| (Relegating Seniority to its legal boundaries) |
For the past year, Water League has been challenging Prior Appropriation, the antiquated 19th-century water use policy that has resulted in:
- Significant over-appropriation of water in Oregon and throughout the West;
- Exceptional declines in groundwater levels, permanently damaging some aquifers;
- Drying up year-round streams and turning some into gravel roads;
- Heating surface waters of still-flowing streams, causing fish kills, algae blooms, and cyanobacteria;
- Declines in domestic wells forcing expensive bulk-water purchases;
- Farmers fallowing fields and struggling to finish late-summer and autumn crops;
- Increased fire risk as groundwater levels drop and vegetation dries out;
- Growing concerns about municipal water security even though the U.S. government has said it will not allow cities to dry up for desert irrigation uses.
These negative impacts have increased because humans export too much water from the natural environment for imports to the built environment (our large-scale agricultural operations, cities, and suburbs). Since we construct the built environment so distinctively from the undeveloped natural environment, the concept of import and export applies.
Before the widespread development of the West, almost all water cycled within natural systems. While the total volume of water on Earth remains constant, its quality and distribution are changing for the worse. Suggestions that we double down, dig deeper, and pump more freshwater from the ecosystems to make up for these changes and keep the status quo going are short-sighted and pose serious risks to future generations. We cannot control the supply of water anywhere near to the extent that we can control the demand.
Instead of making thrifty decisions in the past, we chose to live beyond our means, or rather, Nature’s means. As a result, we’ve backed ourselves into a corner and now must make even more difficult decisions than we would have had we committed to conservation from the start. The 23-year megadrought has revealed the thinly-veiled failures of our water policies and put them into stark relief.
We are very pleased that legislators have begun to address these problems by acknowledging that some forms of irrigation are not a beneficial use of water and therefore, not in the public interest. HB 4061 in 2022, and SB 326 and HB 2929 in 2023 do just that. However, this is just a foot in the door; much more must be done.
Prior Appropriation is the nineteenth-century idea miners invented to sort out their bar fights. It’s called Seniority, and it has become an inequitable policy perpetuated by officials’ quiet acquiescence to the inertia of the past and extensive lobbying pressure. This erroneous water use policy is a disservice to the general public because gold and water are incomparable: one is a luxury, and the other is life. Miners who claimed their gold by using a ‘first-in-line‘ policy is fine, but using seniority over who gets to use water that belongs to the public and which all living creatures need is not only reckless, but now appears to be one of the worst policy failures since settlers took water like they did everything else.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that has driven destructive water policies comes with risks to those who benefitted from the inequitable system. We do not believe, however, there’s a fixed amount of pain and suffering that must be passed around like a hot potato as water policies become more equitable; everyone’s civil rights should be protected. We need to cool down the potato. That said, water use by large industrial Ag operations, which have been allowed to use more water than is available, will be curtailed as is already happening in the West.
In Oregon, 86% of all developed water used by humans is for agricultural purposes — all other human uses of water is 14%. This surprising ratio is typical across the West. Furthermore, only 5% of farms account for $4 billion of Oregon’s $5 billion agriculture industry. 95% of all farms are not significant water users; many are small family farms whose products we use regionally.
Concerns in the West include the irrigation of livestock feed exports grown in regions experiencing severe and permanent declines in groundwater and minimum stream flows. We will never wring enough water conservation out of the cities alone; Virtual Water Exports will have to slow down to prevent declines in our water sources and secure our water future.
Here is a detailed essay about problems with current water policies.