by Marilyn Snell, guest blogger
In 1963, my grandfather's Phoenix law-firm partner won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that would forever alter the face of the West. Arizona v. California allocated Colorado River water rights to the lower basin states, making it possible for Arizonans to have lush green lawns and rapid population growth in a desert region not naturally suited to humans and their thirsty ways. The development championed by my grandfather's generation -- and my father's as well -- as the main vehicle of economic growth has come to threaten the very state we all love. In three generations, the world has radically changed. Pro-growth attitudes, alas, have not.
This great divide was brought painfully home recently, when I attended a series of water forums held in Phoenix and Tucson on the occasion of a visit to Arizona by Dr. Jackie King. A freshwater ecologist from South Africa, Dr. King was instrumental in shaping her nation's revolutionary post-apartheid water law. The beauty of this law lies in the fact that each citizen now has a right to enough clean water for survival; it also mandates that a river's ecosystem health must be maintained. After that, all other interests, including agriculture, industry, and electrical generation, must get in line. The bottom line: Basic human needs and environmental health are privileged
Arizona's civic leaders were quick to protest: That may be fine for a developing nation, they suggested, but it would never fly here. The grandmotherly Dr. King responded with a gentle set of questions: "Do you like your water laws?" "Are they the ones you want?" "Is there a possibility of bringing in new values?" Such questions flabbergasted many of the water managers in the audience. One of them responded by lecturing Dr. King on how advanced our water laws are; I couldn't help but wonder at whether part of the problem was that an African was suggesting to Americans that she may have something to teach them.
She does. Will we listen? Each year, the water table below Phoenix shows an 18-million acre-foot deficit. Subsidence problems have cracked and swallowed roadways and damaged houses, yet there's no end in sight to the pumping or to the housing boom there. Arizona is not facing a water crisis down the road; it's in one right now. Climate change will only exacerbate the problem.
Perhaps Dr. King and her colleagues succeeded in changing South Africa's water law because they knew change was possible. After all, the man who signed the legislation and heralded it as a great victory for human rights was President Nelson Mandela. I, for one, would be happy to take such a revolutionary and realistic lesson from the Africans.