CHARLES FISHMAN

Photo courtesy Charles Fishman

Our guest today is Charles Fishman, an award-winning investigative journalist and author of the best selling book The Wal-Mart Effect. We caught up with Fishman during his tour for The Big Thirst, his latest book focusing on water issues around the world. In the course of reporting about water to write The Big Thirst, Fishman has stood at the bottom of a half-million-gallon sewage tank, sampled water directly from the springs in San Pellegrino, Italy, and carried water on his head for 3 kilometers with a group of Indian villagers.

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To find more articles and broadcasts on water design, policy, and related issues, be sure to tune into Circle of Blue online at www.circleofblue.org. This interview was produced by Travis Miller. Our theme is composed by Nedav Kahn. Circle of Blue Radio is underwritten by Traverse Internet Law. Join us gain for Circle of Blue Radio’s Five in 15. I’m J. Carl Ganter.

The Fraser River tributary is half depleted by distant Denver Water, and symptomatic of climate change, is one of many stretches of riverine plagued by pine beetle infestation (see standing dead and reddened trees). Click any image to enlarge and launch slideshow.

By Jon Waterman
Special to Circle of Blue

On the last day of May, after the heaviest winter in 20 years, I shoulder a pack with a large satchel of my mother’s ashes, a pair of snowshoes, and a deflated Alpacka raft with collapsible paddles. The Colorado River begins seven and a half miles and 1,500 feet above.

Early this morning, we drove for an hour from the arid eastern plains of Colorado toward Longs Peak, 14,259 feet. Plains farmers used to gauge their summer water supply by gazing up at the mountain’s wineglass-shaped snowfield, visible from a hundred miles away. If the glass wasn’t filled, it foretold a bad crop year. This year, the snow has spilled out over the entire mountainside.

Before the understaffed Rocky Mountain National Park rangers could begin charging at the park entrance, we drove above the tree line and past the oft-studied peak on Trail Ridge Road, confined by 10-foot snowbanks. A vertical mile below, we reached the Colorado River trailhead.

In contrast to the windblown eastern side, we’re deep in snow. The Rockies rake incoming storms, pull the moisture onto the western slope, and funnel the empty winds out over the eastern plains.

The high altitude, opaque stream water beside us turns chocolate as the temperature rises, and water begins to pour out of untold ravines, unlocking mud banks, thawing snowfields, and bursting toward sea level more than a thousand miles away. The pace of my hiking companion, Brad Udall, quickens, even though his pack—freighted with heavy-metal back country skis and bindings—is a great deal heavier than mine. Brad is vexed that the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. The water bee-lining past our feet and wetting our socks should “slake the thirst of you, me and thirty million others who live in this gargantuan river basin, or evaporate from immense desert reservoirs downstream.”

About the Author

In 2008 Jon Waterman set out to travel all 1,450 miles of the Colorado River, a journey he parlayed into two books, including Running Dry: A Journey from Source to Sea Down the Colorado River.

He talks with the slow cadence of a native Westerner. His mind holds a hard-earned map of the rivers and ranges of these parts. Nor does it hurt that five generations and two dozen of his kin have run municipal, state, or federal political offices. Since the mid-19th century, the Udall family dynasty, like all Western politicians, has trafficked in water. Or the lack thereof. So it’s not a stretch to say that the river runs through Brad Udall’s veins.

Brad, pushing 50 years old, churns out water facts as we follow the stream growing beside us. A former boatman in the Grand Canyon, he’s fit from backcountry skiing those weekends he doesn’t hit the lecture and sustainable water use circuit as the director of Western Water Assessment, based out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices in Boulder.

We ford a rivulet, climb another steep hill, and amid a thick pine forest, tiptoe across the crust of melting snowbanks, mined with three-foot sunken leg holes of hikers who passed earlier in the week without snowshoes. In a sun-drenched meadow, a kingfisher zippers through the air, rattling loudly against our intrusion. We stop and strip off our outer jackets as the now meandering stream lowers its burbling a decibel.

In northern Arizona during the late 19th century, Brad’s great-great grandfather,John D. Lee, started Lees Ferry, pulling flat-bottomed boats across the river with a cable. A dozen miles upstream of this landmark, in 1961, Brad’s uncle, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall—aka “Colorado River Master”—oversaw the building of the West’s most disputed mass of concrete, the Glen Canyon Dam. His father, “Mo” Udall, was the one-time presidential candidate and Arizona representative who defended that state’s Colorado River water rights, while Brad’s brother Mark and their cousin Tom represent Colorado and New Mexico as congressmen now running shoo-in campaigns as senators. No one would dispute that Brad has found his calling as a spokesman for the river.

He says that today’s growing problem with the shrinking river began with a climate miscalculation. Beginning in 1896, the U.S. government measured the Colorado River volume through acre-feet, the amount of water that would cover an acre of land one-foot deep. !ey guesstimated the river’s average flow at 17.5 million acre-feet (maf), almost six trillion gallons per year. That’s enough water to support 35 million modern households.

