The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is now seeking grant proposals from public water systems and municipalities for (among other things) education programs that help address drinking water losses through local water conservation and education programs. Individual grants can range up to $60,000 with a 25% match.

I’m making two assumptions here: if they want behavior change out of this “education,” then they are amenable to action-oriented social-marketing style campaigns. Also, I’m betting that only public water systems and municipalities in Massachusetts can apply for these grants.

The RFR for the 2009 Water Conservation Grant Program has been posted on the state’s Comm-PASS website (http://www.comm-pass.com/). Click on “Search for Solicitiations”, then enter BRP 2008-03 into the “Keywords” box to find it.

If you have questions, contact Malcolm Harper at Mass DEP at (508) 767-2795 or malcolm dot harper at state.ma.us.

Good luck, applicants.

California’s water woes are the stuff of legend, and environmentalist Mindy McIntyre (California Planning and Conservation League) and bureaucrat Lester Snow (California Department of Water Resources) square off this week in the Los Angeles Times, offering competing visions for how to providing enough clean water to balance the needs of families and wildlife in the state. Two things to keep in mind before I grade their work:

• The LA Times is losing readers and writers faster than the industry as a whole, so this worthy debate won’t have the influence on opinion it would have had five or ten years ago.
• Everyday citizens find these “he said she said” debates to be hard to follow. According to a 2005 Yale University study, more than half of Americans (53%) agree with this statement: “There is so much information and disagreement in the media that I don’t know who to believe about what is best for the environment.”

This second point means that the likely “winner” of this debate will be the one who states their case the most clearly to readers. Now the critiques:

Lester Snow: “Don’t be fooled by the rain — we’re in a water emergency.” C+

Snow uses only a few words that work: “investment” several times, “healthy” once, and “conservation” a few times. He could use a lot more: The whole piece is basically a call for Californians to work together, plan ahead, and… um… build more dams (not your humble blogger’s solution of choice).

Snow makes some word choice mistakes that environmental professionals often make: he uses “climate change” where he could use “global warming,” he uses “water quality” where he could use “clean water” or “enough clean water,” etc… Insisting on using professionally-correct lingo sucks some punch out of his piece.

But I think the biggest mistake Snow makes is structure his piece like a scientific paper: facts first, conclusions last. He should reverse that — Snow should make his point (”We need to work together, plan ahead, and build more dams”) before he provide the facts that prove his point (snowpack, global warming, delta smelt, cfs, hydrology, blah blah blah). As is, many readers will lose interest before he gets to the punchline.

Mindy McIntyre, “Old solutions won’t solve today’s crisis.” B-

McIntyre is also bit sparse with the words that work: “conservation” a few times, “nature” once, and “healthy” a couple of times. She could use a lot more: Her whole piece is basically a call for Californians to work together, plan ahead, and use the water they have more wisely (Your humble blogger prefers this approach).

I give McIntyre bonus points for a pararaph where she writes that some California fish species are facing extinction, rather than writing that they are “endangered.” The term “endangered” is polarizing — your friends love you more, your enemies fear and hate you more. But nobody likes extinction.

McIntyre’s big mistake is venture into economic arguments. She’s not a credible messenger on this point. And if Californians believe that more dams are the only or best way to keep the water flowing, they’ll say “to hell with what it costs.”

I declare McIntyre the winner by a nose here, though. This line is a killer:

We cannot rely on strategies from the past to solve the problems they created and address the water issues of the future.

If she’d opened her piece with this, she’d have knocked Snow out cold. As it is, McIntyre wins the first round but there’s more to come.

Hat tip to the fine Aquafornia blog for spotting the debate.

“If we could just impress upon everybody the magnitude of the crisis, they would rise up and demand that something be done about it!” That seems to be the underlying premise of the film “For the Love of Water,” which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. And every once a while, this premise holds up (see: An Inconvenient Truth).

But more often, this approach does not achieve the desired results, at least not outside a small group of educated, empowered treehugger types. Sometimes it even backfires. And here’s why: As the chart below reveals, everyday citizens pretty much already believe that the state of the planet is getting worse. And piling on the evidence and anecdotes to “prove” it, as the individuals featured in the film do in their interviews, often just ends up “proving” that the problem is too big to do anything about.

You can’t scare people into action unless they know what to do. The Water Words “method” anticipates this in two areas. Rule #4 is to “warn AND encourage” — point out the problem, but always emphasize that there are solutions and that the target audience is part of those solutions.

And when touting solutions, use the water words that work to “prove” to everday citizens that they can make a difference. Sometimes it means telling people what they can do, and using facts and figures to show just how consequential that act really is. And often, that means “proving” to people that they won’t be acting alone, that they’ll be working together with others, and the individual deeds will add up to something meaningful.

Hat tip to Ari for the link to the interview with the experts in the film.

Could a well-run social marketing campaign encourage enough people to work together to conserve water that it could  dent the drought that has put Atlanta’s golf courses and Georgia’s wildlife at such odds?  I believe so, and here are my back-of-the-envelope calculations to back that up:

According to the Atlanta Water Shortage blog, the federales are draining Lake Lanier to the tune of a billion gallons per day, more or less. 

A well-run campaign to perusade hotel guests to reuse their towels conserves 72,000 gallons of water per hotel per year, more or less.

Finally, according to the Google, there are 84,691 hotels in the state of Georgia, more or less.

Assuming those numbers are all somewhere close to accurate, that means if every hotel in Georgia ran a successful campaign to encourage guest to be responsible and conserve water by reusing their towels, it would save six billion gallons of water per year. That’s six days of outflow from the beleagured Lake Lanier. For good measure, it would save a bunch of energy and prevent a bunch of pollution, too.

Of course, we can’t make the drought go away with this penny-ante conservation, but six more days of water in the lake would be nothing to sneeze at.

Everyday citizens are much more willing to be conscientious about little things like reusing their towels when they think that enough other people are doing it that it adds up to something meaningful. Hey, why be the only one to give up a fresh new towel?