PERRY: Lawn gone — time for Colorado to give up thirsty green front yards

The amazement of my first jet ride as a kid still lingers, including the thrilling thrust and the shocking realization that I live in a desert.

Back in the 1960s, obsessed with catching a ride, I cajoled my grandmother to drop me off in Colorado Springs at the end of one summer after a season of picking onions and tomatoes in Manzanola. It’s part of the Arkansas Valley, where river water spread over thousands of acres of dry land produces world-famous melons, peppers and more.

As an expensive lark, I treated myself to a Frontier Airlines 727 flight from Colorado Springs to Stapleton Airport in Denver.

The takeoff speed made me giddy.

It’s a short flight, but the Boeing workhorse gained respectable altitude on its way to Concourse C in Denver.

From about 20,000 feet in the air, I realized for the first time that the Front Range is actually brown. There are no trees. No dense scrub. Just a lot of dirt and some roads as Colorado’s high plains exist in their natural state.

But as you fly into Denver, beginning in Aurora, the emerald yards are a stunning contrast.

That was about 50 years ago. The population, and sprawl, of the Aurora-Denver metroplex has pretty much tripled.

By removing water naturally destined for Colorado’s major rivers, and, ultimately, the ocean, more than 3 million people are pumping billions of gallons of water on the Front Range’s viridescent quilt, which now sprawls from Castle Rock to Lyons and pretty much east to Watkins.

Denver Water, which supplies most of the metro region, other than Aurora, pumps about 369 million gallons of water a day. In the summer, and as much as about half of that gets poured onto laws to keep them alive and as green as possible. 

Aurora Water, one of the most innovative water providers in the country, provides about 55,000 acre feet of water to the city’s almost 400,000 residents and 5,500 businesses. Like Denver, Aurora residents pour about half their water onto their lawns during summer.

And you know what you do with all that water you pour on in the dirt around your house or apartment building? You walk right past it.

Well, not on weekends. Then you walk over the top of it with a lawn-mower.

The notion of home lawns is one of those weird European immigrant things. Going back to the 1600s —  before I was in school and required to care for our own family farm of Kentucky bluegrass — lawns of herbs and natural grasses created clearing around homes as a form of security.

The notion came steadily with immigrants from Europe as they took over this continent, with fine-bladed grass lawns crowding out more sensible ground covers.

But as those of us from here can see, there are no woods to clear and fear, pretty much between Kansas City and western California.

There are no trees and no lush vegetation because there is no rain to keep it alive.

What grows here naturally is what most people call weeds. We spend a great deal of time and money to kill local vegetation from their lawns, which can’t survive here without a lot of extra water.

While this was little more than a novelty to me as a kid in the 1960s, the oddity of planting a yard full of grass to flood and mow so you can look at it once in a while, has become a serious problem.

Grassiness is a quagmire because so many people live here now, the extravagant amount of water thirsty fescue requires threatens things like drinking and flushing the toilet, especially in places downstream of the metro area. In relatively newly inhabited parts of the Front Range, reliable water is already gone or on the verge of being critically unreliable, even outside of a drought.

It’s long past time to end the emerald madness here in the desert.

Aurora has a good start. Not only has Aurora Water found ways to reclaim water sent downstream, the city has long been in the forefront of cajoling and sometimes forcing people to treat water like the rare commodity it is along the Front Range.

The city has long watered some parks with treated sewage water.

Aurora was in the front of the parade to create water-saving homes, even while the hose ran outside in the front yard.

The idea of lawn-watering restrictions have been around longer than most people who live here.

For decades, the city has nudged and prevailed on residents to try a front yard full of thyme, planters, almost anything other than thirsty grasses that we perpetuate here only because we’ve always done it that way.

The latest round of news — that, despite a snowy winter, drought is likely and, with it, further water restrictions for your lawn: two days a week, not three — has caused a stir among some.

The Aurora Water predictions presented to city lawmakers in February sent off a surprising round of huffing and puffing from the region’s “freedom” types, questioning the inexact and critical science of community hydrology.

The “get off my god-given-lawn rights” types sound like Colorado’s congressmembers Ken Buck and Lauren Boebert, sneering at climate change warnings when it rains, or insisting that “real Colorado farmers” need and use assault rifles to keep raccoons in check.

Fortunately, the majority of city lawmakers agreed recently with Mayor Mike Coffman to essentially end thirsty front lawns and side yards for all new homes built. Why it took this long for Aurora to simply do the obvious is a testament to the same human nature that has us watching a groundhog predict the length of winter each year.

The era of thirsty front-yard carpeting is lawn gone. Move along. Aurora even provides incentives to dig it up and give it up. As if you need any.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com