Yet scientists have recently figured out that the Colorado River’s volume was calibrated following one of the wettest periods in its history. By measuring the distance between tree rings, hydrologists found growth rates that matched river volumes. Hydrologists determined that the region has experienced more severe droughts over the last several hundred years, Brad tells me, than yet experienced in the 21st century. This means that droughts are going to get worse before they get better. Over the centuries, the river has averaged little more than 15 maf per year—2.5 maf less than the seven member states and Mexico have divvied up. I’ll learn more about the significance of these numbers as I head downstream.

I have come to the Colorado River to paddle all 1,450 miles and learn about what’s at stake. Not only what’s already been damaged, but also what we might lose in the future without proper solutions or conservation. Water, first of all. Then more cogently, the river itself, a living resource that includes wildlife and plant species, reservoirs, Native American culture, recreation, river-based economies, and the ever-shrinking wetlands of the delta. My family lives in Colorado and I want them to revel in the living resource of water—skiing the Rockies’ snow, paddling its melt waters, and watering our garden—as I have for the last 20 years. But a half century from now, according to the forecasts of many climatologists, my sons are likely to see the ski resorts of Colorado go dry before their knees give out.

Climate models for the second half of this century show that up to 70 percent of the snowpack, which supplies the river 90 percent of its water, will disappear. Despite a whopping snowfall and long winter in the Upper Basin, the two biggest reservoirs created by Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, “Lakes” Mead and Powell, are presently at half of their collective 50-maf capacities and are unlikely to recharge from the winter’s big snowfall after meeting their downstream orders to create electricity and fill irrigation ditches.

Strontia Dam is one of over 100 dams in the Colorado River Basin that divert the river’s water to distant and drier communities and farmlands.

If this nine-year drought continues on beyond a decade, as predicted, life throughout the river basin will be irrevocably changed. First, the sprawling economy created by recreational river and reservoir use throughout the river basin will go bust—crippling scores of towns and small cities along the river. Swimming pools will be drained and lawns browned in Salt Lake City, Utah, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Without Hoover Dam generating relatively clean and rapidly created hydroelectric power, Los Angeles will have blackouts. Without Glen Canyon Dam powering air conditioners, people will abandon sweltering Phoenix, necessitating the construction of more noxious, water consumptive coal plants on the far reaches of the energy grid. Several million acres of farms in the Southwest—including Imperial Valley, the fifth richest agricultural region in the country—will go fallow. Without radical change, citizens in Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and San Diego, California, will have trouble flushing their toilets. Thirty million people will begin losing their drinking water. Finally, thanks to the antiquated Colorado River Compact, lawsuits will lock up what little water remains in what is already known as the most diverted river in the world.

Today, the driest states in the country are now among the most waterdependent and fastest-growing states. Eight decades ago, the Colorado River Compact split up the river between Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. In that time, the basin states’ population of five million increased tenfold. Compounding this dilemma are droughts, an over-allocated river, and increasing global temperatures.

Brad’s brow furrows as he discusses the shrinking river. He fires off facts and figures with the speed of a Wall Street ticker tape showing the futures market. Keeping to the Western Water Assessment’s mission of science, he avoids the rhetoric of environmentalists, whom he refers to as “enviros.”

Like the other jack Mormons in his family, he is lean and tall, with thick eyebrows, and a long jawline that contributes to a craggy handsomeness. As the snow deepens, Brad and I are happy to lighten our packs by caching our five-pound Alpacka rafts and paddles in a greening aspen forest. We strap on our skis and snowshoes. It would be vainglorious to try to boat down the snowed-over, steepening stream.

Brad points to La Poudre Pass, our destination, where the Continental Divide runs north to south, dividing Rocky Mountain National Park hydrologically. Waters on the west side form the Colorado River headwaters, running to the Pacific, while the east side drains to the Mississippi and the Atlantic. At least this is how nature intended it.

Above our heads, the Never Summer Mountains hold the snow that used to form the first drops of the river. Before this snowmelt can drain into the shrunken stream at our feet, a ditch intercepts the water, sluicing it over La Poudre Pass into Long Draw Reservoir, and off to the crops on the eastern plains. !e ditch appears like a surgical scar shaved across the heavily wooded face of the Never Summers. Farther west, a bulldozer rumbles along an adjacent dirt road, clearing out ice jams to keep the water from flooding over the ditch and into the valley below. Brad’s congressman brother, Mark Udall, has championed a bill that will make this corner of Rocky Mountain National Park official wilderness. Five years ago, the ditch flooded the park’s valley floor and caused $9 million in damage to dozens of historic cabins amid flower-strewn meadows. Now with protected wilderness status, the park can bill the ditch owners for the damage instead of suing.

Like other states in the river basin, Colorado developed around the ability to manipulate water. Financiers knew that “water runs uphill to money,” and so does this ditch, pumped at a one percent grade over the Continental Divide.

