What about the Indian's? Water rights and concessions?

I ran across some info on federally protected lands and waterbodies, as well as lands reserved by Indian Tribes (registered or not) it goes like this:

In response to increasing consumption of surface water and the unanticipated problem of potential over consumption, many eastern states have incorporated features of the western appropriation doctrine into the riparian regime for managing surface flows.3 However, eastern water managers have generally overlooked Indian tribes when deciding who gets this water, despite the fact that many eastern tribes depend on the water in those rivers for food and income, as well as for cultural identity and ceremonial purposes.


Ultimately, the court declared that the “ Winters doctrine effectively stands for the proposition that a government, as well as an Indian tribe, can impliedly reserve water for that tribe’s sustenance and thereby override customary state water law, when necessary in light of inadequate protection offered by state water law,” and further that “the inadequacy of riparian law could necessitate an implication that both a quantity and quality of water needed to achieve the purposes underlying an Indian reservation were reserved at the time of the Indian reservation’s creation.”

Although the ruling went largely unnoticed in environmental circles, it achieved instant notoriety in Indian Country as it was the first time that such a claim had been made on behalf of a non-federally recognized tribe in a riparian jurisdiction, let alone been recognized as viable by a state court judge. Therefore, I would be surprised if other eastern tribes did not attempt to make use of the doctrine. It is also conceivable that just as the Winters doctrine expanded over time to protect the water needs of other types of reserved western federal lands the concept of reserved Indian water rights may be expanded in the East to guarantee sufficient water not only for other federal reserved lands, but also for other types of state reserved lands.

A key element of any water trading programs is a cap on the amount of pollution that can be emitted into the receiving environment. Once that number is established either through the TMDL process34 or through some other mechanism, including allowing the pollution sources to allocate the loadings among themselves, units of pollution can be bought, sold, or traded by those who are using the resource as a waste disposal sink so long as the over all cap is met. “Cap-and-trade programs require only that for every unit of resource that you use, you must buy an entitlement – which is to say, you pay for someone else to stop polluting, in an amount equivalent to your pollution, so that the total capped resource remains the same.”

NOW EVERYONE IS WORRIED ABOUT GETTING THE $$$, SO WHO IS WATCHING THE WATER?

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Permalink Reply by mooncookie on August 25, 2008 at 18:50
Oh, and the source of the above data is from the American Bar Association
Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources
Hot Topics: Indian Reserved Water Rights, Water Quality Trading, and the Public Trust Doctrine
Hope M. Babcock
Georgetown University Law Center
Washington, DC
2008 Eastern Water Resources Conference
Charlotte, NC
May 1-2, 2008

There should be a direct link on google!
Permalink Reply by mooncookie on August 26, 2008 at 6:27
I cannot find anything regarding water protection in L.A. other than a summary pdf covering policy from 2001-2007. Looks like there is something, but not really anything "cut and dry" enforceable.

Personally, I would keep an eye on the situation and once the money from all this production starts rolling in...a killer lawyer or politician should pounce on the opportunity to ensure everyone has clean drinking water.

Let me know if the attachment is flawed.
Attachments:
Permalink Reply by Grice on August 26, 2008 at 6:37
May I suggest reading Louisiana Code 30:2074. It identifies the powers of the government to control water in this state.
Permalink Reply by mooncookie on August 26, 2008 at 16:31
Is the code being upheld in reality? In Texas you have to 'rattle the snake' to sometime make sure your air and water quality and standard TMDL are being properly enforced.

With all the frenzy going on, gov infrastructure will most likely be streched thinly which can cause enforcement to be difficult.

Thank you for pointing me to right place. A great deal of my former research involved CA, the Baja and trans border boundary with Mexico, UAE, China, Greece and Spain.

North America in general is rather lucky at this point in time with the use/supply issue, but some regions will dry up faster than others. As Tennesee Valley Authority and other energy players have learned the rather hard way, lack of actionable foresight is costly.

I will also check out the WQS water quality standards published for the area, it will be interesting to see that evovle.
Permalink Reply by baglady on August 26, 2008 at 6:32
LOL
Permalink Reply by mooncookie on August 26, 2008 at 16:16
Jal Gurudeva!

they must be Six-Sigma Jedi Masters escaping the eco-destroyers, Tata Steel, the domestic equivalent of the Republican Party founders.

There's a comic book in this somewhere...lol
Permalink Reply by sesport on August 26, 2008 at 15:32
There's more info regarding this under the Group with the similar name. We'd be happy to have you join & add what you find. There are about 23 of us in that group that recognize this can be a major problem in the future. In light of the recent topic regarding the woman who's well pump burned out, and it appears it was due to the drop in the aquifer level, I'd say the future was yesterday.
Permalink Reply by mooncookie on August 26, 2008 at 16:06
The HSW&EI group? I think it was the first group I joined, we should be friends....

I'd love to know if anyone is actually calculating the use of water (frac jobs take usually 2-4 and consume 5 million gallons daily approx) with thousands of wells to be drilled and those that have already commenced using this technology that may have an irreversable effect on the water table.


The irony is that a company exists that actually uses the frac to produce water resources in an analogous way that the O&G is collected to extract. They have successfully completed work in Tobago (making 5 million gallons a day) as well as several other regions. They call their unique process "watershed technology" to gather pure, earth-filtered water previously unavailable.

Science may indeed save us after all.

Don't you love tetonic serendipity?

The angle I was going for here was more of a federal grounds for intervening on behalf of those whose rights are being threatened (as for now there is no official federal policy protecting us and each state does things a bit differently)....for the very reason that if y'all blink the well runs dry.

Importing water, some fair-trade of water concessions or pre-planned remediation proposals should be concidered as solutions to this issue. Someone is going to have to pick up their 'boom stick' and get people to realize that nothing matters if there is no water, the universal solvent.

Anyone interested in survival should join the HSW&EI group and see what is happening to Mother Nature.
Permalink Reply by sesport on August 26, 2008 at 16:23
Sorry I didn't recognize you. I've been reading & reading unitl I don't remember who, what, where I've seen. Aren't our protected wetlands under federal watch, or is that the states responsibility? I don't know about importing water, that's still water that came from someone else's backyard. I still favor the distilling frac water idea. It may be expensive, but I'd give up a little bonus & a little royalty to cover the cost and ensure I don't have to buy bottled water. Boil orders are a pain and they're usually temporary. I can't imagine having to buy tons of bottled water to cover my drinking & cooking.

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