Water in the West

[RZehr]

People east of the Rockies simply do not understand the role that agriculture water rights plays in the west. Up until a few years ago, I lived in nearer to the Pacific, and we had sufficient rainfall that water rights weren’t a big deal to agriculture there. I didn’t really understand how these things worked or the importance of it.
These “rights” are not simply understood as rights of privilege, but were and are, issued by the Federal government and actually recorded and tied to legal real estate deeds. To understand, imagine the outcry that would happen in the East if the government decided to evict people from their land and take back their land. People consider their land to be their own. That is nearly how the water rights are. Water has been fought over ever since this area was settled by farmers and ranchers, and continues today.
These water rights are transferable to “dry” land, and are worth more money than the land itself.
Not to far from here, there is a creek named Murderers Creek. Named after the killing of one rancher by another over creek access. They each had plenty of land, but water not so much.
Here are two stories that are in national news today:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/were-in ... 00206.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rightwing-pr ... 17379.html

There are certain water “districts” that have differing amounts of water allotments. I live in a very recently created irrigation district from the mid century, and it has “junior” water rights. This year because of lack of water, our allocation has been cut, and about half the land is lying fallow. Farmers aren’t able to make it.

[Neto]

I don't know about now, but before discovery of underground water sources there was the same type of deal going on all through the western plains (west Texas, Oklahoma, & Kansas). It isn't quite the same type of dispute, but a similar thing goes on with rights/use of the underground water aquifer that stretches from Nebraska clear down through Oklahoma, and possibly into Texas. The creek that passes through what was my grandpa's farm (which I understand to be spring fed) in western Oklahoma is only a trickle compared to what it used to be. (Wild Horse Creek)

[Josh]

People east of the Rockies simply do not understand the role that agriculture water rights plays in the west. Up until a few years ago, I lived in nearer to the Pacific, and we had sufficient rainfall that water rights weren’t a big deal to agriculture there. I didn’t really understand how these things worked or the importance of it.
These “rights” are not simply understood as rights of privilege, but were and are, issued by the Federal government and actually recorded and tied to legal real estate deeds. To understand, imagine the outcry that would happen in the East if the government decided to evict people from their land and take back their land. People consider their land to be their own. That is nearly how the water rights are. Water has been fought over ever since this area was settled by farmers and ranchers, and continues today.
These water rights are transferable to “dry” land, and are worth more money than the land itself.
Not to far from here, there is a creek named Murderers Creek. Named after the killing of one rancher by another over creek access. They each had plenty of land, but water not so much.
Here are two stories that are in national news today:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/were-in ... 00206.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rightwing-pr ... 17379.html

There are certain water “districts” that have differing amounts of water allotments. I live in a very recently created irrigation district from the mid century, and it has “junior” water rights. This year because of lack of water, our allocation has been cut, and about half the land is lying fallow. Farmers aren’t able to make it.

In Australia, the government has slowly but surely claimed ownership of all water.

At this point, the government actually sends farmers a tax bill who have a pond (in Australia it's called a "dam") on their property. Some of them have gotten billed for ponds that they filled up decades ago.

Water rights and the taxation from water has been securitised and placed into complex financial instruments traded on commodities exchanges and stock exchanges. Farmers are being squeezed for every last penny. The powers that be, and the financial industry, will not rest until every farmer and labourer is reduced to a serf, barely able to provide for their own needs, and forced to take out loans at usurious interest rates from that financial industry. And the government provides the military and police might to enforce this unjust behaviour.

[Ken]

Agree to everything you wrote except that I think it is typically not the Federal government that regulates and manages water rights in the west, it is the state and local governments. To my knowledge there are no Federal land titles or Federal deeds that manage and track land ownership and ancillary water rights. That is mostly a state and local thing.

The main role of the Federal government in water policy is through the Bureau of Reclamation which manages the giant dam and irrigation projects across the west like those on the Columbia and places like Lake Mead. But my understanding of how they work is primarily as a wholesaler of water to local water districts according to whatever distributional compacts are in place. The Bureau of Reclamation doesn't deal directly with individually-held water rights.