As evidence of this water-as-gold maxim, in Colorado, we cannot legally catch rain in our gutters to water our gardens, because Brad and I live under the doctrine of prior appropriation—or first in time, first in right—meaning that someone below us already owns the water. These rights can be bought and sold separately from whatever rights we’d like to think we own on our roofs, high above and far away from any farmer. In times of drought, the owner of the oldest water right, regardless of distance from the river or its headwaters, reserves the right to use the water. !is explains why ranchers and farmers 80 miles to the west in Grand Junction, Colorado, or 80 miles to the east in Fort Morgan, Colorado, own the water that falls on our Carbondale or Boulder roofs.

Glenwood Springs Colorado, once a bucolic ranching community, has transformed into a burgeoning tourist town, dependent upon a free flowing river.

Yesterday, I’d met with Brad at the NOAA offices in Boulder, and his boss, the Director of the Earth System Research Lab. Sandy McDonald oversees 600 scientists studying weather and climate. In a small, empty auditorium, Sandy showed off a five-foot “Science On a Sphere” globe, lit from within by climate data. He pointed out Africa’s Sahara Desert to remind me of the difference between a desert and a drought. We took several steps around the planet to North America and watched as a computer operator in an adjacent room programmed climate data onto the globe for 1970 and 2007, to show the effects of the drought. Over 37 years, the color change from blue to yellow over the Colorado River Basin showed a temperature increase of 3 degrees Fahrenheit. Along with the globe’s color-temperature changes, a numerical overlay displayed particulate matter in the atmosphere in 1970 and 2007, increasing from 327 parts per million (ppm) to 387 ppm, showing how greenhouse gases have caused the drought and changing climate by warming the atmosphere. In past millennia, similarly high levels have caused melting sea ice, a 10-foot rise in ocean levels, and a drier climate.

Amid these shocking statistics, I asked what NOAA, a governmentfunded agency, has forecast for future climate change in the Colorado River Basin. Sandy deferred to Brad, who replied that, by 2050, the snowpack will thin by a factor of 5 percent to 50 percent. In terms of the future of the river, even a 10 percent reduction in the river’s snowpack water supply could trigger catastrophic reductions throughout the basin amid increasing population pressures for water.

“When you factor in the earlier runoffs caused by dust now overlaying the snow,” Brad added, “raised by development across the West, and causing water to enter the river a month earlier than historic norms, there’s another huge evaporative loss of up to five million acre feet when the water hits the reservoirs.” He’s referring to the heat gain caused by dark dust on the snow surface, absorbing the sun’s energy and melting the snow in spring instead of reflecting the sun and preserving the snowpack until summer.

On this 68-degree day on the river’s headwaters, because of the downed trees we’re constantly forced to climb around, and my own breathlessness from chasing Udall uphill, I don’t ask Brad to defend the science that explains changing climate. Those of us who live for their time spent out of doors in the West have already experienced obvious changes over the last two decades. Amid the rising temperatures, we’ve seen lengthening summers, haze caused by large Western forest fires, and watering restrictions brought on by drought. This is the first May in 20 years that we’ve needed snowshoes or skis at this elevation.

We’re climbing over, walking around, and ducking under a direct effect of the drought caused by climate change. Here in the Colorado River drainages of Grand County and neighboring Summit County, beetles have infested a
thousand square miles of lodgepole pine forests. As we climb to a deforested knob, downstream we can spy a sea of formerly green pine boughs turned dead as a red tide. Although I can’t actually see the rice grain–sized Dendroctonus ponderosae beetles, we’re surrounded by hundred-foot trees exhibiting sappy extrusions from beetles eating the inner bark and killing the tree. The lengthening summers have increased the beetles’ reproductive cycle to twice a year. The lack of subzero, beetle-killing winters has created a tree-eating orgy.

Brad explains that pine beetles have existed in the West since the Pleistocene, but this is the worst outbreak in state history. Foresters are predicting that beetles will destroy all of Colorado’s lodgepole forest—an area the size of Rhode Island—in the next few years. Recently, the beetles have defied the former high-altitude cold barrier by jumping the Continental Divide and infesting eastern slope forests in the park and on toward the plains. At some point, fires will follow. In the past, without 50 million people living in the West, wildfires burned without suppression, regenerating the landscape with new growth.

With a sea of reddened trees standing like matchsticks waiting for a flame, the risks are obvious. Throughout public places along the Colorado River headwaters, “Survive Alive!” fliers are pinned up in eye-catching yellow and orange, instructing citizens to attend meetings and help create evacuation plans for when the “CATASTROPHIC WILDFIRE” arrives.

Weary from postholing the trail’s softening snow with downed trees as high hurdles blocking our way, Brad takes off his skis, jabs his thumb north, and begins striding steeply uphill. I eye the gently contouring trail with a last bit of longing. As Brad bushwhacks at a right angle up away from the trail, breaking the snow up to his hips every few steps, I manage to keep him in sight. After a half an hour of sweating and cursing labor, we reach a narrow dirt road alongside the several-foot-wide Grand Ditch. Out of the shaded forest, we apply more sun lotion as we walk. Ice bergie bits jam up, roll, and then sail no faster than our three-mile-an-hour pace.

The Radium Hot Springs is a stretch of the Colorado frequented by tourists.

