Why? Because you say so? The OP can clarify what he meant if he wants to.
This would be a pretty inept parody, if that’s what it’s attempting:
This isn’t conservative discourse.
Heads up to anyone reading the article linked in the OP: the publication date is 2009.
OK, mea culpa. I didn’t pick up that the rules have been modified since then. And in 20/20 hindsight it occurred to me too late that I’d conflated two things that were non sequitur. Shouldn’t post when angry…
The first principle of which is: Water flows toward money.
There was a guy who was jailed for ‘collecting rainwater’ and a bunch of folks were boohooing his conviction. It was noted that his ‘rainwater collecting’ was diverting all the rainfall to several private reservoirs he had set up.
The only people I know who refer to liberal conspiracies and fears of ecosocialism (and I know several) are right-wingers.
I think it’s worth noting that there’s a difference between, say, collecting the runoff from your own roof (which is what most rain barrel setups I’ve seen do), and actually diverting the runoff from a significant area of land to a different destination.
Any law anywhere that forbids the first is nonsense. Confusing the second with the first - claiming that major groundwater diversion is just “rain collecting” - is idiocy.
Water rights probably seem stupid if you’re living on a postage stamp lot in a suburb or in an apartment or condo and using municipal water, but it’s serious business.
Two of my grandparents (one from each side, different states, different times) were dried out of their farms as children by upstream “neighbors” diverting water during droughts and collecting 160 acre homesteads downstream as families fled to greener pastures. Both of them traded their deeds not for cash but for use of a truck to move because the land was so incredibly worthless without water and they were unable to grow any crops or support livestock. After the drought ended and water began flowing again these “neighbors” were sitting on thousands of acres of fertile and productive land and became incredibly wealthy.
They survived and grew up to live incredible lives, but destroying someone’s way of life for fun and profit is a bad thing that should be discouraged by society. It seems unlikely that your single personal 55 gal drum under your gutter spout makes an appreciable difference to ground or surface water levels, but as they say it’s not the poison that kills you it’s the dosage. The single piece of litter you throw out your car window doesn’t make a difference either but combined with everyone else’s it’s a big problem.
Because air and water falling from the sky are considered above the laws that deal with assets on or below ground. To understand a law take it to it’s furthest point and see how it works. If someone walks in the rain and sticks their tongue out will they get taser’d? Of course not. If someone covers 40 acres with plastic and collect all the water that would feed the wells of surrounding houses is that equitable? Now there’s an issue. It greatly affects others. The law should fall somewhere in between.
There’s a reasonable expectation of at least some of the rain for personal use just as there is for air.
Hey, I don’t subscribe to those views, I just read them at the newsstand.
I think diverting a river, and collecting rain, are entirely different.
Yes, this guy. Obviously, he tried to spin the story as some kind of David vs. Goliath narrative, and that he was just trying to collect a bit of rainwater. The reality was that he built three dams, including one that was 20 feet in height. Furthermore, he was only jailed after willfully disobeying the orders of the judge. He had plenty of opportunity to comply and instead disobeyed.
Yeah, guess what–just because you own a piece of land, it doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with that land. Property rights are more complicated than that, and that includes stuff that affects your neighbors. You also aren’t allowed to drill for oil, build a giant skyscraper, or shoot down overflying airplanes. Deal with it.
They’re exactly the same thing - removing water from its existing flow path - done on different scales.
As Emtar KronJonDerSohn said, water rights make sense on a larger scale. I Colorado (and most western states), water rights are based on prior appropriations. Further, they’re contingent on the allocated water being available, which is no sure thing. A lot of western rivers run dry seasonally, and the water rights of a lot of agricultural producers read something like, “enough water to irrigate 10 acres of alfalfa, provided there’s enough in the river for you to take it without reducing the discharge below 38 cubic feet per second.”
The rain that falls on a house might contribute to surface runoff, flowing into a nearby river; it might infiltrate and make its way into the groundwater. In either of these cases, it’s contributing to an already-allocated (and likely already over-allocated) resource. Will a single homeowner installing a cistern cause a noticeable change downstream? No… but whole communities might. And if those changes mean that a rancher with a higher priority water right has to stop irrigating his alfalfa crop a week earlier, that rancher has a legally sustainable case against the homeowners.
But what if everyone collects the rain from their roof? Let’s say that roofs cover 30% of the area of a city (high? low? I dunno). That’s taking 30% of the water out of a watershed - which isn’t an insignificant amount (and 10% or 20% is also significant).
Now in the midwest, probably not a big deal (the Mississippi and tributaries dump a lot of water into the Gulf).
But the Colorado no longer flows to the sea - so taking 10% of one of its sources is going to have a non-trivial impact on users downstream.