Much of the west is simply too dry for productive agriculture without irrigation. That is why the early pioneers jumped all the way from Great Plains to the western strip along the Pacific Coast where there is good rainfall such as Oregon's Willamette Valley. And why they called it the "Oregon Trail" and not the Idaho Trail or Wyoming Trail. Very few settlers stopped off in the empty dry spaces in between. Which are still largely empty. They wanted to get to Western Oregon or Western Washington and California where there was sufficient water for traditional agriculture.

[Josh]

Agree to everything you wrote except that I think it is typically not the Federal government that regulates and manages water rights in the west, it is the state and local governments. To my knowledge there are no Federal land titles or Federal deeds that manage and track land ownership and ancillary water rights. That is mostly a state and local thing.

Re-read his post. He said the federal government granted land title (which is true), and that title included water rights (also true). Those titles are handled by state government now.

The main role of the Federal government in water policy is through the Bureau of Reclamation which manages the giant dam and irrigation projects across the west like those on the Columbia and places like Lake Mead. But my understanding of how they work is primarily as a wholesaler of water to local water districts according to whatever distributional compacts are in place. The Bureau of Reclamation doesn't deal directly with individually-held water rights.

Much of the west is simply too dry for productive agriculture without irrigation. That is why the early pioneers jumped all the way from Great Plains to the western strip along the Pacific Coast where there is good rainfall such as Oregon's Willamette Valley. And why they called it the "Oregon Trail" and not the Idaho Trail or Wyoming Trail. Very few settlers stopped off in the empty dry spaces in between. Which are still largely empty. They wanted to get to Western Oregon or Western Washington and California where there was sufficient water for traditional agriculture.

If people in the huge cities want food, they need to start thinking a little harder about how they can be supporting the farmers that are providing that food. Instead I see Sacramento taking food for granted and choking off water to the farmers, but I suppose that's to be expected from a governor who hosts a maskless dinner party in the middle of a pandemic when everyone else is forced to stay at home. He'll always have enough food, so why should he care about anyone else?

[RZehr]

10 WATER LAWS OF THE WEST


Introduction: It does not take a law degree to understand water law and policy in the western United States. Ten basic legal and historical principles govern the rights to and uses of water in the West. By understanding these ten Water Laws of the West anyone can then understand the current issues of water and its relationship to the future of the West.

I. The Law of Gravity: The First Water Law of the West is the Law of Gravity. Water runs down hill. The initial uses of water in the West involved the use of gravity to tap rivers and divert their flows into canals for delivery to farms and mines. This is also known as Newton's Law.

II. The Law of Los Angeles: The Second Water Law of the West is the original lawof Los Angeles. This L.A. Law states that "water runs uphill to money". The development of energy technologies to lift water against the pull of gravity is the basis for modern Western civilization. Los Angeles pioneered the effort to defy gravity with money in the early 1900's with its Owens Valley Aqueduct. Southern California is now served with a network of pipelines and canals such as the Metropolitan Water District's Colorado River Aqueduct. Phoenix, San Francisco and Denver also utilize massive pumping and diversion systems to transport water from great distances in defiance of gravity to serve their growing urban populations.

III. The Law of Supply Creating Demand: The Third Water Law of the West, also invented by Los Angeles, is that "if you don't have the water, you won't need it." This is sometimes stated as "he who brings the water brings the people". Both are attributed to William Mulholland, a pioneer director of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP). Los Angeles and other Western cities operate on the premise that in order to assure growth of their cities, water supplies for the future must be developed well in advance of that growth. This is in contrast to the general approach in Western cities of developing freeways and other public infrastructure long after the growth has actually happened.

IV. The Law of I Got It First: The Fourth Water Law of the West, embodied in the West's surface water laws, is the doctrine of "prior appropriation" translated into "first in time is first in right". First in time for most water uses in the West were farms and mines. Instead of "first in time is first in right", we have seen the evolution of "we've got more votes than you in the state legislature" to decide who gets water.

V. The Law of Beneficial Use: The Fifth Water law of the West is that to have a right to water it must be "beneficially" or "reasonably" used on that appurtenant land. This is only understood in the context that water left flowing in a river maintaining the survival of fish in that river and vegetation growing along side that river was not originally defined as a "beneficial" use in Western water law, whereas drowning gophers or growing rice in deserts were deemed "beneficial" uses. In recent years, environmentalists have succeeded in gaining recognition of "instream" beneficial uses of water and a new category of water rights is beginning to emerge to preserve flows in rivers. However this process is emerging only after most rivers and streams in the West have been dammed and dried up by diversions of the flows to the previously established beneficial uses. To fully appreciate why this happened, it must be remembered that the fish in these streams only recently were able to obtain the services of water lawyers via various environmental and conservation organizations.

