Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 16.2
The West's ubiquitous square-mile grid shows a culture treating unique places as interchangeable units of land.
These conditions shaped attitudes toward the land: an unpredictable adversary in its
existing form, and an unlimited resource if transformed and shipped elsewhere.
Early uses of the Western deserts focused on removable resources: mining, timber, and
large-scale ranching.
5
Local settlements were a limited market; the profit lay in export.
Local use of resources usually fosters a degree of stewardship, but exportation demands
ever-increasing scale, cheap production, and minimal involvement with what today
would be termed “environmental” effects. In sparsely inhabited deserts especially, local
residential interests were too few and far between to balance exportive schemes.
With enough space, early surface interests (ranching and timber) were able to coexist
with subsurface ones (mining and oil drilling), which were small, low-tech, even pick-and-
shovel operations compared to today's massive ventures. The doctrine of “split estate”
gave (and still gives) a miner or oil-wildcatter the ability to override any objections from
surface owners.* When ranches were large and mines or well-fields relatively small, this
system was apparently a workable compromise. This is far from true when the same laws
are applied to modern settlement patterns.
Laws governing that other contentious Western resource—water—also favor commercial
use, giving the first surface-water claimant complete precedence over any subsequent
ones.
†
Unlike Eastern U.S. and European water law, this is not a system that recognizes the
irreducible water needs of residents who must share water to survive. The Western water-
law system puts Roan Creek and Las Vegas in an inevitable fight to the death.
Although it would take several dissertations to fully separate fact from fiction on these
topics, the land-use and water laws that govern all of America's deserts clearly favored
the
removal
of resources; settlements endured despite these laws, rather than with their
protection. Increasing residential numbers and density, industrial-scale extraction
methods, and economic pressure on declining supplies of resources are amplifying this
situation toward an uncertain outcome.
*
This theory, which one expert has referred to as “part of the Balkanization of land-ownership rights,” is
enshrined in the Mining Act of 1872, under which subsurface interests are given utterly dominant rights, and
in practice, get resource without paying significant royalties to the government. Reform was passed in the
House (HR 2262 of 2007 and HR 699, 2008) but defeated in the Senate.
†
See for example http://wwa.colorado.edu/western_water_law/ (accessed August 12, 2011), the University of
Colorado's excellent summary of these issues. Many other websites on the topic are also readily searchable.
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