![](\"https:\/\/waterownership.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/01\/cropped-head-til-wordpress-med-tekst.jpg\")
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I have been recently working on a paper discussing the ownership of water, assuming for my argument that you can somehow lay claim to water.\u00a0 Now that the paper is finished, I am free to ponder whether or not you can actually lay claim to water.<\/p>\n
Water is not something static.\u00a0 It is constantly moving, flowing, and changing.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t stay in the same place at any time, regardless of whether you remove it from the river\/stream\/ocean or not.\u00a0 It evaporates back into the sky and returns to the water cycle.<\/p>\n
So how can someone lay a claim to water?<\/p>\n
One way that people have done this is to create riparian rights \u2013 the rights to the land surrounding water.\u00a0 Thus I can own land around a lake and have a claim on the water in the lake, but I still cannot own water.<\/p>\n
Ownership implies some kind of control over the object that is owned \u2013 if I own something I can control access to it, or how it is maintained.\u00a0 But is control over water really the goal? Controlling water does not guarantee the state in which water will be kept \u2013 it does not stop the water from becoming polluted.\u00a0 Furthermore, control implies some kind of dominance<\/a> over the object. What is forgotten, however, is that water cannot be controlled.\u00a0 Tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods are all evidence as to how much more powerful water is than humans.\u00a0 When people have attempted to constrain water, time and time again it has overpowered the constraints.<\/p>\n Frank Trelease<\/a> uses the thought experiment that if you buy a watch, you have ownership of the watch. And if you have ownership of the watch, you can protect the watch and demand damages if it is broken.\u00a0 To him, if I own water, then I can seek any damages for the pollution of that water.\u00a0 And in order to own water, I must buy it.\u00a0 Whether that buying is in the riparian sense, where one buys the land surrounding water and is given claim to the water, or in the infrastructure sense, where one buys the water that is pumped to one\u2019s house, is hard to determine.\u00a0 However, his conception of ownership implies that if one owns something, one can defend it. But what if the resource could defend itself?<\/p>\n Christopher Stone, in his essay \u2018Should the Trees have Standing?<\/a>\u2019 discusses whether or not natural objects like trees and rivers should be allowed to have legal standing.\u00a0 In the process, he says that if we are to view rivers as to be something that can be wronged, then we must also hold the rivers accountable for their impact on the earth: namely the impact of floods.\u00a0 The river should be made to pay damages for its destruction (through the use of a legal guardian and a fund created in the name of the river).\u00a0 Through this understand, rivers and streams would not be owned, couldn\u2019t be owned, as ownership would deny them their rights as objects of legal standing.\u00a0 Rather water would be borrowed from the river\/stream and would have to be returned in good condition.<\/p>\n Furthermore, if water can be owned, than water can be sold.\u00a0 J.H. Dales<\/a> discusses the importance of acknowledging water ownership so that it can be priced effectively for the market.\u00a0 His argument is that if water can be owned, than it can be treated as a material good with a fixed pricing system, rather than affixing an arbitrary price to water, as had been done previously.<\/p>\n But to return to the original question, how can someone lay claim to water, the answer is much more complicated than if ownership is justified.\u00a0 If water can be owned, can it be bought? Or is the ownership in name only, meaning that I can own the water I pull from a stream? I think the answer is a bit of both.\u00a0 When I pull water from a stream to use it, I own that water.\u00a0 John Locke<\/a> writes that ownership of a resource only requires the mixing of one\u2019s labor with the resource \u2013 by Lockean understanding, I own whatever water I remove from the water cycle.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Photo Credit 1: Water Ownership<\/a>) (Image Credit 2: Public Services International<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been recently working on a paper discussing the ownership of water, assuming for my argument that you can somehow lay claim to water.\u00a0 Now that the paper is finished, I am free to ponder whether or not you can actually lay claim to water. Water is not something static.\u00a0 It is constantly moving, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[748,746,747,749,750,540,745,539,538],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-christopher-stone","tag-dominance","tag-frank-trelease","tag-j-h-dales","tag-john-locke","tag-lisa-seyfried","tag-ownership","tag-water","tag-women-and-water","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20737,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions\/20737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.world-psi.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/medium\/public\/images\/news\/en-water_is_a_human_right_square_0.jpg?itok=UHZLo_Gv\")
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