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?