Enough Water

 

We have enough water, its just going to the wrong places.  It is going to irrigate pastures at 8000 feet, grow cotton in the high desert and rice in the low desert.  It is going to golf courses, playing fields and your front lawn.  It’s going to long showers, teeth brushing and shaving flows.  Why don’t we just grow cows in Texas, cotton in Alabama or rice in Vietnam.  Why don’t we golf off of mats, play ball on Astro turf or xeriscape our front lawns.  Why don’t we take short showers or turn the water off when we shave or brush our teeth.

Because we don’t want to.  We don’t have to.  Push has not come to shove.  The tap has not run dry.  We have not run out, our streams are still flowing, our wells have not run dry, our lakes have not dried up, completely.  Water is cheap, subsidized, we have not had to pay for what our water is worth.   Water flows towards money.  If you have money you have water. There is no need to limit population, immigration or growth, water use, waste or consumption.  Water keeps flowing.  

It is not quiet a commodity to be bought and sold and traded with a price and a worth but it is not quite a public resource for the common good and general welfare.   It is regulated by the state for beneficial use and economic development without real regard or priority for what it is used for.  Alfalfa, microchips, people - it is all the same.  It is a social system with capitalistic implications. 

I used to think that water would limit growth in Park City but we did too good a job of water regionalization in the City and the County.  I asked why St George needs a pipeline from Lake Powell; so they can grow to half a million people.  Why would you possibly want that and enable it to happen.   Why should everyone in the state pay for that new Lake Powell pipe when they have ground water and use more water than anyone.

The basic archaic premise remains the same for water; use it or loose it, to save it is anathema to the old system.  If you save it someone will use your share.  Conservation used to mean using it all up, our original goal, now conservation just allows for more development and growth.  If you leave water in the stream or ground, the next in line will take it.  Now more of it is going to cities and people.  Now it is waste it or taste it.

 The priority system; first in time, first in right is supposed to take care of distribution in times of scarcity.  When you run out of surface water, you stop farming.  When you run out of groundwater, you dig a deeper well.  Our basin aquifers, full of ancient, one time historical water, are dropping like stones and yet we keep pumping like there is no bottom or there is no tomorrow.  Out of sight out of mind.  Now it is first in time, first in line.

So what’s the big deal, what’s all the hub bub about.  Is it all a big media game pursued by the water owner and water developers, to give them higher prices or give them things to do?  Is this the kind of news that they sell to us, like weather and sports to keep us tuned in?  Or is there a real crisis of unlimited demand and shrinking supply, a crisis of conservation, a crisis of climate, a crisis of confidence.