West Texas Water Wars

Not everything is driven by Goldman Sachs.

I've been asking the question why too many 'conservatives' don't get 'conservation.'  I suppose it comes down to the perception of conservation being a movement supported by liberals, and therefore a threat to personal liberties and the promise of 'big government.'  Yeah, I've never understood that either.  We've always been a  good hybrid nation of a socialist and capitalist balancing act, never being ready to really dump one or the other.  There's a reason our greatest engineering marvels that make this nation of capitalist ventures work are  of a design that brings common access to a massive interstate road system, a genius national electric grid that is itself a balancing act, and a complex of water supply networks that allows massive populations to congregate and thrive to pursue their fortunes.  But even those social grids are aging and are limited.  Earth and Time does that to us.  It costs a lot to keep systems running and improving.  Somebody has to pay for it.

The question of ownership and regulation of water is a difficult issue, but treating ownership of water like oil and minerals is a very human error.  Water cycles and is necessary for life.  Accessing trapped oil and minerals is a choice based on human economics. The argument is like they're saying I own the air I breathe or the water out of my sink.  It's not even under common ownership. Cities and states 'own' the land where they impound water for various uses. We're merely tapping and storing what the Earth holds on the surface and charges from springs. But if it's not regulated and conserved, then there's not enough to go around.  The politicians in West Texas are talking about making the water resource last 'as long as possible.'  That indicates to me they've already determined they're out of time.  At some point, farmers using 'unlimited' amounts becomes a question of denying another person the right to exist.  This is when 'libertarianism' - the rule of self-governance - has run its course.  That brand of freedom works great on the frontier where there is plenty.  It does not work when the resources are depleting and it becomes every man - or corporation - for himself. There's only so much supply and too many people for selfishness to thrive.  When we realize our time of plenty is over, perhaps more people will realize that the bumper sticker slogan 'freedom isn't free' doesn't just apply to the lives of our sons in defense of our way of life. It applies to the survival of our sons in the future.  Conservatives, above all, should understand this.

Push Comes To Shove Over Water Restrictions, Kate Galbraith, Texas Tribune via New York Times

"... Water is a contentious issue across Texas, but tensions have been especially high in a 16-county groundwater conservation district stretching from south of Lubbock into the Panhandle, an area considered part of America’s “breadbasket.” There, farmers reliant on the slowly diminishing Ogallala are fighting to maintain their right to pump unrestricted amounts of water. The issue gained urgency last month when a landmark Texas Supreme Court opinion confirmed that landowners own the water beneath their property, in the same way they own the oil and gas.

The ruling opens up water districts like the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District, which covers the 16-county West Texas area and is the largest such district, to litigation from landowners, said Amy Hardberger, a water expert with the Environmental Defense Fund and a visiting professor at Texas Tech University’s School of Law. The West Texas clash, she added, is a “micro-sample of what could be happening all across Texas.”

Texas has nearly 100 groundwater conservation districts, but High Plains has been among the first to limit the amount of water pumped from individual wells, Ms. Hardberger said.

.... High Plains wants to make sure that half of the Ogallala’s water that was available in the district in 2010 remains in 2060. This goal, and the tightening rules, are part of a complex statewide groundwater-management process ordered in recent years by the state Legislature.

“We feel like we’ve built in the rules enough water to be used to grow the crops in our district,” Mr. Conkwright said of the new regulations. “And we feel like it’s just a pretty sensible thing to do and make this last longer and add value to the land longer.”

The situation reflects a basic conundrum in Texas groundwater policy, as it has evolved through the courts and the Legislature: groundwater is owned by landowners, but groups like High Plains can regulate it."

Fundamentals Of Preserving Trees

You know from my perspective trees are an essential part of our society.  They allow us to thrive in our communities and support a quality of life that makes living in an urban setting bearable.  If I was looking for only preservation, I suppose I should be moving next to a Wilderness Area or something.  No, the best options we can attain in a city are to derive some form of 'conservation' that will allow for a balance between development and preservation.  