VI. The Law of Worthless Land: The Sixth Water Law of the West is that without a water right or access to water, land is worthless. There is not enough water available to use all available land for all the potential beneficial uses. Thus lands with water rights or access to water have value for use, whereas land without water rights is known as the desert, with zero value except when being subjected to state and local property taxation. It is also a historic fact that farmers, ranchers and miners figured all this out about a hundred years before the average city council or environmental group, thus most Western water laws are heavily weighted in favor of using water for farming, ranching and mining. This law is also known as the "appurtenancy" rule meaning the rights to the use of water are tied to specific parcels of land, which are usually owned by farmers, ranchers or miners.

VII. The Law of Expropriation: The Seventh Water Law of the West focuses on how water (and other natural resources) are obtained for Western civilization. This Law depends on finding some fairly impoverished and unsophisticated water right holder (usually Indians, farmers, or rural communities) on the other side of the mountain a city can steal water rights from. Los Angeles pioneered this approach by buying up the Owens Valley on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada for water rights nearly 90 years ago. What we are now experiencing is not so much a water shortage, but a shortage of people on the other sides of the mountains who are willing to let their water resources be stolen from them by cities.

VIII. The Law of the Price is Right: The Eighth Water Law of the West is that there is no water shortage if the price is right. It is widely believed in city halls that the farmers will sell their water rights if the price is high enough so the farmers can go raise martinis in La Jolla instead of cotton in the Salt River Valley of Arizona, or the Imperial Valley in California. Thus when someone asks "is there enough water for Los Angeles or Phoenix to grow?" the answer is probably yes--if you don't care about how much the water will cost.

IX. The Law of Water Monopoly: The Ninth Water Law of the West is that water management in an arid environment almost always results in the creation of a water monopoly. Thus (along with the discovery of fire and religion) the first steps towards civilization included the construction of irrigation ditches and the immediate creation of some sort of bureaucracy to run the system. Not surprisingly where irrigation water monopoly civilizations rose, they lasted for thousands of years. The Westlands Irrigation District in the Central Valley of California and the Salt River Project in Arizona are merely the modern counterparts of one of humankind's most ancient of institutions--the water monopoly. Many western urban areas figured out the value of water monopoly and created enormously powerful regional agencies such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District in Arizona, to do essentially the same thing--building vast networks of canals to bring water to their constituents.

X. The Law of Vanishing Civilizations: The Tenth (or Last) Water Law of the West should be called the Hohokam Law of Water and Gravity. Under this law, if there is no rain, there is no water to flow down hill. What went up--the buildings and the civilization--may crumble to dust if Mother Nature decides to hold a long drought. Lying beneath the streets of Phoenix are the ruins of the ancient Hohokam Indian metropolis that vanished prior to 1400 AD. Phoenix is the second city to be built on the same site in reliance on the erratic flows of the Salt River. Californians prayed for rain for the last six years (apparently successfully) because they didn't have enough water to flush their toilets. Many Southern Californians had been heard to ask "what do you mean this used to be a desert?"

Conclusion: The principles that govern Western water law and policy have a long and somewhat distinguished history. It should also be noted that similar arid environment ditch-dependent civilizations ultimately collapsed under extreme environmental stresses, internal political conflict, and invasion by barbarian hordes. This is worth contemplating after a six year drought with various water interests fighting over who will get water in times of future shortages while the streets of Santa Monica or Scottsdale are filled with RVs with New Jersey license plates.

[Josh]

San Diego used to be populated by a band of about 4,000 Indians, and indeed it still is populated by a band of about that number. That is what the region can reasonably support.

L.A. used to rely on charging high prices to SD to fund their own water system. And I mean really really high. When restrictions would hit, SD would have to go first. SD now is moving to desalination because it’s actually cheaper.