In 1894, the Water Supply and Storage Company hired Chinese, Swedish and Mexican laborers to dig the ditch, a thousand feet above what used to be called the Grand River. Until the early 20th century, the Colorado River didn’t officially start until 451 miles downstream from here in Utah, at the confluence of the Green and Grand Rivers amid red rock canyons. The longest of the Colorado tributaries, the Green River originates from more than 700 miles north, in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. And because the Utah legislature knew that the Green River ran several hundred miles longer than the other Colorado River tributary then called the Grand River, they debated renaming the Green the Colorado River. At the same time, Colorado’s representative Edward Taylor sought to bolster tourism in his hometown of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. In 1921, he proposed to Congress that the Grand River be renamed the Colorado. President Harding signed the bill, peeving both Utah and Wyoming lawmakers. Thanks to the allure of the well-known name, Glenwood Springs reaped a flood of tourists on the now-elongated Colorado River.

The state of Colorado is rife with dams, ditches, and tunnels that breach the Rockies, having diverted the river’s headwaters long before concrete started pouring downstream. In 1936, backhoes lengthened the efforts of earlier shovelers on the 16-mile-long Grand Ditch. The Water Supply and Storage Company’s “engineering marvel” intercepted over six million gallons of Never Summer Mountain streams and sent them plunging down the Cache La Poudre River to the distant eastern plains. The advantage of midsummer snowmelt is that farmers can open their ditches with all the convenience of filling a pitcher from the refrigerator. Also, the system has only one small dammed reservoir—Long Draw—minimizing loss from evaporation.

After the Grand Ditch was finished, the Colorado River below turned into a lazy creek, seen from a high switchback on the Trail Ridge Road as a looping brown intestine of water. During the last nine years of drought, the river has trickled out of the park and down to Grand Lake. Although flood cycles seldom recharge flora on the banks, valuable homes and ranches downstream remain intact. And so begins the long-justified saga of reclamation— protecting property from floods, growing crops, creating hydroelectricity, and providing recreation—from every ditch, diversion, and dam built between here and the sea.

As Brad and I round the final corner of the ditch road, breaking out toward the open meadows of 10,175-foot La Poudre Pass, we spy the Christmas-tree-shaped Long Draw Reservoir. Its descending waterlines have caused 50-foot-high bathtub rings, stained by minerals pulled out of the Never Summers. These bathtub rings are now emblematic of the drought lowering a hundred reservoirs throughout the Colorado River Basin, like a warning postscript to the reclamation saga.

“Nice view, huh?” Brad asks rhetorically. “It’s for watering subsidized alfalfa to feed subsidized cows out on the plains.” He continues with the suggestion that, if we raised the price of utilities instead of subsidizing the cost of water and electricity, we’d quickly find solutions for conserving water and electricity. “Just like what we’re seeing with rising gas prices.”

During the hike, I’ve learned that part of Brad’s work, as both a Udall and the director of Western Water Assessment, is spreading the news that climate change is here to stay. “In terms of the Colorado River, the higher temperatures will increase the atmosphere’s moisture-holding capacity and evaporation will increase, further draining the reservoir capacities,” he ticks the points off on his fingers. “Then there’s drought. The evaporation will increase water demand and summertime drying. And then there’s the earlier spring runoff. . . .”

We cut across a meadow above a small lake shown on the map, but apparently long since dried up. It’s late afternoon, and although Brad isn’t showing any pain, I’m overheated and blistered from the hike. I pull off my pack. A Steller’s jay wings a croaking, erratic path above us on the snow-covered meadow, but our day otherwise seems a subdued and unlikely beginning for such an iconic river.

Above, tall green trees—possibly still free of pine beetles—climb several thousand feet up the remnant volcanoes. In the distance, we can still hear a clanking, sputtering backhoe, scooping ice jams out of the Grand Ditch. I turn to the west, lift the bag high, and spill the ashes of my mother into the breeze above the remains of the Colorado River headwaters. It’s a long story, but I’m hoping she’ll join me during the long descent to the Pacific.

Jon Waterman is a journalist and photographer who launched the Colorado River Project after spending five months traveling the river in 2008. Read more about the Colorado River on Circle of Blue.

Photo by EduardoZ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A view of Lake Titicaca from the Taquile Island in Peru, which is a highlighted case study in chapter nine of the book.

As shown by the chapters in this book, the modern world’s power structures can usurp or threaten the rights of rural and indigenous societies. Since ancient times, ruling groups have continually tried to expropriate and control local community resources such as water by strategic use of cultural politics. Enlisting community labour and regulating water rights, for instance, are part of a process of identity formation. But dominant groups have taken over both resource ownership and such rules for water management, manipulating and confiscating patterns of identification. The quest to shape users’ water control norms, beliefs, identities and practices, in order to secure their obedience to, and compliance with, a dominant model for water control and ‘normal’ water rights, is at the heart of the issue (Boelens, 2009; compare Foucault, 1991).

