- May 31, 2016
- 9:13 am
- Raymond Benton Jr
- no comments
Water Wars
As is usually the case, Donald Trump is in the news. He just told Californians that there is no draught; there is plenty of water. You can read and read about Trump’s comment, if you haven’t already, on Breitbart News (a conservative view) or on ThinkProgress (a progressive view) here, on the ABC news (mainstream view) here, or on the San Francisco Chronicle’s webpage here.
Is there a drought in California? Sure there is, and a severe one. With that all agree. Is there plenty of water? That is another question. Notice how Trump conflates the two: there is no drought (the drought issue); there is plenty of water (a water shortage issue).
We wouldn’t care (so much) about the drought if it didn’t lead to water shortage. So what is causing the water shortage? Sure, the drought is part of it. No point in denying it. But there may be other things going on as well. Forbes opines that it is a pricing problem, and most certainly is – in part. It could be caused (in part) by the State of California, as Trump said, “shoving it [the water] out to sea” to save “a certain kind of three inch fish.” (That three inch fish is the endangered Delta Smelt.) Others argue that California has failed to invest in either water storage and desalination.
Solutions are easy! Price it right, stop shoving it out to sea, or invest in new infrastructure. Or do all three! All easy enough, right?
Let me shift locations. Let’s take a look at what is going on in the west, on the Front Range of Colorado. The Front Range is that part of Colorado immediately east of the mountains. It is where Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, Thornton, Longmont, Loveland, Greely, Ault, and Ft. Collins are located. From each of these towns and cities it is at most thirty minutes to the mountains.
On Saturday, May 28th, NPR’s All Things Considered broadcast an episode they called “In Colorado, Farmers and Cities Battle Over Water Rights” (listen to it here). The story focuses on the city of Thornton, a growing suburb of Denver, and the farming town of Ault, a little north of Greeley. Take a listen. It is only five minutes.
Thornton is facing a huge water shortage problem. So what are they doing to address the problem? Some background. Eighty percent of the water in the State of Colorado is used in agriculture. Colorado water law is such that those that where there first have first right (called senior rights) to the water. Some of those farmers and ranchers have been there for three and sometimes four generations. Shucks, there might even be a fifth generation someplace. (If I were there now, I would be a third generation native. I was born there, my dad was born there, and my paternal grand mother was born there – the story goes that she was born in a tent on the banks of the Cherry Creek River as it flows through Denver). Some of those farms and ranches have stayed in the family all those years. They have senior water rights. The people moving to Thornton are new comers. They have hardly any water rights at all. That is, unless …
Unless the City of Thornton, under an assumed name, goes to, say, Ault and buys a farm. When you buy a farm you also buy the farm’s water rights. That is what, over the years, has been happening. Thornton goes to town, buys up a bunch of farms (under an assumed name) and then permits the farmers stay and farm the land (paying rent, of course) if they want. The City of Thornton, because it is a municipality, does not pay property taxes to Ault, so from that perspective Ault is struggling. All that tax base just evaporates. (To be fair, Thornton is paying a voluntary amount to Ault for the lost taxes.) But there is more to the story. Thornton, who now owns the water rights, ships the water off to Thornton so the newcomers can water their lawns (and drink it and bathe in it). The farmers in Ault, the old-timers, those that have been permitted to stay and farm after selling it, find it very difficult to farm on a high altitude desert without water (that is what eastern Colorado is – a high altitude desert). It is so common and widespread a practice that it has a name: Buy and Dry. Listen to the broadcast. You will learn a lot.
On Saturday’s All Things Considered, the Thornton—Ault story was followed by another one. This one was part of NPR’s Going There series. NPR’s Michel Martin traveled to Fort Collins and to Colorado State University where she hosted a live “storytelling” event about owning water and dealing with a future where water may be scarce – very scarce. You can listen to what was radio broadcast on All Things Considered or watch the video recording of the entire The Future of Water program.
Audio of the Future of Water (8:06 minutes)
Watch the full program here (1:30:26 minutes)
Water is a looming problem. There are water issues everywhere in the world. Sitting as we do in Chicago, next to a really big body of fresh water (Lake Michigan), we appreciate neither the water nor the impending water crisis.
Thinking about this over the Memorial Day Weekend brought me back to a few years ago, to a student group presentation in a marketing class.
I sat in a class presentations. The undergraduate students were presenting marketing plans for new product ideas. The particular presentation I am thinking about was not a water conservation product. It was a new products that would improve the consumer’s “shower experience” by shooting water at the bather from all directions: top, front, back, both sides, and maybe from the bottom, too. A total immersion in water. Sort of a standing bath. You could take a bath standing up.
When it came time to ask the student presenters questions, I asked if they had considered the impending global water crisis in any of their deliberations before coming up with this “new shower experience” idea. Their response was simply, “What water crisis?”
It is a shame that was there response. By that time there was already plenty to read and to study about a global water problem that could (very easily) turn into water wars. All of the following had already been out for years before they embarked on this class project. The students not only could have known, but they should have known about it.
An early non-fiction book on the issue, still worth reading, was Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (2005) by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke. This was followed by Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (2007), and by Maude Barlow’s Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (2009).
Tired of reading? A World without Water, a UK production, was released in 2006 (1:20:00). This was followed, in 2008, by a television series by the same title, focusing on droughts in Florida, China, and Nevada. Blue Gold, a documentary based on the book, came out in 2008 (1:30:00). A year later the documentary Tapped was released (2009). Bottled Life: Nestle’s Business with Water (2012). There is more. Much more. It isn’t all that hard to find.
I will end with a comment made during NPR’s The Future of Water by Patty Limerick, a professor of environmental studies at Colorado State and the new Colorado State Historian. She said this about the future of water in Colorado: “As soon as you get a simple position it means you haven’t thought enough.”
The solutions are not easy and political one-liners are not what we need, from whichever direction they come. We need more conversations where people sit down and tell their stories, and grapple with the issue by not only telling but by listening, too. Perhaps most important is listening.