10:50am | Every time it rains I’m afraid that a large percentage of Californians believe it means we can stop being vigilant about water use1.
But more than knowledge, analysis, or even ethos, the deciding factor in what kind of consumers we are is how we have been conditioned.
My freshman year in college I lived in the dorms at San Diego State. One of our floor’s resident advisors was sophomore Randy, a surfer-hippie from the Bay Area. And Randy did not always flush the toilet after he peed.
Many of us found this disgusting, and we told him so. Randy was unfazed, claiming that we Californians need to be careful with our water usage, that we waste a lot of water flushing toilets unnecessarily, that in some cases the issue really isn’t hygiene but daintiness, etc.
He was right, of course. That’s easy to see now, being less dainty and more of a hippie2 than I was half a lifetime ago; and it was hard to argue against the logic of any of these points. But the rest of us had been conditioned as late-20th-century suburbanites, and it just seemed gross.
‘Conditioning’ is a term and concept with a solid place in any field of study about what makes us tick, from neurology and psychology to sociology and anthropology. Conditioning is why even after I learned that I shouldn’t be throwing my dental floss into the toilet I kept doing it for a while. “Damn it!” I would say with annoyance, each time realizing the millisecond afterwards that I had automatically done it again. Conditioning is powerful stuff, a hidden hand that rocks the cradle.
As Randy knew implicitly, conditioning goes beyond reflex and extends into the realm of ideas. Conditioning is why at home I used paper and not cloth napkins right up until a day at my friend Aya’s house when I noticed that cloth was the only kind of napkin she had. It’s not like I didn’t believe in being parsimonious with paper; it’s not like I had never used a cloth napkin or thought they weren’t just as handy for hand-wiping: it was simply that all my life paper napkins had been a staple of the pantry.
Conditioning is why my friend Urk leaves the lights burning constantly in half the rooms of his condo. It’s not like he doesn’t grasp the equation of energy usage and pollution or doesn’t care: it’s that all his life the people around him haven’t made sure to flick the switch into the “off” position before exiting. Same with Nar, his wife—and so this bad bit of conditioning is confirmed by ongoing experience. They reinforce the behavior in each other rather than being able to help their partner grow out of it. And when they have a child, she will learn to do the same.
Qel has a similar bad habit at the kitchen sink. While doing dishes3, the water runs constantly, with more of it pouring directly down the drain than first rinsing a fork or plate. Qel’s strength, coordination, and dexterity are non-issues; it would take her no real effort to shut off the tap before walking away from the sink for a moment or turning to the side so as to dry off and set down a plate: she doesn’t do it because she is conditioned to do otherwise. Her husband does the same, and sometimes you can catch them standing and talking over the sound of steady faucet stream. And you can hear that stream running in the bathroom each morning and night over the sounds of the pair brushing their teeth.
The point here is not Ten Tips to Help the Earth. Neither is it Be Thee Perfect in Your Relations with Mother Nature. But Be Better is always on point, whatever we’re talking about (and we might add as a parenthetical: And Don’t Let Conditioning Stand in Your Way). Sometimes it’s tricky to be better; sometimes not so much.
If this ‘being better’ thing I’m talking about is viewed as a general part of one’s lifestyle and not so much a prescription or specific project, we probably stand a better chance to make small improvements as we go, even if at first they’re sporadic and inconsistent. Remembering to turn off the lights (and then, of course, following through) even just once when we wouldn’t have done so otherwise makes us a bit better than we would have been—and it means a little less pollution, a little less waste.
Some life alterations may come easier for you than for others. I drink a lot of water and pee frequently, so Randy’s Toilet Tip, even if viable only a small percentage of the times nature calls, has proven an easy way for me to conserve thousands of gallons of water since my San Diego stay. But I loves me a long shower. I feel kind of bad about it, and I try to stay mindful about what I’m doing (often exiting when I really would have loved another five minutes), but there’s no way around the fact that I use up far more water than I need to for not just cleanliness but even adequate muscle relaxation. When I was a kid I was prone to shower until our home’s supply of hot water ran out; and when I lived for four months in Comoros (a Third Worldy island nation) by far the most difficult privation was living without hot water4. For these (and other) reasons, a long, hot shower is for me a crux of urban living. And so I sin, knowingly.
That doesn’t mean I can’t sin less, or that being a sinner means I cannot attempt to expiate my excess in other ways, ways that come more easily to me. It’s about being better, and helping each other to be better.
Water conservation isn’t hippie stuff. What Randy grokked is that our established ways of managing water are damaging and/or unsustainable. This late-dawning realization is slowly making its way into mainstream thinking and public policy. Hence we have regulations on water usage and exhortations to landscape with native, drought-tolerant flora rather than the grass that was in front of literally every home in the large suburban Fullerton housing tract of my youth.
These ideas—and all of the ones in this piece—are no-brainers, and yet they encounter resistance because they run counter to our common conditioning. And there’s an overarching inculcation here with echoes of our capitalistic American ethos: If we can afford it—and even sometimes where we can’t—we are entitled to it, and we are free to do as we like with it. Thus do I see a guy, when asked about observing water-conservation measures, telling a TV news crew: “It’s my water, and if I want to run the hose all day on my front lawn, that’s what I’m going to do.”
But this isn’t about the government encroaching on your freedom. You need not be especially trusting of government to recognize that the vast majority of the times the ugly behemoth becomes alarmed enough about an environmental issue actually to do something, the situation is already perilous.
This is one of the reasons we’re often better off taking our cues from each other than from the government. Moreover, the government is a sort of abstract entity, and thus is only in a position to put forth broad edicts, rather than to help us be better through direct discussion and behavior modeling.
That is to say, we are the most direct path to a better world, one small, personal step at a time. If you want to help with the water situation, the environment in general, or any damn thing you can think of, just be better, even if only once in a while. Be a little better, and go from there.
Related: Water Department Celebrates 100th Sustainable Lawn Conversion
Footnotes
1Not that I think Californians are particularly vigilant in the first place.
2Not that I’m much of a hippie, Burning Man-going aside.
3Qel’s digs lack a dishwasher not named ‘Qel.’
4Not because they were short on water but on advanced infrastructure.