However, to attain any kind of balance you have to give both pathways (development and preservation) an equal setting. The result is some form of conservation.  Many cities tend not to do this but favor the economic engine to fuel rapid growth instead of considering the implications of planning for the long haul and extended generations of future residents.  Where development is allowed to determine its own path without any regard for the intentions of the citizens to protect the scenic vistas, or trees of historic nature, then 'mistakes' are made.  Decisions are based solely on current economic persuasion or, even worse, the whims of a single land owner.  Economic growth is not infinite.  Greed is a human condition. Bad habits are hard to break. We are only human after all.  Boys will be boys, etc. etc.  We know all of the arguments of why things will always continue the way they always continue.  'It was a mistake and it will never happen again.'  Yeah.

Sure, land ownership is important.  But one of the fundamentals we must remember is that a city is a community of many land owners and what one person does on their land can have immediate and significant impacts to the quality of life of everyone else.  In rural Texas, the issues are not so apparent unless you decide to build a lead smelter or pig farm on the headwaters of the local water tributary. In the city, we create regulations to control - or balance - the importance of quality of life for the long term.  When what was expected to be a wooded green view with hills, trees, and running water becomes a parking lot, shopping center and buried storm water system, you have to suspect the balance no longer remains, if it ever existed at all.  When someone 'decides' to build a grandiose development that will take down an important historic tree - a landmark - of significance to the community, you can just say, oh well.  It's his right.  The tree is gone.  It will be forgotten.  'They'll get over it.'  

We always get over it.

Some people are good at talking preservation, but not at doing it.  Some people disregard the rules of tree preservation altogether by ignorance or by willful taking. Accountability to your community is a fundamental aspect to all citizens, from the high council member to the homeless person in the alley.  As good or bad as the fortunes have  provided for you, there are still rules of conduct to respect.  You're not supposed to steal.  You're not supposed to kill.  Use what you need, but help your neighbor. These are very real fundamental rules that apply to each of us.  Protecting our laws - and the intent of those laws - is also very fundamental.  Unfortunately, intentions are not always placed in ordinances that protect areas like floodplains, wetlands, and vistas.  Fortunately, intentions were placed in the Dallas tree ordinance.  The test for the intended ordinance is if the heart and the basic rules of conservation (development + preservation) are also behind it.

It is a fundamental rule of tree preservation to know the rules and to live by them.  Failure to do so negates the rules you have applied for your community and makes them empty words.  This is fundamental to human civilization.  The decision for the community is this: to live by the law, or to destroy the law.  Living in the grey world between is a false purpose if you're willing to compromise a law to the point of negating it.

Remember that we share our trees with our neighbors just as we share the air they produce. They share our soils and our water and even our breath. The shade of your neighbor's tree impacts your life in more ways than you're probably contemplating right now.  Trees (and Nature) are what bind all of us together though we are divided by our own fences and imagined lines drawn on paper.  We separate ourselves by law, but Nature binds us back together by an even greater law.  The rules we apply to preserve our contact to this greater purpose must be sustained or we lose ourselves behind our fences, our doors, our judicial courts and human weaknesses.  Help protect your trees and vistas.  But also protect your laws that protect your trees and vistas.  

A Little Lorax History....

Great great grandfather Rhett Erwin spoke for the trees.  

Truth be told, there was no 'Rhett' Erwin.  However, history has observed that when my ancestor moved with his family from Washington Township in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, the whole district's forest was in the process of being completely wiped out.  The saw mills ran full and fast until the early 20th century.  The old growth is long gone except for tiny pockets here and there.  What you would see today is second generation new forest where Nature restores itself over time if the land is not consumed by the Once-ler.

The story continued for the Erwin's as they left the township in the middle of the 19th century and ventured west. They eventually settled into the plains of southeastern Nebraska.  But they knew the value of trees in many ways - especially economics. My great grandfather Robert partnered up with his father-in-law Elihu P. Phillips ("Phillips and Erwin") and grew an apple orchard in a part of Johnson County they called Spring Creek from which their apples were distributed throughout the area.

