So water isn't a human right eh? And you want land rights and water rights to be separate eh? Has it ever occurred to anyone that making major changes to the environment has serious issues to the surrounding ecology and society at large? I was reading this article about how this poor shmuck from Oregon gets ordered by the local government to destroy his own pond. They want him to destroy a major ecological land mark on his own property because he doesn't have the right paperwork, a pond that much of the local ecology is dependent on, and won't allow the local municipality to adopt it either because it would undermine local statutes and standards. In short they want to destroy it because of beaurocracy.
Now let's put aside the fact that this whole situation is bloody insane. It's insane to sell just the topsoil when you sell a chunk of land and not the water rights with it. It's insane to order the destruction of an important ecological landmark for the sake of a statute or unfiled form that didn't exist when the landmark, in this case a pond, was created. And it's definitely insane, not to mention bigoted, to get all riled up about this only after the guy wants to start growing his own medical marijuana when you've previously ignored the situation. But let's deal with these insanities shall we?
Why not just let him buy the water rights to the land instead of draining the pond? If he's going to put out money it makes more sense to just buy the water rights. If it's a case of paperwork then just pay to fill out the forms and have done.
If the pond can't be adopted as a municipal water source because it doesn't measure up to code maybe rig it so it becomes a SOURCE for a municipal water source that DOES measure up to code. Clearly state the standards that need to be met and then build a second resevoir that meets those standards and is filled from the pond.
Is there no local environmental agency able to lay claim to the pond or help with the water rights?
Is it not in the municipality's best interest to care for the local flora and fauna?
Instead of having such individuals destroy their water sources why not tax them for ongoing revenue over time. The pond isn't going anywhere, it seems such a waste to have them destroy it. If the government "owns" the water then why not tax citizens on collected water rather than have them relinquish it? It's ridiculous at least the pond would still EXIST and habitat would be preserved.
It's bad enough when government wants to control water but when they do it inefficiently and wastefully? That's just sad. This is another reason to plan ahead when buying land. You aren't just buying land but need to consider also buying the water and mining rights too. But I think there is something seriously wrong when the order is given to arbitrarily destroy the environment because of paperwork.
Up here in Canada Nestle is screwing us the opposite way. Here in B.C. public water is free, it's a public resource but that also means big corporations like Nestle end up sucking up that natural resource without paying the province or it's citizens a cent and then selling it back to us, and everyone else, at inflated prices in the form of bottled water. You can read more about this here. In our case what was intended to be viewed as a public resource meant for everyone's use is being privatized by a single corporation and the profits centralized, and an American one at that!
It is becoming quite clear that water is an extremely valuable resource and can, and will be, privatized but I do not think that it should be up to the government to dictate who and who cannot have water. Nor do I think that if you want to use water in a public area that you should have to pay royalties to some major corporation. I still believe water in general should be ownerless. But if you suck it up for sale then, just like gold, you need to pay for it at value. To put it another way if you are using the water then it's being returned to the land; If you drink it then you pee it right back out, if you farm with it then it goes back onto your fields. But if you harvest it for sale you aren't using it. You're transporting it and selling it to someone else, and taking that water OUT of the cycle. If you take a couple hundred liters out of Canada and sell it to the states that's negative a couple hundred liters from Canada and possitive to the U.S. ecosystems. Shouldn't Canada as a whole be compensated? Likewise if you transport water from the states and sell it to Canada shouldn't the U.S. ecosystem be compensated? Sure Nestle could make a profit but that has to be on top of compensating whoever they bought the water from.
So for me it's not so much the concept of water privatization that bothers me. Water has extreme intrinsic value. We can't go more than 3 days without it. The problem for me is that, like the case in Oregon, in many places the government wants CONTROL of water. It's also the fact the government is willing to destroy habitat, not only human habitat but animal habitat as well, thus endangering the general ecology, in order to maintain that control. But as we can see from the Nestle in B.C. example allowing businesses to run rampant can also have a detrimental affect on the environment. So this is why i say it's more about considering the price of water in a given geographic area. It doesn't matter if whoever manages this price is public or private, or even an open source DAO, but what is important is if you take x amount of resources from an area you compensate the area somehow, either financially or materialistically, before you are allowed to take the resources out of the area. But if one is simply collecting water for their own personal use on their own land, that water clearly isn't going anywhere and so clearly the government, or anyone else, should not get involved.