Poaching on the public preserve

...We owe our faltering water system directly to that competitive economy...

...If damming rivers does not meet the perceived "need" for agricultural growth (need primed not by a benevolent desire to feed the world's people, but by an interest in profits and our balance of payments), then agriculture turns to powerful pumps to extract public water out of the ground...

...Inequity is not the only flaw in our economic system that can effectively be demonstrated by reference to our water problems...

...Our fragile network of pipelines and pools was spun in response to the private pressures of particular industries and particular regions indifferent to the common good...

...Hopes that we can solve these crises by legislative mandate ignore the realities of power in our society...

...the river water is so saline by the time it gets to Mexico that the United States is building a desalinization plant to give the Mexican farmers the usable water legally due to them...

...The physical world is not a collection of discrete, removable parts...

...Even if it were politically possible to force water users to pay the full costs of their intervention in the physical world, it is naive to think we could actually count those costs...

...For in a system based, as ours is, on perpetual alteration, we will never "solve" problems—never find a plateau on which we can rest...

...Such uncharitable behavior ought not to come as a surprise...

...Everything is connected with everything else, and a change at any point ripples through the entire system...

...they can always raise the specter of lost jobs and high prices...

...Without an incentive to conserve, farmers didn't...

...In the effort to keep our extractive economy going, we run into physical problems other than resource depletion...

...we lose a half-million acres of farmland that way each year...

...If the groundwater runs out, then inventive engineers begin to consider moving rivers across mountains—at public expense...

...What is more often spread is the cart of producing private wealth...

...A firm which did not take advantage of the chance to pass on costs to the public would soon find itself out of business...

...And the resource crises that throw us off balance come closer and closer together: first energy, now water and minerals...

...Large industries hold over politicians the threat of disrupting the economy if they don't get what they want...

...There's no reason to avoid mining water any more than we avoid mining coal, or copper, or any depletable resources," according to University of Arizona economist William Martin...

...Most of them are located in California and contributed large sums to several members of Congress during the 1980 campaign...

...We will have to keep moving, faster and faster...

...And we will have to discard our pioneer assumption that our land is a blank slate on which we can write the story of the modern Utopia: a natural world re-created and controlled by human beings...

...The difficulty with this approach to the natural world is that it creates a high degree of instability— economic as well as environmental...

...Economically, resources do us no good just lodging in the ground...

...If we constantly extract resources from their natural environment (at ever faster rates since, in our economy, corporations must grow or lose out), we eventually run out of resources to extract...

...Making someone else pay is characteristic of a society which sees itself, as ours does, as a collection of competing private interests, whether those interests are corporations or localities...

...a city which levied taxes high enough to pay for its own cleanup would soon find its citizens and industries moving elsewhere...

...next, possibly, soil, which has washed into the reservoirs we made so we could till it...

...The benefit-cost analyst—as well as the benefit-cost approach—has always been malleable to the wishes of those currently holding positions of power...

...It is the way our economic system demands we use the natural world...

...For years, the Government has given farmers bargain prices on water from tax-financed reservoirs and canals...

...Expecting powerful private interests to give up their public subsidies—or expecting Congress to take away those subsidies—is politically naive...

...In the reservoirs of the Colorado River system, water evaporates and leaves salts and silts behind...

...Carol Polsgrovr and John Buell (Carol Polsgrove and John Buell are associate editors of The Progressive...

...The problems created by that network challenge a key belief in our society: the belief that the production of private wealth will spread the good life across the nation like butter...

...In a new collection of water studies, Western Water Resources, Daniel W. Bromley, a professor in the University of Wisconsin's Department of Agricultural Economics, calls such analysis "a creature of the political process...

...But caught in the quicksand of our own economics, the faster we move, the deeper we'll sink...

...It is getting more and more costly to find new ways to take the environment apart...

...Conservationists blamed their failure on the political clout of huge agribusiness firms that benefit from the cheap Federal water," she wrote...

...Faced with the prospect of shortages, we make no effort, as a rule, to limit consumption or recycle goods...

...If we are to make any real headway toward using water and other resources in ways that will sustain a good life for us all, we will have to remake our basic economic system and the imbalance of power it supports...

...Irrigation builds up salts in farm soils...

...To the industrial capitalist, the natural world is a vast collection of "resources" to be broken up by machines and reconstituted as products to be sold to generate profit to be invested in more machines to extract more resources to be reconstituted in more products to make more profits, and so on...

...If oil wells on land fail to yield "economically recoverable" oil, companies move out to sea, or they get the Government to underwrite synfuel projects...

...The perpetual need to invent new technologies to keep the whole system going may make for exciting sixth-grade history books, but it is not likely to result in a lasting or stable civilization, much less one that offers psychological comfort for its citizens...

...We have used water badly—in ways we cannot sustain—because that is the way we habitually use the natural world...

...Like the farmers, the polluters have simply passed on their costs to citizens elsewhere...

...And if that costs more than conserving, we find someone else to pay the bill or we poach on the public preserve...

...We ought now to be at the point of that recognition...

...Each alteration we make in the physical world results in a usually unforeseen need to make yet another...

...Cost-benefit analysis, touted as the rational way to make decisions, is in fact a blunt instrument, more politically than economically useful...

...Congressional Quarterly writer Kathy Koch, in a recent analysis of water problems, noted the sound defeat during the last Congress of attempts to charge higher prices for irrigation water in the West and force farmers to conserve...

...Typically, because our economic system is based on production, expansion, and consumption, we try to find new supplies...

...For years, cities and factories have dumped their wastes into our rivers and lakes, two-thirds of which are now seriously polluted...