Source:  History of Lycoming County, Wikipedia, Publication 'Edna Mae' and 1885 Nebraska State Atlas

And So It Came With The Passage Of Time....

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.   - Aldo Leopold

19th century one room schoolhouse in Spring Creek, Nebraska.  Time and the elements will consume it, but not human expansionism.

I guess time changes all things.  Time changes minds. People tend to be forgetful as to why they did something in the first place.  I'm becoming a bit of an expert on the effects of time on generations of families through my genealogy studies (which have taken me away from time for writing you in this blog) where I see relationships dissolved by distance - measured in miles and time. We are slow to gain from the experiences of those who came before us as we continue to make the same mistakes as our ancestors. It can be challenged that we have actually improved beyond the progress of our grandfathers as physical or social beings.  Our own inability to broadly grasp simple concepts like a land ethic shows us far inferior to our potential. For humans, evolution of technology may be vast, but our own ability to take forward steps as living beings on this earth is minimal and painfully slow. I recognize that I shall also always remain forever ignorant to the meaning of time by the limitations of human knowledge of our universe.

As time passes, our interests change as well.  We stop paying attention to certain things that once drove our passions, believing that those things in Nature we once defended are well tended to by whatever caretaker laws or regulations we left for them. We begin to pay more attention to things of more vital need to ourselves and our families.  Life is about survival after all.  Our goals change. Our values may even be altered by our own self-interest or, in the reverse, the desire to better the community. But we get so easily distracted in our constantly moving environment.  We are a transitioning people in an ever changing world.  We perceive of it what makes us most comfortable just to cope with it.

So, it should never surprise you to find that there are places where the protections you thought were to last forever no longer exist, or are under threat of extinction.  They can quietly and systematically be dismantled one day at a time for the benefit of those who would seek to profit where the community had before sought preservation. In time, what was perceived as preserved is gone.  It's the nature of human expansionism.

The Austin Chronicle recently reported on an effort in that Texas city to 'mitigate' the existing Heritage Tree Ordinance to 'allow for more density Downtown, and perhaps beyond.' Apparently, the Plan Commission had denied a developer's request to remove a tree to build a condominium.  God forbid. So, in an effort to 'mitigate' the protection of worthy trees so a developer can build downtown, the Environmental Board and said Plan Commission are seeking ways to adjust the ordinance to compromise for development in the central district.  For many, this may seem fair. But the compromise becomes more than compromise.  Perceptions of fairness are lost in the fact that, yet again, a high principle of our best intentions is laid low to the goals of greed and human expansion.

However, we know how this would end.  It wouldn't. There would always be more reasons to remove another protected tree in the way of a development.  Next time, it may not be Downtown.  Then the compromise begins again.

Compromising preservation regulations becomes a habit when economic value is attached to the effort and overrides the principle that life is good. It becomes easier to look past the purpose of the regulation in the first place when the lords of economic development pushes growth over conservation. As engineers place pen to paper, the trees and the land become simple blank spaces in the mind of a paper pusher and planners.  They become a salary for a bulldozer operator.  They become  devoid of life through the construction contractor as impervious surfaces destroy living soil environments and cast the wildlife to the remnants.  In the eyes of humans who do not understand the land or the Nature on which they give and take preservation laws, the law itself is wasteful - and therefore becomes temporary until the next best deal comes along.

So, the question comes back to you.  What are your values?  What ethic do you follow?  Do you still think the way you did twenty or thirty years ago when, as they did in Austin, you created a law to preserve a 'heritage' tree or a view?  Do you see compromise as better than preservation?  For the tree, there is no compromise if it is the life in question.  It is, or it isn't. It lives or dies.  Its value to you is what is in question. Your ability as a sensual and intellectual being to reason right and wrong, and life and death, is what is in question.  Your ability, or lack of it, is shared by your ancestors.  Again, we are no better than they. We just have better toys.  Some of them just knew that our trees had value as well, which is not in the least understood by industrialists.

