Coachella, Indio

“The most popular way to experience Coachella is to camp on the Polo Grounds,” reads the website for the popular Southern California music festival. “All onsite camping areas are located on lush beautiful grass fields adjacent to the festival performance area.”

The campsites, some of which are owned by Goldenvoice, the event promoter, likely will not stay that way: Keeping those acres of turf in that lush state in the midst of the Sonoran Desert requires huge amounts of water. In a New York Times story—which ran under the headline “In California, the Grass Is Greener at Coachella”—about the drought’s impact (or lack thereof) on the music festival, organizers said irrigation cutbacks were on the horizon.

A spokesperson from Goldenvoice said she could not comment on the watering and would not confirm if the organization was following through on its promise to let “some of the grass go brown.”

(Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

For California’s Iconic Lawns, Brown Is the New Green
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Jewelry That Makes a Statement Against Ocean Plastic Pollution
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Jewelry That Makes a Statement Against Ocean Plastic Pollution

An art exhibit called Vanishing Point takes on the problem of ocean plastic pollution and how it’s harming marine animals such as birds, turtles, and seals. So it’s fitting that the show is on display (through June) at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania.

The artworks are collaborations between artists and scientists, who hope the show will spur visitors to reduce the plastic in their lives and help clean up the rest.

“A fundamental reason for putting together this exhibition was to highlight the issues,” said participating artist Sophie Carnell in an email, “but importantly to educate people that every small change they make in regard to their plastic usage can and will help the problem.”

Carnell’s works for the exhibit transform plastic debris into objects of beauty: jewelry comprising ocean plastic trash, recycled silver, and Australian or “repurposed” gemstones.

RELATED: Ocean Plastic Pollution Could Double in Ten Years—but There’s a Solution

“Incorporating this ‘waste’ into precious objects also highlights what we view as precious and what we view as disposable,” Carnell says in the exhibit’s catalog. “If we treasure materials we use every day and better consider what happens after we are finished with them, perhaps we would bestow them and our shared living environment with more value.”

Here are the jewelry objects Carnell created out of scavenged ocean plastic for Vanishing Point, along with the views of IMAS marine scientists Heidi Auman, Patti Virtue, and Frederique Olivier on how the flood of plastic trash is harming marine life.

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Nothing says “lush” like sprinklers casting arcs of precious water over suburban Californian yards. It’s no real surprise that the thirst of the state’s landscaping is exacerbating the drought, now in its fourth year. So why waste water on appearances when California is experiencing its driest dry spell in 1,200 years?

As cities figure out how to meet Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandatory 25 percent cut in urban water usage, a first for the state, these lawns are bound to trade in emerald green for basic brown. According to the Pacific Institute, trading grass for drought-tolerant landscaping (and switching to low-flow toilets) could reduce urban water use by as much as 60 percent.

Here’s a look at some of the vast expanses of grass that are embracing a browner future—whether they’d like to or not.

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TakePart is the digital news and lifestyle magazine from Participant Media, the company behind such acclaimed documentaries as CITIZENFOUR, An Inconvenient Truth, and Food, Inc. and feature films including  Lincoln and Spotlight.

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