Water, Water Everywhere? Sustaining Scarce Resources in the Desert

By Randall Amster, Huffington Post. Posted March 10, 2009.

Our common law legal system actually once knew this, going back to Blackstone's 1766 treatise on the laws of England that later helped form the basis of our legal system:

"There are some few things which, notwithstanding the general introduction and continuance of property, must still unavoidably remain in common, being such wherein nothing but an usufructuary property is capable of being had. . . . Water is a moveable, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue common by the law of nature; so that I can only have a temporary, transient, usufructuary property therein."

In plain English, Blackstone observed that water could only be used but never owned as property. American frontier law turned this on its head through the doctrine of "prior appropriation" (sometimes colloquially understood as "first in time, first in right") but conveniently ignored the rights of native peoples who were unquestionably here first. In the end, like the frontier itself, water was given property status of a sort, and we're still living with the disastrous implications today.

In the face of these concerns, there's a great need for the articulation of alternative models of resource allocation that don't necessitate militarism and subjugation. With scarce supplies of essentials running down, and with the global economy plainly unable to deliver on its false promise of universal prosperity, we come to realize that the bedrock Western belief in the "tragedy of the commons" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that it is precisely the privatization of the shared wealth of humanity that has led to degradation and inequality. Education and conservation are crucial in turning this downward spiral around, and yet at times the tendency to focus on much-needed macroscopic solutions often misses important lessons from local initiatives.

In this regard stand numerous examples around the world of people and communities who still manage scarce resources collectively and sustainably. Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great "common pool resource" systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself. In this model, water is viewed as sacred and not subject to private ownership. Instead, local communities manage the resource together through a collective self-governance system whereby everyone using the water gets what they need and also contributes their labor to maintain the entire operation. A non-authoritarian "mayordomo" administers the resource equitably, resolves conflicts, and guards the overall integrity of the structure before passing the baton to someone else and rotating the role of facilitator.

This is a low-tech solution to a complex modern problem. Water is moved through ditches and channels, and everyone takes only as much as they need. It works because, over time, people engaged in such an enterprise come to see themselves as interconnected with their neighbors in a meaningful way, so that their own prosperity is bound up with that of their fellow community members. Mutual interdependence replaces corporate dependence, and in a feat of old-school sustainability, people in the southwest have been cultivating this way of life for a few hundred years.

If relatively poor people confronted with extreme scarcity in arid regions can create a stable, collective, and nonhierarchical common pool system, then certainly we can find ways to do so as well with all of the tools at our disposal. It's more than just a matter of wishful thinking or utopian longing; our very survival may well be at stake. Progress might have its virtues, but sometimes the solutions we seek are already at hand and in fact have been in practice for a long time. Indeed, the answers aren't just blowin' in the wind -- they might be flowin' in the water as well.

See more stories tagged with: water, water privatization, water scarcity, water shortage, acequias

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