http://www.alternet.org/water/136477/the_l...illegal/?page=1


The Latest Absurdity in the Fight to Conserve Water: Making Rainwater Harvesting Illegal

By Yee Huang , Center for Progressive Reform. Posted April 13, 2009.

Absurd laws are challenging the collection in some states, while others are embracing the practice.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times described the latest absurdity in the never-ending search to quench the thirst for water: ownership of rainwater and, more precisely, the illegality of rainwater harvesting. Residents and communities in parts of Colorado are turning to this ancient practice of collecting and storing rain to fulfill their domestic water needs, including flushing toilets and watering lawns. Using this “grey” water, as it is called, relieves pressure on water resources and can be extremely efficient.

Many long-time water users, however, object to the practice.

These so-called water buffaloes argue that people who collect rainwater are taking away from their water by collecting the water before it has a chance to flow into a river from which they obtain water. Effectively, they argue, the rainwater belongs to them – they own the rain that falls from the sky as part of their water allocation, even though 97 percent of the rainfall that falls on soil does not reach a river. The bad news? The law in Colorado stands behind those water buffaloes.

Like most states west of the one-hundredth meridian, Colorado follows the doctrine of prior appropriation to allocate water. For all water uses that are non-domestic, a person must have a water right. Water rights are assigned a priority date, which is the date that the water use was initiated.

Under prior appropriation, these senior water users – many of whom have rights dating back to the 1800’s – have priority in times of water shortages based on the date of their initiation. Their water allocation is fulfilled before any junior users, who are often left with a nominal amount of water. People who harvest rainwater are “interfering” with the priority system by jumping ahead of all the senior users, who have the first right to use the water.

This dogmatic adherence to temporal priority blocks efforts to acquire water rights for newer or more efficient uses, such as in-stream conservation and recreation. These uses, initiated relatively recently, will always be subordinate to older, more consumptive uses.

Ownership of water has always been a tenuous proposition. Water and water rights linger on the perimeter of traditional property rights, eluding the solid “property” categorization of items like land or salad bowls. Individual water molecules cannot be marked or identified, and water is in constant motion, swirling below, above, and around the earth in the global hydrologic cycle. More significantly, water is survival for the vast array of living creatures on this planet, so privatizing the world’s most precious liquid would necessarily create a divide between haves and have-nots.

Whether or not water is definitively property has great legal implications for constitutional and civil claims, and courts have not given clear or consistent guidance. If, for example, water is considered a property right and the government required reduced water delivery to irrigators under the Endangered Species Act, those irrigators might have a valid claim for compensation under a Fifth Amendment takings claim. CPR Member Scholar Dan Tarlock blogged about this specific issue here. Categorizing water as a private property right also facilitates the commodification of water, which often ignores the common public interest in water quantity, quality, and viability.

Many water rights are colored by the public trust doctrine, which holds that certain natural resources cannot be privately owned and instead must be held in trust by the government for the use and benefit of the public. This doctrine, an inherent component of a water right, tends to support the argument that water is not a matter of private property. As inexpensive supplies of water dwindle, how water is viewed as a private property will become increasingly important to water allocation and priorities.

In other parts of the West, states are exploring the idea of rainwater harvesting. Santa Fe, New Mexico, became the first city to require by ordinance rainwater harvesting on all new residential or commercial structures of a certain size. Tucson, Arizona, became the first city to require rainwater harvesting to provide 50 percent of landscape-irrigation needs. Even Colorado has reconsidered its position, recently passing a bill that permits extremely limited instances of rainwater harvesting. It remains illegal for most individual residents to harvest rainwater.

Given an increase in population and per capita consumption, coupled with water needs to restore and maintain aquatic ecosystems, perhaps those water buffaloes need to lower their horns and let other creatures sip from the limited watering holes in the West.

Keep a wary eye on T. Boone Pickens. My gut tells me water rights is what he's really after while he's making us look up at windmills.

I recently saw a documentary about the water problems and in it was a section that showed Pickens with a map of the vast areas of property he had the water rights on.

