Revenue Streams - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 118

CHAPTER 13
Revenue Streams
As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this con-
stant meditation upon where water is, of an obsessive interest not in the polit-
ics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through
aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and
drains, in plumbing on the grand scale.
—Joan Didion, “Holy Water,” The White Album
THE JOYS AND SORROWS OF CONVEYANCE
In America, theWestrefers to those states west of the hundredth meridian of longitude.
Heading south from the Canadian border, the hundredth meridian cuts through North
Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. To the east of that line,
average annual precipitation is over twenty inches, and crops don't usually require irrig-
ation. To the west, the land is mostly arid, and irrigation is essential.
In its water laws , the United States has long existed as two separate nations. Because
water is mobile, varies in supply and location, and can be used in different ways (hydro-
power, irrigation, or recreation), it is notoriously difficult to regulate. Most Eastern states
employ riparian (“along the bank of a river”) water rights, based on British common law,
while many Western states rely on the right of prior appropriation, based on Spanish pre-
cedent, with roots in Latin law. Each state uses its own variation of these basic principles,
and some, such as California, use elements of both systems.
In the East, riparian rights permit the use of water found on, beneath, or next to a
property. The rights cannot be sold or transferred except to a neighboring property; the
water cannot be transferred out of the watershed; and the use of the water must be “reas-
onable.” The latter is a notoriously imprecise term. What is reasonable depends on many
factors, including how much precipitation has fallen, how quickly aquifers refill, or the
opinions of other water rights holders. The decision about who gets to use how much
water is usually judged by a court, unless a state creates a regulatory agency to determine
the “reasonableness” of the water use. (Many Western states claim ownership of ground-
water and allocate it through a system of appropriations.)