Water Wars - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 168

CHAPTER 18
Water Wars
Too often, where we need water, we find guns…. As the global economy grows, so
will its thirst…. Many more conflicts lie over the horizon.
—UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, 2008
RIVER/RIVALS
Closely related to the word river is rival, originally “one who uses the same stream
(or 'one on the opposite side of the stream')” … the notion is of the competitive-
ness of neighbors.
—the Online Etymology Dictionary
The last time one American state took up arms against another was over river water.
In 1934, Arizona governor Benjamin Moeur dispatched National Guardsmen to patrol
the Colorado River on two ferryboats armed with machine guns, dubbed “the Arizona
Navy,” to stop the construction of Parker Dam and the “theft” of river water by California.
In a stirring court case, the US Supreme Court ruled that California had acted illegally
and halted construction of the dam. But the ruling was undone when Congress passed
a retroactive bill legalizing California's water expropriations. This ended the fight, if not
the rancor, over the Colorado, which lingers today.
Although water-sharing agreements—such as the Delaware River Compact , which
the Supreme Court brokered among New York, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania—outnumber conflicts, plenty of states are waging water battles in the
courtroom. Kansas and Nebraska have squared of over billions of gallons of water each
wants from the Republican River. The US Supreme Court has appointed a special mas-
ter to adjudicate Montana's lawsuit that contends Wyoming violated terms of the Yellow-
stone River Compact of 1950 by pumping too much water from aquifers for use in coal-
bed methane drilling. And Texas has warred with Oklahoma over the Kiamichi River.
Sometimes these skirmishes cross national boundaries. The five Great
Lakes—Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario—contain about 90 percent of
the fresh surface water in the United States and approximately one-fifth of the entire