Kentucky has owned the Ohio River since 1792. Michigan and Ohio almost went to war over ownership of the Great Black Swamp and I have a friend in Florida who owns the underwater part of a canal but can’t build on it but still has to pay taxes on it. Land ownership is really weird sometimes.
KidHorn
2 years ago
Near where I live sits the Potomac river which separates Maryland and Virginia. For some reason Maryland owns the river. They have frequent disputes whenever Virginia tries to divert water for their purposes. The Potomac is never in danger of drying up. The whole thing is stupid.
thimk
2 years ago
well California could produce supplemental fresh water via desalinization plants . oh i forgot , this process requires a lot of energy .
Anyways here’s a Desal article that describes this booming business . And, oh ya, the process produces waste . Maybe the wastes contain rare earths. Maybe we can uses the keystone pipeline to transport water from Canada ? Partial /s
Illustrates how complex are notions of property, ownership, and property rights.
These are non-trivial concepts which largely define civilizations but are commonly taken for granted as self-evident.
RonJ
2 years ago
I don’t know how many households it serves, but Orange County, Ca. has a toilet to tap facility, which recycles waste water back into potable water. It seems there should be more of this kind of facility around here.
A lot of the rain that falls on Los Angeles, goes right down the L.A. river, past Warner Bros. and Universal Studios, out to Los Angles harbor. It becomes a wasted resource. Just now, on the local news, is the government asking us to cut water consumption by 15%.
Doug78
2 years ago
Much of the East has gone back to forest from farmland. When the West can no longer grow crops for lack of water the valuable farmland will be there where irrigation is not necessary. With less agriculture the West could easily support higher populations since agriculture takes up 80% of the water resources. They can keep their beautiful scenery and quality of life but will have to import all their food.
A lot of what’s grown in California can’t be grown in the east. Plants can’t take freezing temps and/or need a lot of sunlight to produce and/or will have fungus problems if the leaves get wet.
That holds true for the almonds, pistachios, walnuts and grapes but everything else can be grown in the East. California has a great Mediterranean climate but if the water isn’t there any longer what can you do?
Almonds are a stupid water intensive crop. Asparagus, rice, alfalfa as well. CA needs to limit almond production-and all the non-dairy people just need to drink milk or some other calcium enriched product.
As global warming accelerates, things will get worse. The most precious resource that nations and people would fight over in this century will not be gold or oil or land. It will be water.
But we can’t say we weren’t warned about it. Can we?
Here, we’ve been watching this develop for more than 70 years. Too many people moving to a semi-arid climate that never had more than one really wet year in ten. Too many straws dropped into the aquifer for another sip. As early as 1960, writers like John Graves were writing about the “dry line” in Texas, which is the 100th meridian of longitude, which splits the state right down the middle.
Even before climate change, it took irrigation to make agriculture flourish to the west of the dry line.
Texas has what it known as “right of capture” which is the stupidest of all, as far as water rights. If it’s under your land, you can pump it. There are some very sad cases, such as the draining of Comanche Springs in Ft. Stockton….although as the article linked below points out, it might be coming back.
I’d point out that this article is politically sanitized. The truth is that the guy who drained Comanche Springs knew exactly what he was doing, and his son coincidentally later became governor of Texas.
Correction. Clayton Williams got the Republican nomination for Texas Governor in 1990, but lost to Anne Richards in what has to be considered a rare win for the good guys. In Texas today, he would win if he were alive and still running. He died last year.
Very interesting story. Even though I lived in Texas for a decade I never knew that rule about how water ownership works (then again living in a city, I wouldn’t have owned water anyway. LOL).
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link to nytimes.com