And wouldn't that be a nightmare? To redraw state lines? Here's a look at one attempt back in the late 1800s to determine state borders in the west:[In the eastern US, f]racking and strip-mining pollute freshwater supplies. Cities and counties refuse to build infrastructure for freshwater delivery to some communities, especially poor and Black communities. Aging and ill-maintained infrastructure means that in Flint, just a stone’s throw away from some of the largest freshwater resources in the world, people are being poisoned. And at the same time, eastern water companies have been squeezing poor and especially Black residents with ever-rising water bills and ever-intensifying enforcement methods, including foreclosing on people’s homes when they can’t afford to pay for their water. But these are all management and delivery problems. The water is there, it’s just a matter of getting it delivered to people in a safe, affordable, and non-discriminatory way.
The west is a different story altogether. And if we can’t manage to solve the problem of safe and affordable water in places where water is plentiful, you can imagine the problems that arise when real scarcity is involved. Water history in the west is a full-service crash-course in all of 19th- and 20th-century American capitalism’s very worst tendencies. We encountered a scarce and necessary resource, understood exactly how scarce and necessary it was, then proceeded to kill each other for the chance to turn as much of it as possible into profit before all of it was gone. Now, in 2019, it’s mostly all gone and the west is burning.
[...]
[B]y the 1870s, westward expansion was in full swing. [...] Areas that were once labeled “Great Desert” were increasingly re-dubbed “Great Plains,” and throughout the 1870s, (paid) scientists were pushing some absolutely insane theories to encourage people to move west. The most absurd of these may have been the “rain follows the plow” theory. Think Field of Dreams, but for farming. The idea was that once people started farming in dry regions, rain would naturally come. When you plowed soil, even very bad and seemingly un-arable soil, the plowing would just automatically release trapped moisture into the atmosphere. This was, of course, nonsense. At heart, the “great plains” and “rain follows the plow” were marketing slogans, an early instance of real estate developers rebranding a previously undesirable area to turn a profit.
[...]
The Homestead Acts were granting western lands (to people but also to corporations, and with very high rates of fraud) in 160-acre tracts. This tract size made sense in the east where irrigation wasn’t necessary. But 160 acres was too large a tract to productively irrigate, and too small a tract to use as unirrigated land in the west.
[...]
In the early- and mid-20th century, the U.S. embarked on an epic dam-building spree. But much of this building was driven less by need for water storage and electrical power than by competition for funding between two giant federal bureaucracies. Marc Reisner’s exhaustive and surprisingly thrilling retelling of the battle between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers in Cadillac Desert is the authoritative history on this point. Reisner documents decades through which the agencies battled to outmaneuver each other, spending billions to build thousands of dams just to make sure the other agency didn’t build them first.
[...]
The beneficiaries of the dam-building extravaganza were largely agricultural interests in the surrounding areas. More dams than could possibly be justified meant relatively large water stores. A combination of the mythology around small American farmers and the reality of agribusiness lobbying power meant that agricultural interests could reap direct benefits from these federal projects, mostly through heavily subsidized water, power prices, and food control.
[...]
Most of the west now uses a prior appropriation system for allocating water rights rather than a riparian system. This means that water rights are divorced from land ownership: Anyone who can access water can make a claim to it, and those claims operate on a first come, first served basis. So if water sources dry up, the senior rights holders are the most protected, while newer users are left out to dry, both figuratively and literally.
Like dams, this is not an unreasonable system on its own. But it has combined with crafty capital and legal maneuvering to disastrous effect. First, to hold your water right, you have to use it. This means that nearly all water is going to get used, because there’s no formal protection (in the system as first conceived—things are slightly better now) for letting water run its natural course. Throughout the west, water systems have seen the complete loss of native wildlife populations and increasingly compromised water supplies, as water is taken out of rivers to irrigate land and returned to the water system in lower quantities and with higher salt content.
Second, water rights can be purchased and the water diverted far away. This is what allowed someone like William Mulholland in Los Angeles to buy up the entire Owens River and divert it to the San Fernando Valley, turning the Owens River Valley from “the Switzerland of California” into a desert, drying up Owens Lake, and massively increasing the value of Mulholland’s own properties in San Fernando. The battles over the Owens River [...] involve spies within the Bureau of Reclamation, lies and grift and outright theft to obtain water rights, locals dynamiting the L.A. aqueduct, and Mulholland mustering an army of 600 gun-toting LAPD officers and transporting them hundreds of miles inland to protect his waterways.
[...]
Massive underground aquifers underlie much of the U.S., and the western states have managed to produce agriculture [...] thanks to the use of that groundwater. The problem, of course, is that groundwater is largely a non-renewable resource. Depending on the type of aquifer, it might recharge slowly or not at all. And the coastal aquifers, like the one underlying Santa Barbara, are at risk of seawater intrusion if they’re drawn down too low.
