Over the Edge + February 23, 2011 opinion 3 Water: An Essay The most valuable resource to man and the planet PAULT STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR ONLINE SOURCE For most of my childhood and during most of my twenties, | lived in desert communities and learned to appreciate how precious water is. In the 1950s and 1960s, with slow growth, a rural town or small desert mountain city could prosper to a moderate degree. Around the mid-1970s, casinos in Nevada moved from individual ownership to largely corporate control. By the latter part of that decade, the pressure was on the Reno City Council to approve major-development permits for large casinos and resort developments even when the short, warm and rather dry winter of 1975-76 presaged a major drought. In the fall of 1977 the Reno authorities urged residents to conserve water by any means possible, from putting bricks in the backs of toilet tanks and using drip-watering systems for lawns all the way to ripping out lawns and replacing them with rock gardens. (But what place then for children to wrestle or play croquet?) One day it was announced that the good citizens of Reno, through their strenuous conservation efforts, had saved at least a third of the water supply from waste. The pro-development council and its developer friends rubbed their hands together and said gleefully, “Good! Now we can build several more casinos resorts and subdivisions!” Residents felt tricked. FRAMING HEALTH Health & Community How does it feel to have your gender identity included in the Diagnoatic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? Find out when thirteen transgender and genderqueer scholars, artists, and activists explore the impact and implications of the Gender Identity diagnosis on their lives and communities. ARTSPACE Free & Refreshments Served Sponsored by: UNBC Pride Centre A Discussion and Film Series on Canadian Medical Association (CMA) Friends and | formed civic groups that eventually advocated the recall of several councilors who had been at the centre of this subterfuge. By the late spring of 1978 more than a half dozen large new casinos opened and what remained of pasture and meadows in the Truckee Meadows began to fall under subdivisions. Municipal services were so overstretched that even The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page article on what a mess that council and its developer friends had made. Asked whatwould be done aboutthe water shortage, the mayor responded, “There are no problems — only solutions.” There were efforts toward a projectto channel water down from Honey Lake, near Susanville, Calif., about 140 kilometres northwest of Reno, but the City of Susanville and the State of California were not interested. Approaches to the State of Oregon to channel water south from the Columbia River were rebuffed. My friends and | got little help with drawing up the format of recall petitions from the city clerk’s office, and, being mostly students, we didn’t have the legal expertise to draw up the text ourselves. The possibility we might get a recall campaign under way did scare councilors and developers, however, who even went so far as to take out billboard messages against “No-Growthers’. Some construction workers came to disrupt one of our civic groups’ meetings, raising repeated frivolous motions and threatening to start fights with any of our members who openly disagreed with them. Some members of the civic group, Reno Citizens for Controlled Growth, said they were followed home after the meetings. Others went to work the next day to be called in by their employers about what was considered their inappropriate political activities. My mother received rude midnight telephone calls from unknown persons. Other rude people called the house to ask, “Is this The Mustang Ranch?” Once | was picking fruit from plum trees in my parents’ front yard: A heavy glass pop bottle was hurled with considerable force toward the ladder | was standing on, narrowly missing me, as an angry man yelled, “Strickland, you f-----g idiot!” Colleagues at The University of Nevada Sagebrush student newspaper were only half joking when they said | mightend up ina ditch in the Reno area some day. My dad cautioned, “You know, they play for keeps down at City Hall.” In late 1979 | had landed a job at an historical museum on the northwest side of the University of Nevada-Reno campus, but a new manager took over four months after | started and made it clear he didn’t care for my politics. Then, somehow, for some reason, when the new governor of Nevada took office in early 1981, and called for 10-per- cent cuts in the civil service that spring, | learned that my job had been lined out of the budget effective the start of the new fiscal year on July 1. | had taken holidays in early January and driven up to Vancouver where the editor of The Medicine Hat News interviewed me and said he would consider hiring me when | renewed my landed immigrant visa. | succeeded in doing that, the editor phoned to hire me on March 2"4, and | was at work at The News on March 30". Still, from home | heard stories that the Reno City Council and developers might even look to Canada for additional water. In the early 1980s that didn’t get any further than their proposals to Susanville and Oregon. However, later in the 1980s, when the Alberta government kept approving dams along the Rockies in places like the Oldman River Valley even though only about 100 farmers would benefit, suspicious arose. Would the waters collected by these dams be eventually brought together by means of a canal to be sent south for the greater glory of development in the States? Maybe these were paranoid suspicions. On the other hand, municipal councils and developers in the Southwestern United States have hatched equally preposterous schemes in the past seventy-five to 100 years and have been able to carry through with them. Las Vegas is currently running out of water and is trying to expropriate water from sources used by northeastern Nevada ranchers, although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in neighbouring Utah is lending its legal team’s services to the embattled ranchers. Where will Las Vegas and other thirsty cities in the Western United States turn next? Northern B.C. Members of Parliament may dismiss Maude Barlow and the Council of Canadians as crackpots, and sometimes they can be a little off the deep left end, but my experiences in Nevada lead me to advise all of us Canadians to guard our precious water resource very carefully. We must also closely scrutinize proposed provincial legislation, like the new Water Sustainability Act, to be sure it serves the best interests of British Columbians and not American developers eager for our water or globalized multinational corporations unconcerned about Canadian sovereignty or ordinary people.