The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West

The Public Trust: Missing Water

The Public Trust m i s s i n g w a t e r In memory of Dr. James and Nancy Jane Slosson For weeks in the early 1990s, Vivendi, the world’s largest water procurement company at that time, ran a full-page ad in the Reno GazetteJournal . Under a picture of a sweet-faced little girl drinking bubbling water from a hose, the copy read, “Water Is Life.” Question is, “Whose water?” And, how do a people divvy up natural resources ? In many western states, under the guise of providing for the “public good,” companies and politicians try to justify, in the name of the majority , efforts to mine water from rural places and pipe it hundreds of miles to cities. This is done even though the removal of the water from the area of origin results in environmental disaster, denying life and livelihood to those within the scope of pump and pipeline. With every stroke, these decisions remove food production from our country’s table. Bonnie Slosson takes a gi shower every day of her life. She’s not in the army, never has been. But her father, geologist Dr. James Slosson, taught her early on that there is a bottom to every glass, every well, every aquifer, and if not refilled, replenished, or recharged, it will run out of water, and that’s a fact. The gi shower got its name from soldiers in combat who bathe in the amount of water they can scoop up in their helmets. The shower version goes like this: get in, wet down, turn the water off, soap up, shampoo, and turn the water on to rinse. In 1958, the Slossons took a summer cabin in Modoc County with no indoor plumbing. That’s where Bonnie learned something about packing water in a bucket. It caused her to give deep consideration to the well she 138 | t h e fa m i l y r a n c h drew from for her purposes. From then on she made a private ceremony of balancing her existence within conservation’s principle: “You may use, but you may not squander.” More and more of the rural West is being sacrificed to the unreasonable doctrine of disregard. Rivers no longer run to the sea. Landowners, farmers, ranchers, and entire irrigation districts in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and California have made deals to stop producing food and sell their water rights to support urban sprawl. We, as a nation, choose to ignore truth: If we continue to neglect our responsibility to the environment and humankind, we will, in the words of Bonnie’s father, “create the Sahara of the West.” In return for our betrayal, we will be given thirty pieces of silver. This cautionary tale pits a handful of ranchers and landowners against the might of greed. If no other lesson can be gleaned from the experience, there is this one: Without the ranchers on the land to care for and protect the environment, water-grab schemes such as this one, and the one that currently threatens White Pine County, Nevada, will succeed and the environment will suffer the consequences. Those people who protect their property rights and property value also protect water for the benefit of land and wildlife—the entire environment in a balanced system. The danger is the illusion of insignificant modification. The broken web of interdependence is revealed only in retrospect. The system must be protected against intentions that oppose nature’s balance. Resistance to that lesson of truth is a mortal human flaw that needs to be put right, or we, as a species, will fail. For that reason, all land must have a champion if it is to remain intact, functioning, and prospering to the best of its natural ability. The honor and duty fall to those who love it most. That was the purpose of our home-based offensive. Champions would be coming to help. But we were to begin the journey alone. This is the story of one of many environmental conflicts taking place across this country. The Public Trust | 139 the battle to keep our water from being pumped by the state of Nevada and exported across state lines can be traced to a single point in time. In the spring of 1987, the Reno Gazette-Journal ran an article...