Who Owns National Forest Spring Water?
The other day I was talking with a close friend who works in the area of land reclamation and lives on a kind of preserve which is surrounded by wildlife preserve.
Their water comes from a stream they have been nurturing (there is a way to coax streams of water back to abundance over time which is what they are doing among other things). Its source is within nearby national forrest area.
He said that not long ago, they were visited by someone working for the U.S. Government who said that Uncle Sam wasn't going to renew the lease which allowed the preserve to get their water from this stream. This was a cause for alarm since it was their only source of water so they queried what this was about.
The official said that the Bush Administration was selling off national forrest water resources to private companies for their exploitation and, as a result, leases were not being renewed.
Acknowledging that this is coming to me on a relay and therefore may contain the usual inaccuracies inherent with information not coming from the source point directly, I thought I would post this discovery here. Personally I like national forrest land and it seem to me to be the last refuge in our country from the inexorable "forward" motion of commercialization and urban sprawl. I grew up visiting national forests and would like my kids to do the same. Further, while I myself drink bottled "spring water", I object to the fact that the government has found it necessary to first pollute our tap water sufficiently to make it undrinkable and, second, must now sell off public land water rights, rather than confront what it would take treat tap water in a way that doesn't make it nearly poisonous.
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