Water And The West Is An Ever Evolving Courting

By:  Kevin Trainor/Managing Editor

The American West is a beautiful land of stark contrast.  Of mesas, plateaus, valleys, and flatlands.  It is also a region of divisions when it comes to land.  Federal vs. private mainly.  It is a bitter feud that gets hot from time to time.  Ranchers squaring off against a bevy of D.C.- based administrations and agencies over environmental, conservation, or endangered species concerns.  Want to get on a rancher’s bad side?  Ask his/her opinion on whether wolves require federal protections. The politics of water is not immune to contention. 

Water in the ground can be either publicly, or privately owned.  Water owned by the state is publicly made available in set quantities, and metered accordingly.  Communal water for irrigation, crop production, home use, is captured by methods such as damming and charged to consumers by taxation, or other usage fees.

A law that looms large in the West is an accord that is both judicial, and traditional in origin.  The Rule of Capture provides each landowner the ability to capture as much water as they can put to good use, but they are not guaranteed any set amount.  Well owners are not liable to other land owners for damaging their wells, or taking water from beneath their land.  The rule is in play only if all intents remain benevolent, and not malicious.  This is a popular practice in the West as it reflects the culture, and character of homesteaders.  A drawback is the overproduction of an aquifer system as landowners dig deeper, bigger wells to protect the water right.  Under this, landowners are encouraged to get what they can as quickly as they can.

“Rooster Tails” are popular sights in Idaho every seven years out of ten roughly.  Particularly along the 102 mile Boise River, part of the Snake River tributary system you can see the arcing water along the river way.  A welcome sign signifying some good water levels for the spring irrigation, recreation season.  By later summer water quality suffers from agricultural runoff, and lower levels.  Range, and agricultural demands are stressing the waterway, and the increasing numbers of settlers; many fleeing the failed government that is California, an opinion of many.  So Idaho, a western state most endowed by water resource may start feeling a pinch here, and there.  Yet aquifers continue to be found and explored in areas such as the Payette Valley near the east central Oregon border, and northeast of Boise, in the Sawtooth Natural Forest.  Water has always shaped the history of states.  Certainly California, later southern Nevada, and Arizona, with the highly politicized Colorado River.

The newly created Idaho Water Resource Board is creating a water sustainability plan to manage the state’s 100,000 miles of river water.  Idahoans use more water per person than any state in the union.  The state’s agricultural industry uses the second greatest amount of irrigated water, although they are not second in produce.  Critics of the newly formed board say it is not concerned with decreasing the state’s over-taxed water wasting ways, but just maintaining the status quo.

New water patterns will be present in the state as well.  C

limate change will not necessarily mean less water, but a difference in pattern.  Less snow, more rain, and earlier runoffs will change the water equation.  For aquifers? In the long run, yes.  For surface sources the effects will be more immediate, visual.  The politics of water is less party line, and breaks on issues of availability.  Want to see a region, or state, unite fastly and firmly?  Mess with the Western water flow.