Friends of Gualala River Protecting the Gualala River watershed and the species living within it
| This article was published in the Independent Coast Observer on July 5, 2002. |
Courtesy Independent Coast Observer, Gualala, CA
A video showing people from around the world who spoke about threats to public water supplies opened the June meeting of Friends of the Gualala River, the fifth meeting Ursula Jones has organized around the water bag export threat.
Their message in the video is that an international understanding is growing that corporations intend to take control of all the world’s water. A water attorney said that the international trade agreements supersede any government regulations; severe sanctions against governments are available to corporations under these trade agreements.
Dan Wickham, president of Friends of the Russian River, was the guest speaker at the Thursday evening meeting held at the Gualala Arts Center.
“Water is vital; fresh water particularly so,” he said. As a scientist he started out studying fresh water, later became a marine biologist working at the Bodega Bay Marine Lab, and now owns a company that restores failed septic systems.
In Sonoma County, he went on, the Board of Supervisors acts as the board of directors of the Sonoma County Water Agency. That means the BOS owns the water and controls the waste water treatment plants.
“The conflict of interest is absolute,” Wickham said, and it makes the BOS “impossible to deal with.”
Local organizing can help, he said. Friends of the Russian River decided to create a Russian Riverkeeper program. A riverkeeper and volunteers take to the river in boats, looking for problems and ways to help solve them. Wickham met recently with 80 Waterkeepers at a conference.
“Public pressure is what counts,” he said. “Government manipulates most of the processes in a cynical fashion.” Water keepers go after them in court for real monetary damages.
About whether a Riverkeeper could help protect the Gualala River from the water bag scheme, Wickham was not encouraging. He said the program is trademarked and has many standards to keep up with; it might not work if such programs were everywhere. The issue of how many the organization will allow is unresolved.
Wickham said that water should not go outside watersheds, but he also said he would fight the anti-water bag bill (now languishing) that Assemblymember Patricia Wiggins crafted. The bill would give county boards of supervisors a veto over export of water from their counties.
“I would fight it with a passion,” Wickham said, adding that if the BOS were not also the water agency in Sonoma County, the Wiggins bill might work.
His main message to the group was that every stream begins in someone’s back yard, and each person can be steward of the water on his or her own property. That back yard stream is called a first order stream, the one it flows into is a second order stream, and so on. He thinks the Gualala River may be a fifth order stream.
Something as simple as putting a culvert under the driveway can influence the first order stream. Ideally each such stream should have a wooded riparian zone, Wickham said.
Tom Cochrane, president of Friends of the Gualala River, had a message for people who don’t take the water bag proposal seriously. He took a small cardboard box to the podium, and asked us to go back to 1850, when promoters urged people to claim unallocated land. He had a small jar of earth and another jar of wheat flour. These were the resources that hawkers said would change the world when they were exploited.
His forbear Cochranes in upstate New York invested with James Watt, and his inventions didn’t work out, so when Watt came to them to invest in his steam engine, they said that the steam engine would never go anywhere, so they didn’t bite on that one.
“Would you have?” asked Cochrane. The next thing the hawker touted that would change the world was the railroad.
Around 1900, the hawker was back trying to get people to invest, said Cochrane, and pulled out another jar – full of oil, that would change the world if people would invest.
“Would you have?”
Yet in 1940, World War II was fought over oil. In 1950, the hawker was back, with credit cards.
Now he’s back again, said Cochrane, and pulled out a bottle of water.
In conclusion, he said that California water law is the worst water law in the United States, and that the community will beat water hawker Ric Davidge on the environmental challenge. He expects the state to open the water bag project for public comment in August.
Another founder of Friends of the Gualala River, Vivian Green, said that people think the water bag scheme is crazy, because water isn’t worth that much now, but the rights Davidge is seeking are forever, and how much will water be worth in 100 years?
Later, Roger Dingman of the Gualala River Steelhead Project said he thought Cochrane would pull out one more jar – full of air.
