Living With and Without Water

If there is one thing Pt. Roberts has, it’s water: all that ocean, all that rain. Except that if there is one thing we are seriously short of it is water. And that is a tiny version of what will be a much bigger story for many people in the world very soon, even those in first world countries. For us, it is a more extreme issue: although we have ocean and plenty of rain, we don’t have any source for potable water. Neither the state nor the county has any interest in providing us with drinking water because, obviously, it would involve miles of water lines and they would have to either go through Canada or under the ocean. Not a reasonable expenditure of public funds for 1,000 Americans. Wells are unreliable—especially during the summer dry season--and there is probably insufficient ground water for many of them, though there are a few around. So, awhile back we turned to our neighbors, the friendly Canadians, and said, ‘Please would you sell us some of your large supply of water?’ And they said yes.

Until they said, ‘But no more.’ Currently, there is a long-term agreement to provide Point Roberts with X gallons of drinking water/day. Because Canadian water standards are different from U.S. standards (different, not better, not worse), that water has to undergo additional treatment once it gets here, but we have learned how to deal with that. Several years ago, it became apparent to the B.C. legislature that they had a lot of water, that there was going to be a real demand for water resources in the world, and that they were at risk of inadvertently losing control of theirs. To avoid this, they passed a law that no water access can be sold to anyone outside of Canada, although current contracts were to be honored. However, they couldn’t be increased.

There’s a lot of empty land in Pt. Roberts and over the past few years, a lot more people are moving there (a lot more is, of course, a relative term). In any case, we have had something of a building boom with Californians and Canadians increasing their presence. And their water use. A year ago, the water board (one of our very few local government functions) announced that they were almost out of water use permits: indeed, there were more applications than there were permits. There were developers who wanted dozens of permits, there were people who had been planning for 20 years to built the cabin of their dreams and now wanted a permit, there were people who were moving up from California to build the houses that the sale of their overpriced California real estate now made possible and they wanted permits. For a year, this tiny community struggled with the issue of water permits and, but not so much, water itself as a resource.

Many angry meetings, many angry letters, much self-righteousness, much hiring of consultants, and some selection and resignation of water board members led to a final lottery in which everyone had an equal shot at the permits, whether he/she wanted one permit or 60. There are plenty of hard feelings still around from this year and there’s a plan proposed for water use, but the count/state isn’t on board with it. Most important, perhaps, is that all this discussion was largely among those who controlled the water and those who didn’t have water. Those of us who live in the community and have water and would not be directly affected by any decision other than one that also involved raising the monthly price of water were outside the discussion.

What it seems to have been was a terrific opportunity to engage the community in broader water resource issues that are going to arise with lots of natural resources and will arise again for us about water and soon: How much do we really need? How can we use conservation principles? Why are there no programs for encouraging or mandating low use of water? What about rain barrels and other methods of water re-use (grey water, e.g.). None of that. We missed that opportunity. I think that was not because we weren’t prepared to have such a discussion but because the issue got framed as ‘how to apportion permits when there are insufficient numbers of permits.’ We should have been asking, 'How are we going to think about our water use?' At the end of the discussion we didn’t have, there might have not been so many angry people. And we might have moved a few steps toward incoporating into our being a more rational approach to living in this world and not just on top of it.