Courtesy LATimes:

Reporting from San Luis Obispo, Calif. - Katie Martin grew up with a set of water commandments. No lingering in the shower. Turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Don’t flood the yard.

Until she left for college this fall, the 19-year-old lived with her family in a typical California stucco house with a lawn. But when it comes to water, neither the Martins nor their town, San Luis Obispo, is typical.

Katie, her parents and little brother use roughly half the water on a per-person basis as the average single-family household in Los Angeles used last year.

“The community is just like that,” Martin said.

As climate change, environmental constraints and growth continue to tighten the valve on California’s water supplies, the rest of the state is going to be more like that too. Not just during droughts but all the time.

The reason is simple. Compared to building new reservoirs, recycling or seawater desalination, conservation is one of the cheapest, quickest and least environmentally damaging ways for the state to get more water.

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