It's Okay to Cry "Wolf"

              It’s okay to cry “Wolf!”  Just do it with spirit.  Professor Aaron T. Wolf’s 2017 book, The Spirit of Dialogue, Lessons from Faith Traditions in Transforming Conflict, Island Press, is anything but alarming, rather more it is consoling.  Based on an impressively broad reading of faith literature (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahá’í Faith), facilitation of water conflict agreements in the Middle East (Israel, Palestine (River Jordon)), North Africa (Egypt, Sudan (Nile River)), Southeast Asia (Mekong  River), the Caucuses (Azeri, Armenia and Georgia (Kura-Araks River), and consultation with the World Bank, the Vatican, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Professor Wolf, now over 20 years at Oregon State University, knows his stuff.

            Wolf asks, “What, precisely, can spiritual traditions offer the fields of facilitation, mediation, and conflict transformation, especially when people in conflict often come from a variety of backgrounds and belief systems?”  He answers:  “Well, quite a lot, it turns out.”  Later, he explores the “constructs of anger and conflict, as understood by faith traditions, and some of the tools and techniques to assuage both.”  A worthy study indeed.
            "We don’t all come from the same place in our attitudes about water.  “[T]he Western legal structure is very comfortable with the idea that one side in a dispute can be found entirely right and gain everything, while another side is found entirely wrong and loses everything.  In contrast, the balance of justice and mercy in many communities of the South and East can retain individual rights and honor on both sides of a dispute and lead to reconciliation of a wrongdoer within one’s community.  Consider the Arabic word tarrahdhin, for example, defined as ‘resolution of a conflict that involves no humiliation,’ a profound concept with no Western equivalent.”
            In Wolf’s “glass half full” approach, he says, “As the historically contrasting worldviews of the global North and West and the South and East increasingly more interact, both within and without the worlds of complex negotiations, we have the opportunity to heal historic divisions.  The history of conflicts and cooperation suggests that people do come together, even across vociferous divides.  And yet the suffering created by scarcity and conflict will only increase with population growth, poverty, and global change.  As the dangers grow, however, so do the opportunities for dialogue and healing.”  Water conflicts Wolf has facilitated have reached “general consensus that the highest priority [of needs] should be given simultaneously to drinking water and to water for spiritual purposes.”
            Water plays a significant role in the spiritual practices of most the world’s religions and is central focus in the lives of indigenous peoples.  “Both faith and water ignore separations and boundaries.  Thus they offer vehicles for bringing people together, and because they touch all we do and experience, they also suggest a language by which we might discuss our common future.”  Wolf’s approach to water negotiations is first to remove reference to artificial boundaries, permitting the parties opposite to focus on the organic watershed, to look at systemic issues within the whole.  Negotiations focused primarily on rights, rather than shared goals, he suggests, exacerbate rather than resolve conflict.
 
            Professor Wolf admonishes that “the impact of conflict is generally felt by a much larger population than is charged with resolving it.”  His facilitation works systematically to identify common interests, ascending through “four worlds”:  the physical (positions, warrior, adversarial), the emotional (interests, lover, reflective), the perceptual (values, thinker, integrative) and the spiritual (harmony, dreamer, a “world without” which “straddles the internal (intellectual mind) and the external (intuitive mind, which seems to tap into deeper and wider knowledge).”
            The Spirit of Dialogue is a thoughtful read.  I recommend it.

Groundwater Contamination as Economic Cost

Groundwater Contamination as Economic Cost

While the consumptive use of water, from either surface or groundwater source, can be measured, use of groundwater through contamination of its quality is usually not.  Consumption of groundwater quality is clearly a cost rarely attributed to the economic activity which it benefits.  For some thoughts on the subject, follow this link:

Groundwater Contamination as Economic Cost

J. Davenport

The Colorado River's Antiquated Legal Infrastructure

The Seven states of the Colorado River worked hard to resolve a climate-aggravated water shortage within the context of an antiquated legal infrastructure that exacerbates the problem.  On May 20, they signed the Drought Contingency Plan.  “[T]he seven states and Mexico were able to get together and agree on voluntary restrictions.  These were not imposed—the states agreed to them.  They set aside water law, water rights, and priority systems, and thought about what they needed to do to protect the system.  I think it’s a significant and remarkable achievement and a real demonstration of what we’re going to need to do in the future,” said Jeff Kightlinger, General Manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.  The difficult legal infrastructure the states set aside incorporates the nineteenth century notion of water-rights priorities based on time of the respective establishment of each, an interstate agreement (Colorado River Compact) originally premised upon fear of exercise of state-law-based rights, the interstate significance of which was recognized by a 1922 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Wyoming v. Colorado) decided by an ethically compromised justice.  Constitutionally-recognized principles, like equal protection under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, suggest a more even approach.  Moreover, this self-imposed, antiquated approach is inconsistent with the water-sharing ethic ensconced in most of western civilization’s historical and contemporary water jurisprudence, as well as that described in international law.  The states were well advised to set aside this legal infrastructure and do the better thing for their constituents.

J. Davenport