Comment by njovin
13 hours ago
There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River.
The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations.
Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change.
When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading.
So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.
How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.