Nestle Water is another one to watch. They bottle under many different names and their actions have to make them close to if not the worst.

http://yubanet.com/california/Nestle-Asked...er-Supplies.php

Nestle Asked to Stop Fooling With Community Water Supplies
Nestle making yet another pass at Mt. Shasta water; annual shareholders' meeting April 23rd

Published on Apr 16, 2009 - 8:16:47 AM

By: Corporate Accountability International

BOSTON, April 1, 2009 - In the lead-up to Nestle's annual shareholders' meeting this April 23rd, a storm is gathering around the business practices of the world's largest water bottler. Communities across the country have long been engaged in struggles with the bottling giant over control of local water resources. Now many of these struggles are coming to a head and a national campaign called Think Outside the Bottle is using April Fools Day to call on the corporation to, "stop fooling with community water supplies."

"For years Nestle employed a range of tactics to wrest water rights from rural communities and downstream users, keeping its abuses out of sight and out of mind to the public," said Deborah Lapidus, campaigns director for Corporate Accountability International. "Well, affected communities have now made it clear there is a pattern that needs to stop."

To begin bottling in communities, Nestle has been engaged in everything from costly public relations campaigns and legal challenges to backroom deals for water rights. For example:

Public relations to pump. This year, several Maine communities passed ordinances to protect community water rights. Their victory was significant, given that just a few years earlier, Nestle pumped more than $200,000 to front groups that successfully attacked and defeated similar, statewide measures in the media.

Draining community resources in more ways than one. When communities in Michigan challenged Nestle's right to drain hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every day, the corporation waged a drawn out court battle to maintain its access to water. The protracted legal struggle has burdened community members with costly legal fees , exhausting the community's resources to challenge water withdrawals.

Behind closed doors, Nestle is now making yet another pass at Mt. Shasta water after backroom negotiations with county officials precipitated a six year struggle. In 2003, Nestle negotiated a deal to pay a little less than 1/100th of a cent per gallon for at least 50 years, before any public meeting or knowledge of the project.

"When one tactic fails, Nestle changes things up and tries another," said Anne Wentworth, of Protect Our Water and Wildlife Resources in Shapleigh, Maine. "What doesn't change is the resolve of our communities to keep water under local control. We know all too well what happens when that changes."

In Florida, Nestle has a record of being cited for exceeding water extraction limits, and has sought to increase the amount of water it extracts from local water sources, even when there is concern about local water resources. For example, outside of Tampa, FL, Nestle once pushed to quadruple its daily water extraction from local sources from 300,000 to almost 2 million gallons a day -- even when nearby cities were adopting water conservation measures during a time of drought.

There are also the environmental consequences. Nestle has skirted necessary environmental reviews in California and communities from Maine to Michigan have observed declining surface water levels.

"What's most insidious is that this corporation uses public relations to create a divide between what really happens at the source and what people think of Nestle downstream," said Terry Swier of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation in Mecosta County, Michigan. "Well, that divide is closing today in markets hundreds of miles from bottling plants."

In the market, Nestle wants to be seen as an "environmental steward" and pumps millions in to advertising its lighter weight bottles -- a deflection from its environmental abuses in communities and the amount of waste and energy water bottling generates...regardless of the thickness of the plastic. The corporation has, in fact, a long track record of opposing bottle recycling bills across the country for fear that fees on its product will curb consumption and cut into its profits -- only recently shifting its position to support ‘modified' bottle bills that are more friendly to the beverage industry.

Nestle would also like to be seen as "community involved" and a good "corporate citizen," sponsoring marathons and sports teams - a means of positioning bottled water at civic events, where waste conscious athletes would be content with paper cups and tap water coolers.

For more information on Nestle, Think Outside the Bottle and Exposing Nestle visibility events in a city near you, visit www.ThinkOutsidetheBottle.org. (Note - this is the address in the article but it leads to the site below which is it's home.)

http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/content/...outside-bottle/

Nestle. The only bottled water I've ever had that tasted bad.

I'm going back to filtered tap anyway to keep the plastic outta the landfill.

Rent the movie "Flow" if you're ever in Hollywood Video. It caught my eye while there. Interesting.

Thanks for the lead TNblue. I located Flow and found it extremely well done and informative. Scary to think we allow the conduct of these massive water companies to continue legally. Life in prison is too good for these greedy, incentive a**holes who are completely void of even the slightest bit of compassion for anyone or anything but themselves and their profit.

They have destroyed the way of life in cities (Mexico City is an excellent example), sucked the blood out of vast areas of once vibrant countryside and shown a complete disregard for entire countries.

Now they are basically trying to tell us that the only way we have a right to what naturally falls from the sky or what flows freely under the ground we stand on is if we buy it from them. And even worse... many of our courts and others throughout the world agree with them.

It's time to stop all bottled water and shut down those who have and would deprive mankind of what nature provides. Not only do the plastic bottles wreck havoc on the environment but the water is no cleaner than tap water (most of it is nothing more than tap water). To say these people legally own the worlds water supply is insane but that is exactly what many courts are saying. Think about it... what better way to enslave the population of the world that to own all of it's water.

These people who would do this should be strapped to a rocket and launched into the Sun with the understanding that they can claim all the water they find there.

That being said here is an article about harvesting rainwater with an upside.


http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/gsif.ra...ions/index.html

updated 5:17 p.m. EDT, Fri April 17, 2009

Rainwater represents half of all the water that Los Angeles needs

By Gabe Ramirez
CNN

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Andy Lipkis was 15 years old on the first Earth Day in 1970 -- the year he says he realized what his calling in life would be.

Exploding populations from Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, to suburban Los Angeles have turned the issue of water supply from problem to crisis. "The way we use water is so wasteful and so inappropriate today, according to the California Water Plan, there is already so much demand for water, it already exceeds supply," says Lipkis.

And human consumption isn't the only problem, because as cities grow, so does the amount of pavement and concrete that seals the natural watersheds. That in turn prevents rainwater from refreshing underground aquifers, nature's water tanks. And rainwater is exactly what Lipkis is hoping people will start to think about.

Right now, building codes in Los Angeles County, as in most parts of the country, require rainwater to be moved from rooftops to the street. As a result, even in mostly sunny southern California, a massive amount of water gets flushed into storm drains every year.

"When it rains an inch," Lipkis says, "Los Angeles hemorrhages 7.6 billion gallons of water."

Part of the solution to the water crisis, he says, is collecting as much rainwater as possible because "it represents half or more of all the water we need in this big city."

Lipkis and the TreePeople imagine a time when as many as a million homes and businesses have rainwater cisterns all electronically networked and ready to provide treated drinking water to the public.

Lipkis points out that cisterns are not a new idea. If fact, civilizations throughout history have used cisterns to collect rainwater. Cisterns exist now as part of building codes in places like Bermuda, which lack fresh water resources such as lakes or rivers. Lipkis believes it's an idea whose time has come here in the deserts of the West. Watch how rainwater cisterns work »

TreePeople, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, has built five demonstration sites in Los Angeles, which include a large hilltop cistern at the organization's Coldwater Canyon Park headquarters.

"When it rains an inch," Lipkis said, "those five little projects capture 1.25 million gallons."

And it is all that free water that has government agencies thinking about rain.

In Los Angeles, storm runoff presents many problems. When it rains heavily the water goes from the streets into the canals of the Los Angeles River and straight into the ocean. With that runoff is all the garbage and toxic pollutants picked up along the way.

Another problem, Lipkis argues, is the heavy reliance on the almost 100-year-old California Aqueduct, which routes water from the Eastern Sierras. His main concern is the incredible amount of energy that is spent moving water.

"We're bringing water in from hundreds of miles away. Moving water and using water," he says, "consumes, overall, 19 percent of all the electricity in the state and one-third of the natural gas."

That is the single largest use of electricity in the state, which happens to be the most populous in the country and which, were it an independent nation, would be the eighth-largest economy in the world. That's quite a carbon footprint.

Lipkis believes a hybrid water management system is the best solution, one that would include cisterns, natural watershed management and existing water infrastructure, including a less power hungry aqueduct. And perhaps most importantly, it would include the cooperation of water supply agencies, flood control agencies and sanitation agencies, which he believes have done too much conflicting, single-purpose cost-benefit analyses in the past.


