A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 6

Sixth in a series

“Whisky is for drinkin’; water is for fightin’ over.”
- Mark Twain (reputedly)

Who Owns Water?

We will spend some time on this question in this series. Rivers and their waters have been the source of conflict throughout human history, and nations and states have devised all kinds of treaties, agreements, rights, and regulations to protect and allocate what they see as “their” waters. Too often, though, the matter comes down to one word: power.

Consider who owns these waters:

The Golan Heights

In 1967 and again in 1973, Israel and various Arab States fought major wars over the Golan Heights. This was hardly new: Israelis and the people of Aram were fighting over Golan in the Old Testament.

Much is made of the Golan Heights’ strategic military value as the high ground in the region, but its even greater value lies in the fact that it feeds both the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee and is a major source of fresh water for Israel.

The Colorado River

The Colorado River begins in the Never Summer Mountains, flows southwest through Colorado and Utah, and enters Arizona, where it turns west through the Grand Canyon and on to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.

There it turns south and flows along the Nevada and California border until it trickles into Mexico and ends its 1,450-mile journey in the Gulf of California. At least it used to. The river, which provides water to 40 million people and makes possible some of the most productive farmland in the world, rarely gets to the Gulf. The allocation of its water to seven US and two Mexican states involves a complicated set of calculations first laid out by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. There is no longer enough water to go around, and the Colorado has been called “a river in crisis” . . . if you can call something a crisis that we have seen coming for more than 60 years.

The Amazon

The Amazon is the world’s largest river, annually sending into the Atlantic Ocean about 20 percent of the world’s total freshwater discharges. Although two-thirds of the Amazon is in Brazil, the river begins in Peru and also flows through Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

Its drainage basin is the size of Australia, and it is so critical to the planet’s climate as to be a global resource. But governmental, corporate, and private encouragement of agriculture, oil drilling, road development, population growth – all accomplished primarily through deforestation (and of course corruption) – are destroying the forest at exponential rates. Is it too late to slow or reverse the damage? Can the basin be protected? If so, how? If not, then what?

The Nile

“From its headwaters in Ethiopia and the central African highlands to the downstream regional superpower Egypt, the Nile flows through 10 nations,” writes Fred Pearce. “But by a quirk of British colonial history, only Egypt and its neighbor Sudan have any rights to its water.

“That is something the upstream African nations say they can no longer accept. Yet as the nations of the Nile bicker over its future, nobody is speaking up for the river itself — for the ecosystems that depend on it, or for the physical processes on which its future as a life-giving resource in the world’s largest desert depends. The danger is that efforts to stave off water wars may lead to engineers trying to squeeze yet more water from the river — and doing the Nile still more harm. What is at risk here is not only the Nile, but also the largest wetland in Africa and one of the largest tropical wetlands in the world — the wildlife-rich Sudd.” And to its upstream neighbors, Egypt has made it as clear as the headwaters of the Blue Nile that it will destroy any efforts to impede the river’s flow.

The Tigris and the Euphrates

“The massive Ilisu Dam under construction in Turkey,” said Ulrich Eichelmann of Riverwatch, ‘is an infrastructure project with a 1950s mindset: big, bigger, as big as possible.’. . .[E]xperts say the [dam’s] impacts will be felt hundreds of miles downstream across large parts of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, which includes Syria, Iraq, and Iran, exacerbating water shortages that will affect irrigation, biodiversity, fishing, drinking water, and transportation

‘But in a political context in which water is power, Turkey is not budging on its prerogative to dam ‘its rivers.’

“‘Turkey sees itself as completely sovereign in the management of its rivers and basically does whatever it wants, in terms of damming and discharging pollution,’ said Nicolas Bremer, author of a book on Turkey’s dams. ‘Turkey refuses to be bound by the international treaties and laws that exist.’” Paul Hockenos

New York City

The water that supplies the people of New York City with some of the world’s cleanest drinking water starts over 100 miles away in upstate streams, which then flow through tunnels into huge reservoirs on land the city acquired mostly between 1905 and 1967.

At the bottom of the reservoirs lie the remnants of 25 communities, which were condemned through the process of eminent domain and required the relocation of more than 5,000 people. Tensions between the upstate communities and the city have festered for years, primarily because New York grew to astonishing wealth and power despite a serious dearth of onsite water. Almost all the city’s water is delivered without the need for exorbitantly expensive filtration, which is a consequence of its unending efforts to protect the reservoirs from contamination and pollution. That has caused great conflict in the upstate watersheds, as New York City, perhaps the most urban and developed place on Earth, has for years used its economic power to preserve the rural nature of a poor region that is desperate for economic growth.