Protection of water has priority over protecting the profits of development, mining and industry
The Great Basin Desert of eastern Nevada and western Utah is threatened by plans of the Southern Nevada Water Authority to drill over 200 wells in one of the driest regions of the United States and pipe the water 300 miles to Las Vegas. If permitted by the State of Nevada and the Bureau of Land Management, Las Vegas would pump up to 85 billion gallons of water each year from rural valleys adjacent to the Great Basin National Park and National Wildlife Refuges.
The groundwater would be piped through a huge, buried pipeline network and supported above ground by hundreds of miles of power lines and roads. The groundwater exported from eastern Nevada’s desert valleys by the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) would enable more sprawl development in the Las Vegas Area further impacting Las Vegas residents with congestion, pollution, and a poorer quality of life. Rural communities would be destroyed by the loss of water. Unique wildlife dependent on small streams, wetlands, and regional springs would be threatened or exterminated.
Following is a public statement of Bob Fulkerson, State Director, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, to Nevada State Engineer, Jason King, regarding the proposed Las Vegas/SNWA Water Grab on September 29, 2017, in Carson City, Nevada.
Greetings. My name is Bob Fulkerson, State Director of PLAN, the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.
PLAN has worked to educate the public and policy makers that politics as usual and conventional economics in an era of less water and global warming is a recipe for extinction.
I’m proud to have been with an organization that was among the first to protest the original 1989 water applications in Nye, White Pine and Lincoln counties, now commonly known as the Las Vegas water grab. That organization, Citizen Alert, had a history of working with downwinders and against nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. So it wasn’t a stretch for us to take on the latest attempt to place rural Nevada at Ground Zero and to make its residents more expendable than those who live in highly populated areas like Las Vegas. Except this time the struggle was about water.
This project is potentially the largest water transfer in U.S. history — certainly the biggest since Los Angeles diverted water from Owens Valley turning much of that fertile valley to desert. Rural residents in the high desert areas of Nevada and Utah that will be affected by the proposed water withdrawal, and pretty much everyone else not on the SNWA dole, are convinced a renewable water supply of this magnitude is simply not available.
One of the universal questions facing communities across the globe in the 21st Century is how to meet the water needs of growing populations. In many parts of the world, surface water is already fully, if not overly, allocated. Increasingly, urban centers are turning to groundwater supplies in rural areas as a primary source of ‘new’ water. Groundwater, however, has far fewer protections than surface water and is under assault in many parts of the world.
Typically, municipal water districts eyeing rural water use some version of ‘the greater good’ argument to justify the water transfer. And, since more people live in cities than in rural areas that argument tends to be quite effective. What is often left out of the mix is any substantive discussion of a much more cost-effective alternative to water transfers — water conservation and efficiency. Las Vegas, Nevada is no exception; city boosters claim that rural areas should be willing to make sacrifices to allow for the booming economic development of the Las Vegas Valley.
Let’s never forget the cemeteries in rural communities downwind of the Nevada Test Site are laden with headstones bearing the names of those who were the victims of the last “greater good argument.”
And while the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) — the entity that manages the municipal water supply for all of the cities in the Las Vegas Valley — has instituted many water conservation measures, overall per-capita water use remains high when compared to many other cities in the Southwest. Consistently, the messages delivered by SNWA staff are: 1) we have gone about as far as we can go with conservation; 2) Las Vegas must grow; 3) the proposed pipeline is the only way to get enough water to allow for growth.
It’s critical to acknowledge that our state faces permanent, long-term water shortage. Climate change has made the current drought worse. The water storage that Nevada’s growth-industrial complex says is available to sate growing population demands won’t be enough when more water is demanded and used than nature provides. This will cause further unsustainable groundwater overdraft (which is illegal in Nevada but happens all the time anyway) and prompt ill-advised schemes to build pipelines to rural regions of the state, in turn leading to inevitable ecological destruction of our streams, wetlands and the life that depends on them — both wildlife and human life.
Finally, let’s bring up the lack of trust we have in SNWA. A 3M plan entrusts the land and the economic health of the area to SNWA. How can we trust them and when they overpump? How much is it going to cost senior water right holders to get them to stop? In the 3M plan, the burden of proof is on the senior water rights holder to prove it is SNWA’s pumping that has caused harm. That’s like telling the downwinders who have lost their hair from the fallout to hire a physicist to prove it was from the fallout.
The EIS disclosed pages of irreversible, irretrievable impacts from the project. You can’t pump as much water as SNWA needs in order to make the project pencil out and not create a national sacrifice zone.
In closing, Nevada should emulate Ecuador, the first country in the world to recognize the inherent rights of nature. Protection of water has priority over protecting the profits of development, mining and industry. In Nevada, it’s just the opposite. If we’re to survive, we must flip that.
To learn more about the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) Groundwater Development Project — the water pipeline/grab from Eastern rural Nevada and the Utah border for continued Las Vegas sprawl/development — visit our ally’s, Great Basin Water Network’s, website, reach out to PLAN’s Environmental Justice’s team and sign the online petition to stop the Las Vegas Water Grab.
