Dear HCN,
A
quotation on page 8 of the March 12 issue of HCN
is a beautiful example of a doctrine of priorities that needs to be
re-examined. An officer of the El Paso Water Utilities is quoted as
saying that “Agriculture (which uses water from the Rio Grande)
brings in only $60 million a year in El Paso County. When you look
at the highest and best use of the water, municipal and industrial
use is many times greater.”
This implies that
municipal and industrial use of water is more important than
agricultural use; therefore, municipalities should have the right
to take water away from agriculture. Carried to its logical
conclusion, this doctrine suggests that we could take all of the
water away from agriculture and use the water to operate flush
toilets, etc., in thousands of new homes and industries. The loss
of water would destroy agriculture, and the loss of agriculture
(food) would mean that there would be nothing to flush down the
toilets.
Traditional “Highest and Best Use
Economics” has produced the enormous human problems that are
documented in the story; it has replaced a sustainable agricultural
society with a completely unsustainable society built around money
that can be made by diverting water away from agriculture, which is
inherently sustainable, to use the water to develop an artificial
and unsustainable industrial production complex. Gresham’s
Law (Sir Thomas Gresham, 1519-1579) suggests that if counterfeit
money is circulating along with good money, then people will take
the good money out of circulation and hoard it, while circulating
the counterfeit money as promptly as possible. Thus “Bad money
drives out the good.” Rephrased, the law becomes, “Unsustainable
societies drive out sustainable societies.” This unfortunate
consequence follows directly from the doctrine that municipal and
industrial uses of water are more important than agricultural use.
Albert Allen Bartlett
Boulder, Colorado
The writer is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Water from agriculture to flush what?.
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