Most contemporary Latin American nation states have promoted a form of multiculturalism that actually destroys community management of rights when it does not follow the market’s rules of play. The latest neoliberal wave in the Andean countries is fostered by banks and international agencies and by states themselves which are reordering their policies to conform to liberal theory and to please international institutions. Thus, globalizing forces strengthen the market-based institutional models that threaten to co-opt local systems and community management forms (compare Hendriks, 1998; Budds and McGranahan, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2005; Bakker, 2007, 2010; Perreault, 2008). National and international policies do not attempt to adapt to local contexts, but rather seek to transform and control them. It is the users’ universe that is to be adapted (Boelens, 2008). But such changes require more than enacting new laws. A water-political order becomes institutionalized in a users’ society only when it becomes integrated within its economic, moral and ideological structure. Laws cannot act, only societal forces can shape such change (Cohen 1986; von Benda-Beckmann et al, 1998; Roth et al, 2005). Andean user collectives therefore resist externally imposed policies that attempt to impose ‘normalization’ and to take control of their water rights and management systems. Their resistance includes opposing current distributive inequalities and undemocratic forms of representation, challenging the rules of the game and the very politics of truth and identity themselves.

In addition to the matter of how water is distributed, the dispute is fundamentally about the definition of rights to use water and local autonomy for its control (Gelles, 2002; Oré, 2005; Guevara-Gil, 2006). The multidimensional importance of water rights in indigenous and rural communities of the Andes can be seen in the way in which struggles over water have materialized. The disputes dynamically link four different but connected ‘echelons of rights’ that are at the root of water conflicts (for a conceptualization of the echelons of rights analysis (ERA), see: Boelens and Zwarteveen, 2005; Boelens, 2008). Together, these echelons give substance to water rights struggles and highlight how they involve the formulation and materialization of water rights in the following fields of contention:

• Access, withdrawal and use of water, and related infrastructural, material
  and financial resources;
• Formulation of the rules: contents of water rights, obligations and management
  rules, and of mechanisms to acquire rights;
• The legitimate authority to make decisions, establish the rules and enforce
  rights; and
• The discourses that challenge, impose, legitimize or defend particular water
  policies and water-political orders.

In the fourth echelon, discourses are developed and invoked as ‘socio-technical, socio-natural organizers and political stabilizers’: conjunctions of power and knowledge that aim to create and proliferate the belief that particular policies and water rights orders are correct and self-evident. Discourses strategically connect all water rights domains, from the technical-physical to the cultural and metaphysical, to compose and glue together convenient water rights and truth orders. Society’s ruling groups seek to enrol and align humans, nature and thought within a single water governance system that is structured according to their interests to control locality and based on non-local rules, truths and frames of reference. In reaction, local users’ collectives commonly resist and strategize to construct their own, alternative systems (Boelens, 2008).

These chapters offer a framework to understand how struggles over water arise at each of those four levels, implicating local norms and forms of control and bringing the culture and the identities of the user groups into conflict with modernist water policies. In these struggles, local user organizations trying to defend their autonomy do not avoid interaction with the state or development institutions. Many communities request collaboration. Through such interaction, the state, the users and third parties all try to achieve their own,
frequently contradictory, purposes. Here, commonly, local user groups pursue state resources and international funding without handing over local normative power. This raises the question of power: who controls the activities and resources of whom and how? Each side tries to conscript the other in the action programme which they desire. This interaction is between entities with unequal power but a mutual need for each other’s resources, where each makes strategic use of some of the other’s techniques, norms and rules.

Cultural politics and the politics of identity, therefore, are inherent to dominant, control-externalizing strategies and to the power tactics of controllocalizing communities and water user collectives. Each seeks power over the applicable rules, rights and meanings of social practices. Each tries to shape identity and forms of subjectivity in divergent ways (see also Cohen, 1986; Foucault, 1991; Álvarez et al, 1998). In this struggle, the dynamic assertion of water rights diversity is an expression of resistance. By creating or adopting water rights that are profoundly intertwined with local identity formation, a world of difference is perpetuated below the outer appearances of uniformity. Multilayered collective water-rights systems extend existing forms of legal pluralism, implicitly questioning the exclusiveness and self-evidence of formal state- and market-based water rules.

It follows that we need to examine how water user communities and networks construct new, diverse water rights and collective organizational forms in their struggles against control externalization. This process simultaneously implies the active construction and reconstruction of ‘water territory’ as a socio-productive and cultural political ‘home base’, as a rooted and multilayered ‘political water community’, as a scheme of mutual belonging that enables the rebirth of collective imagination. Such water territories involve socionatural webs with landscapes and waterscapes in which people live and make livelihoods and identities, for which people feel responsible, in which they are morally involved. Water territories, in this way, contrast with the essentially placeless irrigation systems and watershed plans that are determined by ‘technocracy’ and that have social arrangements that are presented as convenient arrangements – neutral, universal, timeless and void of context.

Increasingly, struggles to create and defend alternative water rights repertoires and to embed them within water territories are not limited to the local scale (see also Bebbington, 2001; Swyngedouw, 2004; Perreault, 2006). As several chapters show, control-localizing strategies implicate wider political objectives related to social transformation and reform of laws, discourses, governance frameworks and class, gender and ethnic structures. Local user groups engage in scalar politics and scalar alliances to build territorial alliances and networks that link diverse peoples, identities and places. They use these alliances to contest the processes of de-territorialization of water, the separation of water rights and decision-making powers from local livelihoods, and policies and actions that attack the integrity of their territories in general. Advocates of local water control thus have transcended existing boundaries, manageable units and assigned identities, and they continuously produce new webs and alliances for political, normative and scalar articulation (compare Foucault, 1982).

