Dear Headway reader,
Michael Kimmelman’s recent story on Los Angeles’s water needs included a surprising fact: The city has been using less water, even as its population has grown.
Part of this success, Michael reported, came from adopting a culture of conservation after a series of severe droughts, starting in the 1970s, prompted “some simple, practical, boring fixes, like better plumbing, alongside larger transformations in social norms, policies and politics.” In a 2024 survey from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, 90 percent of respondents said they considered it important to conserve water daily, even when the region is not in a drought.
We asked readers around the country what they thought of Los Angeles’s approach to water conservation, and whether they had taken similar actions. More than 500 wrote in to offer their thoughts.
Why Conserve?
Last fall, New York City declared its first drought warning in 20 years as dry conditions sparked wildfires. The warning “brought things into perspective” for Daniel Cortez, who grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., and now lives in Manhattan. “New York takes water for granted,” he wrote. “The 2024 drought should make it clear to us that our water is not unlimited and even our forest can burn down these days.”
Experts stress that water conservation can have a significant impact on emissions, too. “Any water that we conserve is also energy conserved,” said Ashlynn Stillwell, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in an interview. Treating and transporting water, as well as heating it, requires a lot of energy.
In the Northeast, water overuse has caused rivers to dry up, leading to environmental impacts like fish die-offs. “We all need to use water, but use it reasonably,” said Shimon Anisfeld, who teaches at Yale and wrote the book “Water Management.” “Figure out how to use a little less in order to preserve the ecological health of the river systems that are providing this water.”
But what does it take to use less water? We’ve assembled a few starting points.
Check Your Water Efficiency
The best way to begin is to audit how you’re consuming water in your home, which can also help uncover leaks.
Water-efficient fixtures and appliances, like toilets, shower heads and washing machines, became more common once the U.S. adopted national standards in 1992, and have improved in quality in the decades since. But saving even more water is possible. According to a 2017 posting by the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Researchers have estimated that if every household were fully equipped with today’s higher-efficiency devices, average indoor household water use could drop an additional 35 percent or more.”
In places where combined sewer overflow is an issue, using water-consuming appliances at appropriate times can help keep waterways clean. Some municipalities, like the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, offer alert programs so residents can reduce their water usage and help prevent such overflows from happening.
Look Outside
Outdoor water use is a major strain on water resources, but the solutions for ecological landscaping may look different around the country. Replacing thirsty lawns with drought-tolerant landscapes is more essential in dry climates, while letting traditional turf lawns go brown during the summer can suffice in places with more regular rainfall.
“We live in a water-rich area (Upper Michigan),” Dan Wiitala wrote. “Still, we decided long ago to never put a drop of water into lawn watering when we bought our property on Lake Superior.” This year, he said, he began planting native varieties in his landscape. “We’ve made a conscious effort to let the native vegetation take over, more or less.”
Shreya Ramachandran, a college student from Northern California, installed a gray-water system to irrigate her family’s trees and shrubbery with water from the dishwasher and washing machine. She started a nonprofit called the Grey Water Project to advocate this form of recycling.
Stillwell, the professor, has rain barrels to help ease local drainage problems and prevent combined sewer overflow. She also mentioned a secondary benefit: “I haven’t used my outdoor faucet to water my garden all year because I’ve used my rain barrel that is helping mitigate flooding in my city.”
Everyday Actions That Add Up
Many readers wrote in with personal actions that sound small, but are easy for anyone to adopt:
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Taking shorter and less frequent showers
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Collecting and reusing excess running water, for instance while waiting for the shower to warm up or rinsing fruits and vegetables in the sink
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Turning off the sink when shaving or brushing teeth
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Only flushing solid waste
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Running dishwashers and washing machines only when they are full
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Scraping, not rinsing, dishes before loading the dishwasher
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Washing a car with a bucket of water instead of a hose, or going to carwashes that recycle water
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Cleaning sidewalks and driveways with a broom instead of a hose
Personal actions “can also model behavioral change for others, and that’s where that can start to snowball,” Stillwell said. “While it might feel like, ‘I’m just one person, what can I do?’ When you multiply that by several million, we get somewhere.”
As one Times headline put it some 60 years ago, amid falling reservoir levels, “Saving Water Is Game Any Number Can Play.”
— Anna Diamond
Revisiting
Water can be subject to cycles of boom and bust. In our era of climate and weather extremes, periods of drought vie with periods of storms and flooding. This dynamic creates conflict and stagnation as communities struggle to balance their immediate needs with longer-term risks.Headway began in 2021 with an essay by Michael Kimmelman about the effort to redevelop East River Park in Lower Manhattan to help protect New York City’s coast from flooding. Neighbors of the park were divided over how to juggle flood mitigation with other priorities, like preserving the park’s mature trees.
Now, the first phase of the East River Park redesign is nearly complete, and Wagner Park, on Lower Manhattan’s west side, has been redesigned as part of the same coastal resilience effort. Michael recently took stock of both projects to consider what the results reveal about progress, and why it’s so elusive. — Matt Thompson
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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