And have we managed this non-renewable resource in a reasonable way to preserve it for as long as possible? Spoiler: We have not. In fact, officials in charge of regulating groundwater have always been well aware that it was a non-renewable resource, and decided to exhaust it anyway. The former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board described their decision to use the state’s groundwater supply over the course of 25 to 50 years like this: “ [...] Well, when we use it up, we’ll just have to get more water from somewhere else.” The New Mexico State Engineer openly admitted the same: “We made a conscious decision to mine out our share of the Oglalla (aquifer) in a period of twenty-five to forty years.”
[...]
California is a particularly depressing example of harm wrought by greedy water policies. Groundwater extraction in California has been largely unregulated for most of its history, and as a result the central valley of the state is literally sinking. The entire valley is estimated to have sunk more than 28 feet since the 1920s, with some regions having sunk much more than that.
Some of the largest groundwater extractors in California these days are not even farmers—they’re oil companies. California droughts result in severe restrictions imposed by municipal water departments, which levy steep fines against people for overusing water at home. Meanwhile, 80 percent of water use in California continues to come from agriculture and big business.
The brazenness of these government subsidies to agribusiness is particularly apparent in the Yuma desalination plant. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed after the Mexican-American War, guarantees Mexico a certain volume of water from the Colorado River. But massive agriculture in the U.S. portion of the Colorado watershed meant that the water we were sending to Mexico was too salty to use for irrigation and was actually destroying crops. As a result, the U.S. built the Yuma desalination plant to purify water as it crosses the border into Mexico. Running this desal plant costs nearly $500 per acre-foot of water, and we use this plant to clean millions of acre-feet. But many of the upstream agricultural users, the ones who are responsible for the salt content in the water in the first place, pay less than $5 per acre-foot. [...] Meanwhile, residential users in San Francisco pay the equivalent of $773 per acre-foot, plus a monthly service charge.
[...]
The thing about political boundaries is that they have historically served military purposes. The border of my territory is as far as my army can reasonably reach, as affected by how far your army can reasonably reach. In practice, this meant borders often conformed to geographic features like mountain ranges and rivers. It’s hard for me to cross the river to attack you, and it’s hard for you to cross the river to attack me, so the river is our border. In the U.S., we have continued to use geographic features like rivers as internal borders. There does not appear to be a logic behind this other than it’s a way people have always drawn borders.
[...]
[N]either [...] doing what we’ve always done with rivers and mountains, or drawing easy straight lines [...] do much to help the actual function of the political bodies that operate within those borders.
[...]
In fact, rivers make particularly poor borders between states because a primary purpose of our union is to facilitate interstate commerce, and rivers are natural barriers. But, more importantly, rivers are an important natural resource, especially in the west. And rivers don’t respect borders. This is why California, Nevada, and Arizona have to continuously negotiate and update a giant contract about how much of the Colorado River each of them gets to use. It’s why the U.S. and Mexico have to negotiate and re-negotiate agreements about how much of the Colorado will flow into Mexico and what its salinity will be. And it’s why the longest continuous litigation in the U.S. legal system is an attempt to determine who has rights to use water in [the Gila] river.
[...]
States or even local jurisdictions could avoid a lot of conflict and unnecessary bureaucratic wrangling if they simply drew their jurisdictional lines by watershed [...] . Watersheds, you may remember from a life science class at some point, are areas in which all runoff water ends up in the same place. Every river, stream, lake, and puddle has a watershed. The continental divide splits the Pacific’s North American watershed from those of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. If you pour some water on the ground, and that water eventually ends up in a river, you are in that river’s watershed. Because of gravity, watersheds tend to consist of valleys or basins, with the edges running along ridges.
When your border is a river, as between California and Arizona, you have the exact opposite of a watershed border. Both states contribute to the health of the river, and both will often fight, politically and sometimes physically, to use as much of its water as they can. If a state is part of a river’s watershed but has no access to that river, its residents have little incentive to keep the river healthy and might be more inclined to pollute, since someone else will bear the cost. A system of political boundaries based on watersheds, in addition to avoiding conflict, would allow states to more consistently regulate and protect their surface and groundwater resources.
Obviously, not every river, stream, and puddle in the U.S. should have its own state. And there are likely logical divisions for the same river, like the upper and lower basins of the Colorado, to avoid very large rivers with huge watersheds spawning super states.
Current Affairs
Sadly, no democratic apportionment of water is going to happen in this country. Water will sooner be privatized, and good luck to the poor.[The early] vision was a locally and efficiently managed water system, one that took into account the peculiarities of each watershed and river system, allowing those most immediately affected to decide how the resources should be allocated. The system that we ended up with [...] is just the opposite in philosophy and practice: The federal government spends billions on top-down projects motivated by pointless rivalries or desire to grant corporate subsidies, while domestic uses and the environment pay the price.
Fresh water is a precious and scarce resource, especially in the west. It’s the sort of thing that demands the most democratic control, but has historically been subject to the least. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Droughts in the west are becoming more frequent and last longer. [...] To say that the freshwater status quo in the west is unsustainable would be an understatement. Democratizing water is a big project—much bigger than redrawing some political boundaries. We have to enact a massive shift in power and control from capital to local people and political organizations. But watershed borders would probably be a good start.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment