Behind Scarce Water: Cowboy Corporate Socialism : Drought: We are now permanently diverted from the preservationist environmental concerns and values that once made us Westerners unique.

The 100 years’ war of the West against itself--our regional civil war--is over. “We” won. Now, water’s only “value” is its dollar value. The remaining questions are not biological but strictly human. Water is not scarce unless we make it so.

In this post-civil-war period, we must ask ourselves about the fair and efficient distribution of what water there is left. The winning answer will be the same--humans first. For better or worse, this is the conclusion of our war in the “desert” that is, or was, the West.

When the other war--the one in the Persian Gulf--is over, we may have the time, money and resolve to enter the second phase of the post-civil-war era--the reclamation and renewal of the West, including repatriation of POW’s like the wolf. Meantime, we can take these first steps toward a regional human ecology:

--Break an old habit: Say “so long” to irrigated agriculture and its federal subsidies;

--Shuck some wrong-headed friends: “Goodby, cowboy”;

--Dismantle the federal conservation agencies: “Gold watches all around,”

--Stop the flow of “save the whatever!” junk mail: “Just say no!” to environmental fund-raisers.

For the past century or so, we in the West have been characters in a morality play, roughly “cowboys” vs. “Indians.” The surviving characters’ fatal flaw was that they all saw wealth and empire in the desert rather than beauty, freedom and democracy. Now that the play is over, we who watched and maybe participated have an opportunity to redeem the desert West, our greatest natural resource.

For the West, the drought has a crucial local meaning: We are now permanently diverted from the preservationist environmental concerns and values that once made us Westerners unique. The last hope for saving the wild West has disappeared. Further efforts will be counterproductive.

Our federally designated wildernesses “protect” mostly rocks, ice and backpackers, none of which are endangered. It is the lower elevations--the true deserts--that we need to reclaim. Most of the time, most of us will cluster in cities where the water is.

The cowboys have converted the desert areas to irrigated alfalfa and cotton. Once we cut off their federally subsidized water, the market will correct itself, and land prices will fall to a reasonable level. Then people who value such experiences can buy the lands and begin the restoration process every gardener knows. Such work is as good for the gardener as it is for the garden. For now, we will grow wildlife and open space, always the highest human values of any desert worth the name.

The drought can be a blessing for us in the West. It’s reminder that we live in a desert region may tell us what our true needs are, helping us arrive at a sense of essentials, helping us discard old baggage from our regional civil-war days. In our new (old) desert home, the assumption of scarcity confers value by reducing water to a marketable commodity. That’s the American Way, bending the knee to the Almighty Dollar. Equally “American” is the fraud we Westerners have perfected, a deceit we learned from that most rugged of all individualists, the cowboy.

The hoax works this way. With one hand, you bang the drum of individualism, capitalism and free enterprise. With the other, having killed everything that is wild, you rake in the federal subsidies. What did we think the living desert was, anyway? Was it empty? Was there really no one at home before the cowboys and their irrigated agriculture moved in?

Consider the big dams--Hoover or Glen Canyon--along the Colorado River. Most of this federally developed water still flows first to low-value, subsidized agriculture, then to industry and finally to urban users. This is true throughout the West. Does this seem backward? One of Pete Wilson’s last acts as a U.S. senator was to make sure that big agribusiness irrigators like J. G. Boswell Co. continue to receive subsidized water on their enormous holdings. Just last fall, Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign received $350,000 from a fund-raiser at the San Joaquin Valley spread of rancher John Harris.

We inherited this system of cowboy corporate socialism and government subsidies from our parents and grandparents, who found that massive, centralized federal agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation were the best way to bring public dollars flocking West and into the saddlebags of a few. Such agencies also had the advantage of being remote from the effects of their deeds. Few people thought of the final, irreversible environmental costs. Fewer still thought that the federal money spigot would ever run dry. And no one though the magnificent dams and reservoirs that turned the Colorado River into a plumbing system would ever leave us as short as we are today.

Now all these sources of federal help are running dry. Declaring California a federal disaster area would only be the final symptom of a fatal, habitual dependence on Uncle Sam. Since it can be fairly said that federal subsidy dollars bought agriculture a California governor, take a look at the backside of a dollar bill. The Great Seal of the United States, its pyramid topped by the all-seeing federal eye, tells you of our Western affinities with centralized, authoritarian, ancient Egypt, an entire civilization depending on irrigation water.

Encourage Gov. Wilson to help the West change its ways. And let’s do this before California starts flexing its economic and political muscle, starts demanding more federally built dams, starts looking for more imported water from upstream states like New Mexico. No one doubts that California could do such things. But why repeat the mistakes of the past? More practical solutions may be at hand.

The way to rid the West of these parasites--cowboys and irrigators--is to take our free-enterprise system seriously. Change the unfair, inefficient and environmentally damaging system of Western water and natural-resource law in favor of a free market. Admit that federally subsidized water and grazing have become property “rights.” Recognize these rights and facilitate voluntary transfers to anyone who can pay. Translation: Buy the bastards out.

Grin and cough up, taxpayers. You’ve seen this sort of welfare Cadillac before. Privileges have a way of becoming “rights!” But never mind. This is an emergency, and this solution respects the sacred value of “private” property while honoring more legitimately traditional American values: efficiency and fairness.

Assume that we force or bribe--shame won’t work--agriculture into sharing water, home on the range and other public property. It is true that every industrialized nation subsidizes its agriculture. The Western plane will crash if we don’t lighten its load. Let’s just offer the cowboys a golden parachute they can’t refuse: a lump sum and early retirement.

In dry years or wet, if anything will level with you, water will.