Cover image courtesy of Earthscan

In the end, the water struggle exemplifies not only inter-user conflicts and community–state contradictions, but also the transnational policies and market forces resulting from globalization. Several chapters of Out of the Mainstream seek to examine how locally rooted water-user communities develop water control defence strategies, build systems of water rights and water management, and strengthen the definition of ‘home territories’ for water use. Some authors also show how action on a broader political scale can advance local efforts. This seems appropriate as many of the challenged institutional arrangements and water governance structures themselves emanate from higher levels such as states, transnational corporations and international water development agencies.

It appears that the power to compose or manipulate patterns of multiple scales is crucial. To meet the needs of local water users it is important to reconfigure the scale of water governance. The political ordering of water control and the contents of formal water rights require connecting them on the ground with local livelihoods and perspectives. Out of the Mainstream aims to contribute to understanding why water user collectives resist externally imposed change and why they seek creative reproduction of their own cultural and political norms, as well as different forms of democracy and political representation in formal water governance. Thus, the book looks at how asserting water rights pluralism and water identity-based distinctiveness animates challenges to commensuration and control by the dominant power structure. It analyses how local and indigenous communities reject the categories in which the dominating groups want to enclose them, while at the same time pursuing ways in which formal categories can be used for their own purposes. It analyses how political and legal action can be used to challenge dominant forms of power and to ‘localize’ water control by simultaneously deepening their own water rights systems and borrowing ideas from the dominant system. Along the way, indigenous people, campesinos and other marginalized water users are defending their alternative out-of-the-mainstream ideals as they struggle to protect their water domains.

Please read Circle of Blue’s interview, Q&A: David Getches on Water Rights for Indigenous Cultures, for more on David Getches.

Read a specific water rights case study in the Achamayo River Valley in Peru from Out of the Mainstream by downloading chapter nine on Circle of Blue. Also for more on water rights amongst indigenous communities, read excerpts from James G. Workman’s book on Botswana’s Bushmen that were previously featured on Circle of Blue.

Cover image courtesy of Earthscan

Welcome to Circle of Blue Radio’s Series 5 in 15, where we’re asking global thought leaders 5 questions in 15 minutes, more or less. These are experts working in journalism, science, communication design, and water. I’m J. Carl Ganter. Today’s program is underwritten by Traverse Internet Law: tech savvy lawyers, representing internet and technology companies.

Indigenous people around the world depend on water for their agriculture, their cultural traditions, and their spirituality. A new book, Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity explores this intense cultural interdependence. Circle of Blue Reporter Molly Ramsey spoke with one of the book’s authors, David Getches. He’s Dean of the University of Colorado Law School and Professor of Natural Resources Law. For the book, Getches writes on international law and the potential to secure water rights for indigenous communities.

Thank you, Molly. Circle of Blue reporter Molly Ramsey has been speaking with David Getches. He’s dean at the University of Colorado Law School. To learn more about his work and other projects, be sure to tune in to Circle of Blue online at circleofblue.org.

Our theme is composed by Nedev Kahn, and Circle of Blue Radio is underwritten by Traverse Legal, PLC, internet attorneys specializing in trademark infringement litigation, copyright infringement litigation, patent litigation and patent prosecution. Join us gain for Circle of Blue Radio’s 5 in 15. I’m J. Carl Ganter.

Read an excerpt from the introductory chapter Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, a book on the effect modern society has on water culture and indigenous communities.

Read a specific water rights case study in the Achamayo River Valley in Peru from Out of the Mainstream by downloading chapter nine on Circle of Blue.

For more Circle of Blue reports on indigenous people and the right to water, read this article on Ecuadorian protests of a water reform bill or this article on the struggle in Copenhagen during the COP15 UN Climate Conference.

Photo by James G. Workman

In this final excerpt from Workman’s Heart of Dryness, the author weaves several segments together to understand the political battles that often accompany water scarcity, and the problem of complacency when water is in abundance.

By James G. Workman
Special to Circle of Blue

The dark side of drought and water scarcity isn’t economic stagnation; it is political implosion.[1] Scarce water fragmented society and curtailed liberty. It eroded trust. When drought-struck, the local governments from Atlanta to Los Angeles rationed individual water consumption to one-tenth of what people normally consume each day. [2] It cracked down on private well pumps, claimed and regulated waters for public consumption.

