Who owns the rain?
1:06 pm March 18th, 2009 by Sal Cangeloso
I just wanted to throw out a quick link to this article at the LA Times. Apparently it is illegal in some states to collect rainwater for personal use. Using that water, which happens to fall on your property, is actually stealing according to some strange perversions of logic.
“If you try to collect rainwater, well, that water really belongs to someone else,” said Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado Water Congress. “We get into a very detailed accounting on every little drop.”
It turns out that the issue is a lot more complex than one person collecting water from their gutters for a garden. Large scales water collection (say for an entire community) could cause some serious interruptions in the water cycle and have major effects on people downstream.
Anyway, it’s an interesting article and while it’s only a short introduction to the complexities of water politics, it’s worth checking out.
Sometime these days, we’ll have to pay just for breathing…
Hear hear, just head to the jungle and begin a fresh. No laws and rules against rainwater harvesting there.