In 2014, a teenage idiot was caught taking a leak in an urban reservoir in Portland, Oregon. The diluted pee was no health threat; the reservoir is open air, and birds shit and piss in it daily. But the city made a decision, seemingly fit for a Portlandia sketch, to treat the reservoir as a ginormous urinal, flushing all 38 million gallons, before refilling the bowl.

I was raised in arid California, where water conservation is a form of morality. As a then-recent transplant to the rain-drenched Pacific Northwest, witnessing this preposterous...