Outside the Kalahari, these political responses are almost universal. Conflict is inevitable, as most recently witnessed in Boston supermarkets as families brawled over the last bottled water. “Other hazards tend to pull people together,” said Michael Hayes, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, speaking of water’s power. “With a drought, because it’s a limited resource, it tends to drive people apart.” [3]

Divide us it did. Southeastern states have sued one another for remnant water, and even Maryland challenged Virginia over control of Potomac River currents for the first time since the Civil War. [4] As citizens appealed to government, governors appealed to God. In July 2007 Alabama Governor Bob Riley declared a week in July “Days of Prayer for Rain.” In November, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue gathered people together on the capitol steps, bowed his head, and appealed to a higher power for relief. “We’ve come together here simply for one reason and one reason only,” he told the gathering, “to very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm.”[5]

Irreversibly rising heat, migrating jet stream, booming industry, thirsty populations, helpless leaders driven to their knees: The Perfect Drought.

El Nino anomalies aside, it doesn’t appear on the horizon to be getting any cooler or damper; both the World Meteorological Organisation and the British Meteorological Office confirm that last decade was the hottest on record,[6] and reputable observers maintain that our current mega-droughts represent the overture of what will follow for centuries. Based on new evidence that the Global Warming Era was dawning sooner than expected, even Nobel laureate Al Gore changed his mind: prevention alone was not enough, and too late. Now, he said, we must rapidly learn to adapt to less water.

If that’s the case, who will teach us?

For the last seven years as the U.S. broke records for high temperatures and low reservoirs and prepared for what could become the worst hot Dry Age in 30,000 years, the remnants of the world’s oldest civilization—the only people with the survival savvy, strategies, tactics, and values to guide us through the extremes of our once and future drought—were embattled in the heart of the Kalahari Desert, surrounded by armed men who were urging these last free Bushmen to surrender their way of life forever…

For more than a decade even the wildest drylands in Africa no longer held autonomous bands who might share their self-sufficient experience. Then Botswana’s convoy destroyed the last government water supplies and deliveries inside the Reserve, triggering their crisis—and my opportunity.

I saw America’s fate inextricably linked to the predicament of a thousand indigenous people suddenly forced to submit, die or adapt once again to The Great Thirstland. The survivors had to tap into the deep reservoir of indigenous wisdom, and I hoped to grasp the essence of their unwritten code. For centuries Bushmen had been shot and infected, poked and prodded, and now, facing the onset of permanent droughts, I set out to exploit them one last time.

The ‘Last of the First’ welcomed me to their fire. I listened to what often seemed serious debate but was later translated as spectacularly lewd banter. During a lull one evening, as it grew cooler, I moved with tape recorder and camera from one Bushmen to the next until coming to an unspoken matriarch. In exchange for smuggling contraband water and other supplies, I sought to extract from her and others a few Important Answers to Big Questions, namely, “What will you do without government supplied water?”

She kept scooping flesh out of a tsama melon, trading gossip with another.

“How are you going to manage water during the drought?”

The old woman shrugged without looking up and shifted back on her heels. Next to her a small fire burned. It was more smoke than flame, but never seemed to go out.

I persisted. “Do you think you could manage enough water for your family and your band to last until the rainy season?”

Like others before her, she grew evasive. Repeating the question through my translator met with awkward silence. Back then, her caginess didn’t make sense. Years later it began to. It wasn’t that Bushmen didn’t want to answer; they just couldn’t. As an ‘international water expert’ my grilling Qoroxloo about how humans must manage water was like a Vatican cleric interrogating Galileo about how the sun must orbit the earth.

To be sure, we will not soon abandon eBay or Wal-Mart to hunt and gather in foraging bands. Nor should we feel the need to. Yet the Bushmen code of conduct may help us escape a Hobbesian or neo-Malthusian nightmare. Prepared for extreme deprivation, Kalahari Bushmen chose the hard responsibility of a dry reality over a government-dependent fantasy of water abundance. Outside of their Reserve the so-called civilized world found that for all our military might and internet bandwidth, certain things still lie beyond our grasp. We discover we cannot ‘regulate’ barren rivers and depleted aquifers any more than we can ‘regulate’ our climate, clouds, or rain. Out here, while elected leaders kneel and ask us all to pray for a thundershower that will provide temporary relief, the increasingly dry hot wind whistles through the thorn trees in the central Kalahari and whispers the ancient secret those last defiant Bushmen never forgot.

We don’t govern water.

Water governs us.

If our competitive demand for scarce water drives us apart and escalates political tensions, this same finite supply of freshwater is also itself what ultimately drags us back and binds us together. We may not like the rule of increasingly scarce water, but at the same time we cannot escape it. And Qoroxloo’s band demonstrated how to embrace that reality. Her fundamental rule of adaptation was not to organize and mobilize physical resources to meet expanding human wants, but rather to organize human behavior and society around constraints imposed by diminishing physical resources.

Whether it pulses between a competing heart and brain, sinks down in the shared aquifer beneath our fenced-off private property, or flows in the common currents that runs along or across our walled-off borders, water is quite literally the connective tissue that links and rules our fates. Only this magical glue makes us collaborate to endure scarcity. If we are to prevent dehydration, domestic strife, or degeneration into the ruthless Hobbesian/Darwinian scenario and if we are to avoid testing the nightmare hypothesis of a trans-national water war, then we need to derive a system like that which for millennia sustained people in the Kalahari.

Given the scale and complexity of our current political economy, what might this system look like? How do we obey water’s rule? If Qoroxloo’s band ran America’s waterworks: what would Bushmen do?

