A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 41

41st of a series

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

- Norman Maclean

Meredith Sadler designed and drafted the figure.

This image, which appeared in the second post of this series, was originally published in Waterkeeper magazine. It was part of an article by Bern Sweeney and me, much of which I will reproduce in this and the next post. In it, we tried to come up with a formula for allocating a river’s goods and services equitably and sustainably among its diverse users. By equitably, we mean that one person’s use of the river does not impair it for the use of others. By sustainably, we mean that we leave to future generations a river that is in the same or better condition than the one we inherited. 

Our premise is that, while almost everybody wants clean water, healthy wetlands, and unpolluted rivers, we depend on economies that have long despoiled all three. To stop, or even slow, the decline is really hard, but it pales in comparison to restoring a river to its more pristine past. At the core of the matter are its many human constituents, who resist cleaning up the messes they and their predecessors have made. For them, the commons is not a public trust. It is a public trough.

The result? Almost half of America’s streams and rivers are in poor condition, particularly the smaller watersheds that provide over 70 percent of the nation’s water. The cause, of course, is us. For centuries people have dammed and removed more water than our rivers can replenish and disposed of more waste, toxins, and detritus than they can process. No worries, we said, for everything goes downstream – until we discovered that everyone also lives downstream.

In Meredith Sadler’s image, you can see our efforts to identify a river’s primary consumers and polluters. It should not be surprising that the biggest consumers and polluters are also the most powerful players in the watershed. Way down at the bottom of the graphic are the passive users, who come to a river simply to enjoy its beauty and the peace it offers.

The significant improvements to stream health that came in the wake of the 1972 Clean Water Act confirm that, while watershed restoration is expensive and time-consuming, it can be done. The time has come to begin paying down the staggering debt we are leaving our children and our children’s children. To do that, we need a plan that is fair, sustainable, and enforceable, one that is grounded in science and economics, honors a river’s intangible qualities, and seeks to build partnerships among all the interests in the watershed.

The first step is for scientists to determine the scope of the problem, calculate the impacts of the various uses on a river’s ecosystem, and design a plan to return the nation’s watersheds to a healthy state. These days scientists can assess the damage to a watershed over time, isolate many of its causes, and suggest better practices going forward. The accelerating evolution of technology, which in the past was too often used to enable more efficient (and destructive) ways to extract and pollute water, has recently made possible cleaner technologies and innovative practices that cause less environmental damage, even as they improve the user’s bottom line. 

The second step is for economists to determine the total costs, which, needless to say, will be a very large number. But the costs of doing nothing are greater. It’s time to move beyond making minor changes to our lifestyles, hoping for a technological miracle, and kicking the can downstream. Indeed, if users had historically paid the real costs of using water, it would now be clean. 

The third step is to devise a system for fairly allocating those costs – with the ultimate goal being to ensure the health of our rivers and watersheds and to protect the communities and economies that depend on them.

Next post we’ll see if that is even possible.