Javan Briggs
Water is life, writes Javan Briggs. And it belongs to all of us. California's water shortage is caused, not by 'drought', but by massive long term over-pumping. And as the crisis worsens, the response under the 'water as property' model is just to pump all the harder. We must manage water as a commons - to sustain us all, not to profit the few.
Water - it's a big topic for small town talk all around central California.
Madera, some 30 miles west of the state's geographic center, is a hot and arid farming community in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.
At a run-down neighborhood convenience store situated at the corner of two dusty farm roads surrounded by modest homes and lush crops, after-work chit chat inevitably turns to water. Locals shake their heads while remarking that this area has always been known for its easily accessible groundwater.
Yet every day, new residential wells are going dry while large corporate farms continue to drain groundwater at breakneck speed to keep water-rich mega-crops flourishing like almonds and grapes - or to sell it to the highest bidder.
Why are corporate profits trumping community rights to water? Shouldn't those most affected by corporate misappropriation of groundwater resources be the ones to decide their water future?
Dry wells have become so common that residents are forced to devise extreme measures to supply water for basic cooking and hygiene. In measures that were once unthinkable, hoses run through windows between neighbors' homes, pumping water from large storage tanks filled by trucks.
It's about the money - lots of it
Some families have to rely on store-bought bottled water or hauling gallons of the stuff home in the back of their pickups. Most can't afford the $13,000-25,000 price tag to drill a new well. But even for residents with means, waiting lists for residential well drilling are 6-12 months long, partly because of competition from corporate farms who bring in higher-paying well-drilling jobs.
Agricultural wells, which are deeper than residential wells, can cost $500,000 or more, but even at that price, cash crops for export like almonds still remain money-makers.
Suree Towfighnia / Waging NonViolence
The impending renewal of the license for a uranium mine in Nebraska has ignited a years long resistance among those - most of them women - for whom good health and safe, clean water in the Ogallala aquifer is as important as life itself, writes Suree Towfighnia. But for others, jobs and money come first. Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must reach its decision.
With a population of around 1,000 people, the rural town of Crawford, Nebraska was an unlikely setting for a federal hearing hydrologists and lawyers - all of whom have been fighting the permit renewal of a uranium mine located in town.
But it became the site of one in late August thanks to the dogged determination of a group of Lakota and environmental activists, as well as geologists, hydrologists and lawyers - all of whom have been fighting the permit renewal of a uranium mine located in town.
The region is ripe with stories from the brutal Indian wars, when Lakota and neighboring tribes fought over western expansion.
Today, this intersection of frontier America and Native resistance is a battleground in the war between environmental advocates and energy corporations, only this time allies from all sides are joining forces in the effort to protect their water.
The Crow Butte Resources, or CBR, uranium mine is comprised of thousands of wells at the base of Crow Butte, a sacred site located within Lakota treaty territories.
For the past couple of decades CBR has mined uranium using the in situ leach process, which injects water under high pressure into aquifers, extracts uranium ore, and then processes it into yellow cake.
Each year 700,000 pounds of uranium is produced here and shipped to Canada, where it is sold on the open market. CBR has applied for a permit renewal and expansions to three neighboring sites.
Pure water must be protected at all costs
Cindy Meyers, a rancher and resident of central Nebraska, drove four hours to attend evidentiary hearings regarding the renewal of the mine's permit. It's not unusual for Meyers to travel with her own water, which she gets directly from a well on her land that's tapped into the Ogallala aquifer - considered the largest, underground freshwater source in the world, covering eight states from South Dakota to Texas.
CBR uses the same Ogallala water to mine the uranium. "I keep bottles of the aquifer water in a cooler in my car", Meyers said. "This is what water is supposed to taste like. We call it sweet water." She notes the absence of a chemical taste often found in other drinking water.
Cindy shares a large jar with her ally Debra White Plume. The two women met during their work to stop the Keystone XL pipeline in 2011. Both women share an understanding that once water is contaminated it can't be restored and a belief that pure water is worth protecting at all costs.
Debra White Plume is a Lakota grandmother who was raised on the treaty territories of the Pine Ridge Reservation located across the border in South Dakota. She shares the Lakota worldview that water is sacred.
About 10 years ago, White Plume began to notice a rise in illnesses and premature deaths among her neighbors. She heard about wells testing high for radiation, arsenic and lead. This information concerned White Plume, who lives on hundreds of acres of family land and relies on her wells for drinking water.
She is an experienced researcher and organizer from decades spent protecting the nearby Black Hills, sacred sites and preserving the Lakota way of life. During her research, through ceremonies, and prayer, she connected local contamination to the Crow Butte uranium mine located just outside reservation lands.
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