Based on my reading of the evidence, they’d organize us politically around the measurable contours of the hydrological unit where we live: water known to exist within an aquifer or river basin. Then, within that unit their code would secure the fundamental and minimal amount of fresh water required to keep each human healthy and alive. Some researchers peg this quantity at thirteen potable gallons per day, for drinking, cooking, and basic hygiene; others ratchet the amount up to one hundred gallons per person per day. Let’s conservatively assume the upper limit, which still lies below America’s comfortable average, and secure it as a fundamental human right, the kind Bushmen owned, recognized and respected in others. The flip side of this individual right is that it demands we also own water as an individual responsibility.

Human nature takes over from there. Confronted with finite limits imposed by drought and siege, the Bushmen code of conduct allows people to negotiate informally over the water resources they required, reaching out to partners with whom to exchange if and when they need more or less. People increased supply by efficiently reducing demands, and the benevolent result of their integrated informal right to water brought Bushmen into a relative state of social abundance.

This informal right may seem on the surface like what liberals vehemently demand from the UN, in which under a binding convention governments collectively hold federal water on behalf of the public, safe from the clutches of commerce.[7] If anything, Bushmen sought the opposite. It was not trade itself they feared, but the lack of secure access to the water resources they needed to trade in the first place. Government’s primary role would then be to uphold their individual or band’s right to access water—water that they already inherently owned and traded in reciprocal, lateral, and mutually beneficial exchanges. Defense of this kind of individually defined and divestible water right is a far cry from the enlightened paternalistic eco-socialism espoused by the so-called global water movement. It more accurately reinforces Justice Unity’s Dow’s assertion that water does not belong to the government: It belongs to each of us.

Or it would if we had not already given it away. All of us growing up in cities and suburbs have surrendered both our right and our responsibility to water to state-run or -regulated institutions. Many of these command-and-control structures are now teetering on the brink of physical failure or institutional collapse. The left wants trillions borrowed and invested to improve all creaky public waterworks. The right wants to privatize them.

Yet ideology aside, it matters little whether our taps and pipes and sewers can be traced back to a government utility or a corporate venture if both operate as absolute top-down centralized monopolies that impose involuntary and uncompetitive rates and quality with which we cannot, by definition, negotiate. Public or private utilities are neither good nor evil; but right now they still remove all real incentives and accountability to conserve water efficiently, while making us dependent on aging infrastructure, political fecklessness, wasteful approaches, and unreliable supply in a radically changing climate.

In an era of permanent droughts, that is not a desirable place to be.

Like Qoroxloo’s band, however, we can use our will and our cunning to reclaim what has always been rightfully ours. Government must ensure equitable delivery of water, but it need not be the institution that delivers it. In a free democratic society we can demand that water agencies restore and protect our inherent human right to water—say, the first one hundred gallons per day, owned by each of us—in return for our once again taking responsibility for using it wisely, free to truck, barter and exchange any surplus water within that right that we manage each day to conserve.

In the spirit of Bushmen, we could demand water exchanges within aridity’s authoritarian rule, in other words: unlimited markets within natural monopolies.[8]

Rather than pressure politicians to keep water rates low, build more dams, drain more wetlands, pump more deltas, expand storm drains and sewers, and plunder more aquifers, we would all be pulled in the opposite direction. We would nudge governments to raise rates higher and across the board, to reward our efficiency, make the water we conserved worth more, drive us to more efficient exchanges, and restore substantially more leftover wild water back to all those endangered aquatic species.[9]

However small, local, and interpersonal in its origins, this translation of the Bushmen code of conduct could be replicated and scaled from the bottom up, from urban utilities to irrigation districts to international transboundary waters. By redefining water as an owned and tradable right that turns costly conflict into symbiotic cooperation, security analysts suggest that exchanges like those among Bushmen could alleviate national security tensions over border-crossing aquifers and streams from the Rio Grande and Colorado to the Great Lakes and Columbia, perhaps even in the Middle East.[10] In other words, landlocked Botswana could learn from the Bushmen living within its dry heart how to break the siege imposed by rival neighboring African states.

My interpretation may or may not accurately convey what the late Qoroxloo would have outlined, either for her resilient and humble band or for our far more rigid and profligate civilizations growing thirsty outside the Kalahari. Then again, even while living she never was one to lay down rules or dictate advice to friends and family, let alone foreign strangers like us. She didn’t write a code of conduct. She lived it. As drought dragged on, she danced against the armed and unthinking political forces closing in on her, until finally, and on her own terms, she broke free.

When I think of the permanent drought we face in the years ahead, I like to picture her as last seen by her band of foragers: calm, defiant and aware, striding purposefully across the hot dry Kalahari sands while singing an ancient song quietly to herself…and to anyone else who might care to listen.

Read more of Workman’s Heart of Dryness on Circle of Blue.
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* Footnotes

[1] Michael Dudley, “Cities Abandoned? Mass Migrations? The Questions No One is Asking about Drought.” World Environment, PlanetCitizen.com, November 18, 2007.