The true question you must ask yourself:  Is the aged tree worthy of my futile dream of preservation?  Your 'preservation' exists only in words if not followed by your perpetual action to sustain it.  

Teddy says....

BULLY!!

January 24, 2012: Looking Forward

 

As usual, the Republicans are falsely accusing the president of one thing or another and consistently misrepresenting his policies and record. After awhile, you'd think even the gullible would stop listening to the boy crying 'wolf' at the GOP podium and airwaves. This being the same boy who was raised by the wolves and was paid off for protection and information on where to find the sheep.  I'm sure they'll lay into Obama that he's hurting jobs and energy production with the current Keystone decision.  Listen to them if you want, but please tone down the 'baaa'. You're just sending up flares to your whereabouts.

January 23 News: America's Oil Production Grew Faster Than Any Country In The Last Three Years, Climate Progress  (Wall Street Journal)

"Federal forecasters are expected to confirm on Monday what the energy industry already knows: Oil production is surging in the U.S.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration is likely to raise by a substantial amount its existing estimate that U.S. oil production will grow by 550,000 barrels per day by 2020, to just over six million barrels daily.

The forecast will include new production data from developing oil fields, including the Bakken shale area in North Dakota, which could hold as much of 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil. North Dakota’s output of oil and related liquids topped 500,000 barrels per day in November, meaning that the state pumped more oil than Ecuador. In fact, U.S. oil production grew faster than in any other country over the last three years and will continue to surge as drillers move away from natural gas due to a growing gas glut, experts say. The glut has sent natural-gas prices to a 10-year low.

The three oil giants will post billions more in profits than they did in the fourth quarter of 2010, thanks to higher oil prices."

The Alarming Outlook For Urban Water Scarcity, Climate Progress

Ocean Acidity Rise Unprecedented In Past 21,000 Years, Researchers Say, Yale Environment 360

Value of Conserving Habitats Could Be Worth $500B To World's Poor, Yale Environment 360 (re: Fiona Harvey, The Guardian)

"Some of the world's poorest people would be half a trillion dollars a year better off if the services they provide to the rest of the planet indirectly – through conserving natural habitats – was given an economic value, a new study has found.

Many of these valuable habitats and species are under threat, but the people who live in these areas lack the means to improve their conservation, according to a new study in the journal BioScience.

If poor people were paid for the services they provide in preserving some of the world's key biodiversity hotspots, they could reap $500bn. There are some fledgling schemes that could help to raise this cash – for instance, the United Nations-backed system called Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), which uses carbon trading to generate cash to preserve trees – but so far they are small in scale.

The benefits of safeguarding these habitats, such as providing valuable services from food, medicines and clean water to absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, are more than triple the costs of conserving them, the researchers found.

Will Turner, vice–president of Conservation International and lead author of the study, said: "Developed and developing economies cannot continue to ask the world's poor to shoulder the burden of protecting these globally important ecosystem services for the rest of the world's benefit, without compensation in return. This is exactly what we mean when we talk about valuing natural capital. Nature may not send us a bill, but its essential services and flows, both direct and indirect, have concrete economic value."

He said that preserving areas of highest biodiversity should be the priority. "What the research clearly tells us is that conserving the world's remaining biodiversity isn't just a moral imperative - it is a necessary investment for lasting economic development. But in many places where the poor depend on these natural services, we are dangerously close to exhausting them, resulting in lasting poverty," said Turner.

Many of the benefits of conservation, so-called "ecosystem services", are invisible – for instance, maintaining wooded land can help to prevent mudslides during heavy rainfall, and provides valuable watersheds that keep rivers healthy and provide clean drinking water, as well as absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. These benefits are not assigned an economic value, however, so that chopping down trees or destroying habitats appears to deliver an instant economic return, when in fact it is leading to economic losses that are only obvious when it is too late."