Lipkis sees only an upside to a large-scale cistern and rainwater infiltration project, and not only because of the environmental benefits. A study in the late 1990s conducted by TreePeople estimated up to 50,000 new jobs that would be created by a sustainable infrastructure system.

"Why would we invest billions of dollars on old infrastructure we know doesn't work anymore?" he asks. "It's very important to start putting this new alternative on the table."

Cool! Glad you liked the movie, al001.

Here's a link to a nice EPA brochure on the basics of bottled water. Bottled water is not not necessarily safer than tap unless it's been treated by one of several methods. Plus, it costs more per gallon than gasoline. Think about it.

http://www.epa.gov/safewater/faq/pdfs/fs_h...bottlewater.pdf

Oh! It's raining now. Gotta stick my head out, open my mouth, and steal some water. Shhhh....don't tell. ;)

:lol: Isn't that the most outrageous thing you've ever heard? People thinking they own rain water???? :blink:

It reminds me of years ago, in some places, there were public restrooms here that actually charged people to go in the stall. You had to put a dime in the slot for the stall to open. Well, I remember one time a friend of my mother's had to go to the restroom badly and didn't have her purse with her, so she ended up crawling under the stall to get in. :laugh: You would have had to know her to know how hilarious that was!! :lol:

ETA - I'm going to have to look for that movie as well. It is scary to think that these companies and others think they can actually claim dibs over things that nature provides us with. :!:

Bottled water is insidious, and most people really don't think of the harm done not just from all the plastic, but from all the energy used to transport water that we could get from just opening a tap. I would be open to considering a tax on bottled water and an public service campaign to encourage people to drink tap water.

And of course Al is spot on in regards to companies that want to make harvesting rainwater illegal.

Is it a coincidence that there's an ad for "Rain Water Tanks" at the bottom of this thread right now?

Kinda creepy. :unsure:

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/general/majorwater/

Who are the major water companies?

The two largest water corporations in the world are part of French transnational Suez and German energy conglomerate RWE. Ranked 79th and 78th among Fortune's Global 100 List, these two water giants capture nearly 40 percent of the existing water market share. The French company, Vivendi, previously ranked 51st has dropped off the list, but remains a strong contender. These multinationals are now gaining a foothold in the United States, where they operate through a number of subsidiaries.

Suez operates in 130 countries and Vivendi in over 100; their combined annual revenues are over $70 billion (including $19 billion in water and wastewater services). RWE revenues are currently over $50 billion (energy included), having acquired British water giant Thames Water. After purchasing American Water Works, RWE gained control of the largest U.S. private water utility. This expanded its customer base from 43 million to 56 million people. Other major water corporations include Bechtel, Biwater plc, Bouygues/Saur, U.S. Water, Severn Trent, Anglian Water, and the Kelda Group.

NEWS ALERT: This just in! Insurance giant American International Group acquires small water utilities across the U.S.

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/general/majorwater/suez/

Suez-Ondeo/United Water

Suez has 125 million customers in 40 countries with subsidiaries such as Ondeo and United Water. Their 2002 revenue was €6.4 billion which makes it the largest water corporation in the world. But the company is racked with debt, with a net loss in 2002 of $950 million, and continues to lose profits every quarter. Suez has lost several of its high profile contracts, such as Atlanta (US) and Puerto Rico and been forced to re-negotiate contracts in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Manila (the Philippines). It is no longer profitable being a shareholder of this multinational corporation. But nothing is as bad as being one of their customers. Suez has been scrambling to do whatever it takes to turn its financial fortunes around. That means that as water divisions Ondeo and United Water grab control of a city’s water system, a top priority is cutting costs, because low costs mean higher revenues. So, Suez slashes water system staffs to inadequate levels, fails to perform necessary maintenance, tries to delay or avoid altogether any costly infrastructure investments, screams for higher rates, more money from government or both, and blames public officials, or just the public, for all the company’s problems. Customers end up paying more for less.