One beautiful day follows another here in drought-stricken metro Atlanta. The high today will be in the low 70s; we've had frost some mornings. But every day since the last rain in October has been clear, cool, and gorgeous. If it weren't for the water shortage, this would be the perfect fall, and I would be planning and planting my front yard with native perennials, herbs, and vegetables.
To the untrained eye, our neighborhood seems unaffected by the drought. Our lawn, which we have never watered, remains green except for a few small spots of dead grass. Native plants are doing well; heavier water drinkers such as hydrangeas are wilted. The drought poses the most danger because 5 million people in metro Atlanta depend upon a small water source--the Chattahoochee River--and its dammed resources in Lake Sidney Lanier. 
Metro Atlanta has been under an outside watering ban for some weeks now as the drought continues to increase in severity. Some folks have responded to the need to conserve water better than other folks. One of our neighbors continues to wash his car weekly and water his plants with city water from his outside water hoses. "Consider your dirty car as a badge of honor," Governor Sonny Perdue has encouraged us. I guess our neighbor doesn't value that particular badge of honor.
Some folks turn in their scofflaw neighbors who continue to water outside. A local news reporter interviewed a woman who walks in her neighborhood every day, rather self-righteously looking for the telltale signs of wetness around the edges of lawns. I'm not going to turn in my neighbor, but it is difficult for me not to feel a little ill will toward him. I've been doling out the water I collected from the last rain, watering in the native perennials I had purchased before the water ban, and I'll soon have to resort to gray water from the shower again.
People respond to crises in different ways. Some think they are above the cares and concerns of ordinary people, as if they have no personal responsibility in civic life. Channel 2 Action News recently researched the water records of Cobb County to discover the biggest water users in that county. One man's home rose to the top of the list: 440,000 gallons of water used in the past month, "as much [water use] as a 60-home subdivision," according to Channel 2. On her website, Dr. Pamela Gore, of Georgia Perimeter College, writes that the average person in Georgia uses 168 gallons of water a day. So that's a lot of water per day for this guy in Cobb County who lives alone, according to one news source.
That kind of reckless use of our resources contributes to the water crisis we're facing here in north Georgia. Photos of Lake Sidney Lanier illustrate that crisis more than these words can. The unfortunate thing is that most of us don't see the dramatic results of our poor use of resources until it's too late: homes are burned on the hillsides in California; water taps are running dry in Atlanta. As long as our grass is green, we don't seem to care if the neighbor's spigots are dry.
UPDATE:
I have edited this entry so that no one can exactly identify the neighbor who continues to wash his car. His outside watering is small potatoes: he probably uses less water cleaning his car than he would if he used the facilities of a local car wash. (Some car washes, however, are recycling their water.) Watering one's lawn wastes the most water in urban and suburban areas. I think we need to change this ideal of the American lawn as being a huge expanse of thirsty green grass. At some point in our history--probably in the 1950s--the American lawn, with its heavy need of water, fertilizer and its requirement of a hatred of dandelions--became every suburban American's obsession. How can we turn around that obsession and get folks to grow native grasses and ornamentals that require less water and attention? This water crisis is not going to go away. We may eventually get enough rain to raise the water in the reservoirs, but Atlanta continues to grow while our water resource does not.
UPDATE II:
"Cobb Top Water Guzzler Say's He'll Try to Cut Back" And, of course, he has hired a PR team to help him
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