A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 29

29th of a series

Wasting water

“If you save one drop of water, you’ve saved the world.”
- Pete Seeger

On August 5, 2018, then-President Donald Trump tweeted: “Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Can be used for fire, farming and everything else. Think of California with plenty of Water. Nice! Fast Federal govt. approval.” That Tweet, said Brown, “doesn't merit a response." LeRoy Westerling, who studies wildfires and climatology, wrote that Trump’s tweet “boggles the mind,” noting that the real culprit is the huge moisture loss caused by climate change.

Several weeks ago, we began this series with a discussion of the Colorado River, which has not flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. This is pretty universally considered a problem of some magnitude. But in Trump’s worldview, this is perfect river management – the Colorado isn’t wasting a single drop. In fact, not only does the river not make it to the Sea of Cortez, it generally peters out before it even gets to the border, leaving Mexico with a dry bed and the polluted dregs of its 1,500-mile journey. Surely, in Trump’s mind, this is an added benefit. After all, why should Mexico be entitled to our water?

All this is a bit hard to square with American Rivers’ designation of the Colorado as the most endangered river in the United States. It is, the organization declared, “on the brink of collapse.”

What’s at issue here is the definition of “wasting water”. Particularly in the East, where water was historically plentiful, we have associated waste with overconsumption, and so we take steps to cut back, from turning off the tap while brushing our teeth to installing meters to encourage conservation. In the West by contrast, where water has always been scarce, waste is allowing even a single drop to escape to the ocean. One side focuses on the efficient use of water to protect its sources, both for ourselves and for the ecosystem. The other believes that water unused is water wasted.

The plight of the Colorado, and almost all of the world’s rivers, demonstrates the utter folly of the latter approach. We know – or at least, we should – “the importance of natural flow for ecosystems.”

But don’t take my word for it. Read what Jacob Dreyer, a native of Muynak, Uzbekistan, wrote last November in The New York Times:

“Walking toward the shrinking remnants of what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was like entering hell. . . .[as] over the decades, Soviet authorities diverted rivers that flowed into the sea to irrigate cotton and other crops. The world’s fourth-largest inland body of water – which covered an area about 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan – gradually shrank, triggering a domino effect of ecological, economic and community collapse, the kind of catastrophe that could befall other environmentally fragile parts of the world unless we change our ways.”