Is Brown the New Green?

I’ve been meaning to bring this up for a while. Sometime back I heard one of the incessant and ever present commercials you hear in California these days – about water shortages. A theme that I always find ironic, since we have thousands of miles of coastline with raging water right there. It’s drought season. Oh yeah, that’s right we have to get all vaklemped because we didn’t get enough rain. The ironic thing is that when we have lots of rain, far beyond our ‘normal’ annual rainfall, they are always very quick to point out that this in no way cancels any drought deficits we have built up – despite the fact that several people’s houses are sliding down hills right past their windows. Oh no, we must never admit that we actually have an abundance of anything – if we did, then how the heck would we scare the bageebers out of the general populace? And if we couldn’t do that, how the heck are we going to control them? Anyway, as usual, I digress.

So, I’m listening to this commercial going on about how we must, must, must conserve on water because now that is in short supply (despite the fact that we get most of our water from the Colorado river, eh?) and how we must refrain from watering plants, lawns and other unnecessary green items, so we won’t all die from dehydration or something. And besides, how will we water all those plants growing on the side of the freeways if we actually water our own plants and lawns?

But it got me thinking…don’t you see the irony here? I mean, the whole thrust is that we want to go more green, right? All over the country and perhaps the world, we are hearing about how the trees are all being chopped down and that is going to rip an even bigger hole in the ozone layer (btw, I heard that is actually repairing itself, who knew?) so, yes, let’s plant a lot of trees and get that oxygen level up folks – but ooops, I think trees actually need water in order to grow. In fact, all plants need more water to grow. So if you pull out your lawn and put down concrete, in order to save water, aren’t you contributing to higher ambient temps? Plants and greenery do not conduct heat, so they actually contribute to cooling ambient temps – also they produce water as well, right? Concrete, not so much. See my dilemma here?

So how in the hell does either letting your lawn/plants go to a dry mass of brown contribute to helping to ‘stop global warming’? The answer is it doesn’t. And the truth is, IMHO is that it is not about conservation, preventing global warming or any of that – it is just about control. Apparently we are all so stupid that if anybody throws in the term global warming that we, like Pavlov’s dogs will react and do what we are told. We will not use our own common sense, we will simply believe that we must do our part in battling the impending doom of the planet drying up like a 70 year old virgin. My ass.

And what are we saving the water for? Some guy who fifty years from now is going to be thirsty? I think not. Seriously, if you told a farmer or a gardener that the way to have plants in the future would be to save all their seeds or use as few of them as possible they’d hit you over the head with a rake or tractor or something. Life begets life. Death begets death. If we have to kill the very things that supposedly sustain life on this planet, in order to have a more sound planet and a better quality of life, then sorry I’m just not down with that. Are you? It’s just too stupid for words.