Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times,
A Nevada lawsuit trickling toward trial could determine how the nation’s most arid state balances the legal rights of upstream landowners to divert water from rivers for agricultural irrigation with the impacts those withdrawals have on downstream ecologies and economies.
Water rights exceed water supply across much of the western United States.With many watersheds failing to deliver enough water for local needs, the suit is being watched by attorneys, state water managers, and federal agencies. It could potentially set a precedent in revising how states across the West regulate access to water.
The Nevada case, filed by the Walker River Paiute Tribe and Mineral County, may also present an opportunity for a win-win solution, in which nonprofits and government entities purchase private water rights from willing upstream sellers and dedicate them to downstream public benefit.
Without public-private intervention and the changes in state water law that the suit seeks, geologists and environmental experts agree the future is bleak for Walker Lake, a 13-mile long terminal lake about 75 miles southeast of Reno near the California state line in rural, sparsely populated Mineral County.
The lake is completely dependent on diminishing Sierra Nevada snowmelt runoff into the Walker River—runoff that, for decades now, has been almost entirely diverted for irrigation by upstream farmers and ranchers.
As a result, a desert oasis that once generated more than half of Mineral County’s economic activity through recreational pursuits such as fishing, migratory bird-watching, boating, and camping is now a lifeless “sludge pond,” while the town of Walker Lake faces an accelerating prospect of extinction.
“The last fish was caught in 2013 or 2015, I believe. When the fish died, the fishing died; boating, recreation, that all just disappeared,”Mineral County Commissioner Tony Ruse said.
“There were restaurants here. There were hotels here. There were businesses here. Now? All gone, just 300 residents struggling.”
A Mineral County native, Ruse returned in 2020 after working 34 years as a Switzerland-trained chef in Europe and Asia, including 20 years in South Korea, to open The Big Horn Crossing, a restaurant and convenience store in a shuttered bait shop. It’s now Walker Lake’s only remaining retail business.
Source: ZeroHedge News
