A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 2
Second in a series
“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
- Garrett Hardin
Readers’ views: “Thank you, Jamie, for this new blog. Water and blood, the two most mystical, magical, essential, and interesting of fluids. I would hope that, as all things seem to be coming apart, we return to our ancient and common belief – or in the current vernacular, story – that rivers are sacred.” Warren Burrows
Editor’s Note: I apologize for the redundant sentences and missing word in the first paragraph of Monday’s post. Embarrassing.
“Picture a pasture open to all,” wrote Garrett Hardin a half-century ago in his landmark essay. His pasture, however, is no idyllic meadow where local herdsmen amicably graze their cows, but a place of impending devastation, where it’s in each farmer’s self-interest to pack as many cows as they can onto the communal grass. The resulting “tragedy of the commons,” wrote Hardin, “brings ruin to all.”
He had a point. By treating our commons as a resource to be exploited instead of a public trust to be protected, we threaten to destroy the very thing on which we depend. Nowhere is this more true than with our treatment of rivers and their watersheds, which sustain all life on earth.
Consider all a river provides us: drinking water, electric power, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, recreation, nourishing food, intangible beauty, habitat for wildlife. Hardin describes two types of commons: ‘a food basket,’ from which people take what they need, and ‘a cesspool,’ into which they put what they don’t want. Rivers are both – and more, for people actually take the commons itself, removing ever-increasing quantities of water or diminishing its quality to the point it becomes unusable. It’s as if some of Hardin’s herdsmen crept back into the pasture after dark, dug up the grass, and replanted it in their backyards.
Meredith Sadler designed and drafted the figure.
Given all the diverse claimants to – and uses for – a river’s goods and services, is it possible to protect it both now and for the future . . . so that the commons will be passed on to future generations in the same or better condition than it was inherited from the past.
Start with the premise that (1) almost everybody needs clean fresh water, healthy wetlands, and unpolluted rivers and (2) most of us depend on economies that have long despoiled all three. To stop, or even slow, the decline is a difficult task, but it pales in comparison to trying to restore a river to its more pristine past. Just as damage was caused by a thousand cuts across time and the river’s watershed, so restoration will require tens of thousands of physical, chemical, biological, and political bandages. At the core of the matter are a river’s many constituents who continue to resist cleaning up the messes they and their predecessors have made. For them, the commons is not a public trust. It is a public trough.
The result? Almost half of America’s streams and rivers are in poor condition, particularly the smaller watersheds that provide over 70% of the nation’s water. The cause, of course, is us. For centuries people have dammed and removed more water than our rivers can replenish and have disposed of more waste, toxins, and detritus than our rivers can process. No worries, we said, everything goes downstream – until we discovered that everyone also lives downstream.
Clean fresh water is not free, and it is no more inexhaustible than a pasture’s grass. A river is not a pipe whose function is to deliver water and other products for human consumption. It is an ecosystem in which all life is connected. As the life’s blood of the watersheds through which they flow, all rivers are deeply impacted by human activities. “The health of our waters,” wrote Luna Leopold, “is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”
Much of this post is taken from an article Bern Sweeney and I published in Waterkeeper, Jan. 27, 2021.