How the fuck we haven’t kicked these companies out of California yet completely baffles me.
If they didn’t sell us back our water, what would we do?! Install pipes and do it cheaper without plastic?!?
It seems that this problem, as well as some other problems, would be solved if we stoped giving dead people influence over property.
I don’t think people’s property rights 100 years ago should influence who gets what water today.
In my opinion, companies shouldn’t have “water rights” in general, regardless of whether their owners/founders/whatever that person is are alive or dead. If you think critically about how our resources are used, the idea that someone can just wander along, buy up some land, and then consume all the resources that are on it or pass through and charge other people for them is completely insane. Just because you have a big fat wad of money, you get to fuck everyone else over by claiming critical resources? What??
That’d be like Elon Musk blocking the sun with a giant rocket umbrella, then charging everyone a twitter blue sky fee to literally see sunlight (maybe I shouldn’t give the guy ideas… he seems the type of ruthless capitalist who’d actually do it).
At least in the case of farming, there’s some honest work and genuinely beneficial product coming out the other end that leaves us with a reason for a company to own and control the land. Though, I’ll not pretend that all farming is equal or good, some of it isn’t conscionable either. But sucking down fresh stream water to shove into crappy plastic bottles is just an insane thing for us to allow to exist.
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Regulators on Tuesday voted to significantly reduce how much water BlueTriton – the owner of the Arrowhead brand – can take from public lands in the San Bernardino mountains.
The ruling is a victory for community groups who have said for years that the bottled water firm has drained an important creek that serves as a habitat for wildlife and helps protect the area from wildfires.
But environmental and community groups say the company has never had permission to take water from the springs in the San Bernardino national forest.
In a statement after the vote, BlueTriton Brandsindicated it would sue to block the order, vowing to “vigorously defend our water rights through available legal process”.
Lawyers for BlueTriton had argued there was ample evidence the company and its predecessors have been using the springs since well before 1914, when the state began regulating how people can use water.
Amanda Frye, a resident of Redlands who has spent countless hours combing through documents to investigate the case, said when hiking the mountain, she can see BlueTriton’s pipes gushing with water as they run along the dry bed of Strawberry Creek.
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