Ultimately selfish urbanites want to live in deserts for “nice weather” and then want to steal water from the people who need it to grow food that selfish urbanites need to live.

[Ken]

There are plenty of absurdities in water law. Perhaps more than in any other type of law.

For example, it was illegal to use rain barrels and gather the water off your roof in Colorado until 2016 because downstream water users with more senior rights had claim to the raindrops falling on your property: https://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/05/c ... t-tuesday/

In Chile where my wife is from, they have severed water rights from property rights which has created an enormous mess. And when buying any rural property you have to separately negotiate both land title and water title or rights or you will wind up with a piece of property that you can do basically nothing with. A lot of foreign buyers found this out the hard way. Water rights was one of the things that led to the collapse of this libertarian dream project in Chile based on Ayn Rand: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn53b3/ ... 922-v21n10

[temporal1]

Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!

People should eat more filberts. Or hazelnuts.

Here is some information on almonds and water. This is from 2015, and the droughts are a lot worse since then. https://www.motherjones.com/environment ... ts-charts/

California’s worst drought on record isn’t stopping the state from growing massive amounts of nuts:
The state produces over 80 percent of the world’s almonds and 43 and 28 percent of the world’s pistachios and walnuts, respectively. As Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott details in this longread, the state’s almond market in particular has taken off: What was a $1.2 billion market in 2002 became $4.8 billion market by 2012.

Why are the almond growth rates so…nuts? (Sorry.) One reason is that the average American now eats two pounds of the crunchy snack per year—more than twice as much as a decade ago. But the biggest demand is coming from abroad: The US now exports 70 percent of almonds.

The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water:
it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. Residents across the state are being told to take shorter showers and stop watering their lawns, but the acreage devoted to the state’s almond orchards have doubled in the past decade. The amount of water that California uses annually to produce almond exports would provide water for all Los Angeles homes and businesses for almost three years

Water. It requires power to get it where it’s needed.
i was reminded of RZehr when reading this:

“Illinois could see controlled power outages this summer”
https://www.lincolncourier.com/story/ne ... 690341001/

.. Rolling blackouts or brownouts typically associated with Western states may be necessary in Illinois and other Midwest states in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) footprint. MISO is the regional electric grid operator that oversees power in 15 states, including the southern two-thirds of Illinois.

Several factors are contributing to the heightened risk, including some early generator retirements, changes to the generation resource mix and increased demand for electricity, Brandon Morris, MISO adviser-strategic communications, told FarmWeek. ..

.. If my power goes out and it was a very hot day, or a very cold day, we could lose our livestock.
They wouldn’t have water. The heaters wouldn’t kick on. The fans wouldn’t kick on,” he said during the hearing.

Meier recently spent thousands on a new generator to ensure his livestock would be able to survive if he’s not home to flip the switch.

“We need a reliable baseload energy source,” Meier said. “I’m not against clean energy.
We need to have a plan that’s focused on getting there before we’re shutting everything down.”

Aside from logistical issues on the farm during a power outage, Meier pointed out another concern – energy prices.

Ameren Illinois warned customers they will pay more for electricity because of inflation, the conflict in eastern Europe
and the closure of coal-fired electric generation facilities.

The average customer could see an increase of more than $600 annually.
But farmers aren’t the average customer.

“Can you imagine a farm when we go into drying grain?
What that’s going to do (to our bills) now?” Meier told FarmWeek.

In the coming weeks, Meier plans to issue safety advisories, such as warning people not to run generators in their garages or homes.

“We need to be putting out reminders all summer long knowing that this is going to be a possibility,” he said.

Among the most vulnerable areas heading into summer is southern Illinois, according to a forecast by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), a regulatory authority that monitors risks to the grid.

“Industry prepares its equipment and operators for challenging summer conditions.
Persistent, extreme drought and its accompanying weather patterns, however, are out of the ordinary and tend to create extra stresses on electricity supply and demand,” said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments, in a news release. “Grid operators in affected areas will need all available tools to keep the system in balance this summer.”

Morris said temporary, coordinated power outages are extremely rare and a last-step emergency measure implemented to protect the electric grid.

More gov incompetence+corruption.

[barnhart]

Some of this water law sounds similar to the controls the Israeli government uses over water supply.

Historically control over water is one of just a few levers used to control civilization.