Discuss: Fluid Values: Battles Over Water Rights
Matt Jenkins, author of "Fluid Values: Battles Over Water Rights," has deep experience as a reporter and editor covering resource battles around the American West. Over the next few weeks, he’ll share his thoughts and discoveries here about communities that are navigating those battles effectively —Eds.
Water—and other natural resources—are increasingly valued for their role in maintaining the ecological integrity of the planet, rather than simply as a means to human prosperity. The Klamath Basin is just one of many communities that are struggling to cope with the human costs as “resource-extractive” economies are forced to adapt to 21st century environmental concerns.
The struggle in the Klamath highlights a major challenge now confronting both environmentalism and the nation at large: How do we find equitable ways to resolve the human costs of the transition to more ecologically enlightened economies? And what responsibility does society at large have to help what Joseph Sax has termed the “casualties of a changing world”?
The communities that are confronting these questions range from logging towns in New England, the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest, to fishing communities on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, to ranching areas throughout the West. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting comments here on the experiences of various communities that are trying to work out resource problems like those found in the Klamath Basin. I’ll also be noting arguments for a broader, society-wide commitment to assisting these communities in transition.
More important, however, this is a space to share your own experiences, ask questions, and offer comments on how (to paraphrase Joe Sax) everybody can take a little piece of this—or even whether everybody should.
—Matt Jenkins
25 comments
25 Erik Hoffner on Jan 16, 2008
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Big development on this topic from Tidepool.org today: “The decades-old disputes between advocates for fish and the farmers who are their historic adversaries appeared to dissolve as almost all of 26 user groups, tribes and governments involved backed a plan to allocate the waters of a dam-free river. But the agreement lacks one vital link: a decision by the dams’ owner, PacifiCorp Power, to agree to their removal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/us/16klamath.html
Erik
Orion Grassroots Network