Before I get back to sustainable food systems, a post on how we enclosed water. It’s not as though it falls from the sky. (I think I hear lots of groans 😊.) Looking at the Earth from space we see a shining blue planet with vast ice fields and major cloud systems. Water is one of the most abundant resources on the planet, which accounts for all the wonderous green that can be seen on the land. Yet this absolutely incredible resource that is essential to life and knows no boundaries as it flows and cycles around the planet has been commodified. Ponder if you will that half of the portable water (that which we can use and drink safely) is now too polluted to use. The vast oceans that have been a dumping ground for centuries are also the lowest point in which ALL the surface water flows into, thereby increasing the pollution continually. Getting fresh clean water, even in areas where rain and snow fall frequently, can be a challenge as there are multi-factorial occurrences that contaminate the water. With so many people on the planet and so much need for water to maintain not only life but lifestyles, it is amazing how such a vast self-cleaning resource has become enclosed and therefore scarce, and thereby commodifiable. Future wars will be (and in some areas already are) being fought over access to water.
Here in Colorado, the moisture that falls from the sky, as a water manager told me one day, belongs to the water authority of a given area. To use the water in any way without permission is illegal. For instance, to live along a river in a Prior Appropriation Doctrine (PAD) area means you cannot use the water in that river to water your garden or even to drink and wash. You cannot commodify water that actually falls since the global precipitation patterns cannot be controlled (yet – that’s another story down the ribbit hole), but you can commodify it once it has landed on the ground and has run off into ditches and lakes. (They haven’t figured out how to charge you for water landing on your garden but give them time – I’m sure they will figure that out when good quality water is really scarce.)
At this time int the MDCs, the density of people in towns and cities and the number of times water has to be reused from a river source, or aquifer, means the water has to be treated before use and then after use. The days when one could simply drink from a source is long gone. If it isn’t the pollution, it will be the fecal contamination, or some other form of pollution that spoils the water. I have a friend who got Giardia when drinking water from a mountain spring at 12,000ft in a wilderness area. While you do not get charged for using water from a wild area stream, you still have to treat it – hence there is a cost involved. The LDCs usually do not have the sophisticated treatments we take for granted, but their water is typically as polluted if not more than in the MDCs. That’s a whole topic in itself, so back to PAD.
While the PAD has its origins in the California Gold fields of the 1850s, it is a good example of how a natural resource that was free became a managed commercial resource – an enclosure of a commons. Farming resources that have adequate rainfall account for about 15% of the worlds crop areas. The rest are marginal agricultural lands in which rainfall is less than needed. So water irrigation techniques have to be used. A short story will emphasize why we have PAD. In 1870, Union Colony became one of the first agricultural communities established in what is now Greeley, Colorado. Immediately the farmers recognized that they need to bring water from the Poudre River through large irrigation ditches to water the crops. There was no one else using the river so it worked fine until 1874, when 30 miles upstream the Fort Collins Agricultural Colony started diverting the Poudre River through their own newly constructed ditch thereby leaving little for the Union Colony to siphon off. As you might guess, the Union Colony farmers were not happy and a short water war ensued. The army post at Fort Collins interceded and it was a bunch of lawyers from the Nations capital in DC that came in to find a suitable way to distribute the water. Irrigation commissions determined that a concept of prior appropriation was needed that prioritize the water allocation. The PAD set up that: “the person or irrigation company who first claimed water from a river is the first person to receive the water from the river regardless of need.” Poudre River Heritage.
The water allocation was set each year based on the snow fall in the mountains that would serve as a slow release source as the snow melted each summer keeping the rivers running. However, even that was not enough so intense reservoir construction began to store as much of the Spring runoff as possible for when the snow was diminished by the end of summer, and the period when crops needed more water in the hot summer sun. The river, the reservoirs, and all the ditches had a user hierarchy of who got the water first, then second, then third and so on. A common statement in the region that I was told about was, “You can have my house, my wife, my kids and even my horse, but don’t you dare touch my water rights!” Rainwater barrels were deemed illegal since every drop that fell was already spoken for with the water authority. Stealing water was almost a hanging offense. Today, in the Front Range (where the Great Plains run up against the Rocky Mountains in central Colorado) the use of water has to include all the building development and the growing industrial needs (including that boondoggle called Hydraulic-Fracking) of the region. Pioneer farming families can make a small fortune selling their land and even more selling their water rights to developers so the new homeowners can wash their cars and water their grass lawns whenever they want.
In 1922, the Colorado River Compact was established in which 7 states that utilize the river agreed on usage rules. If you plow through all the shenanigans of policy that has ensued since then you will find that the desperate need for water in the Arid South West states of the USA is far from solved. In 1922, California was the most populace state and took the lion’s share of water to irrigate crop in the central valleys of California. Since then the western states have all grown as have all the cities. The demand is higher now than ever, BUT the 1922 compact was signed during a wet period. The precipitation has been declining since 1922. The fact that the Colorado River actually flows in to Mexico’s Gulf of Baja is all but ignored whenever possible by the U.S. bureaucrats. The Gulf of Baja is (or was) an ecotone – it is a mixed salt water and Fresh water ecosystem. The confines of the gulf create unique species adaptations. Since the western states have been growing rapidly the water form the Colorado River is all spoken for with it being pumped over mountain ranges to California, and uphill to all the major cities of the South West USA. You might ask how much does Mexico get? Nada, Nothing!! Oh, occasionally they run a flush through the river valley but the vast Baja delta is now a desert! Indeed, what is left of the mighty river that flows through the Grand Canyon comes to an ignoble frothy puddle on the other side of the Mexican border! The upper Baja ecotone is now saline most of the time.
Around the world the same story is being played out. The Gulf of Aquba in to which the Jordan river used to empty suffers the same problem. All over the world water is being siphoned off from communities for drinking bottle water by corporate systems, or the water flows are diminishing rapidly for a multitude of reasons. Water is an essential commons that has been controlled for well over 150 years in most places, especially in the MDCs. The complexities of water management will only get worse and the control by the hierarchy more Machiavellian as fresh water becomes ever scarcer. John Wesley Powell, the one-armed U.S. Civil War veteran who explored the western USA and clearly recognized the value of water back in the 1870s. Powell saw that only a small portion of such an arid area could be used for agriculture and maintenance of towns. He proposed that the all the water be controlled by the local peoples within ‘watersheds’ with small dams, not the mega-dams we see today. He foresaw back then that water would be and remain the most important issue of an arid area. Today, the same issue is global and the solutions still as vague and unresolvable while we let the hierarchy and the corporate systems dictate how water is used! Powell warned everyone not to let the water get out of the hands of the local people. Maybe it is time to rethink how we use and control water worldwide.
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