Oregon. It’s that wide open state of mountain and forest where American’s dream of a life of self sufficiency, fish for your supper, shoot your breakfast, camp fires, and a thumping great 4 x 4 to tear along the forest tracks…
It is the American dream, a return to the lifestyle of the pioneers. Take care of yourself, take care of your own, live on the bounty of nature. Even in Oregon the State is encroaching. Those who dream of a similar lifestyle might care to take note of the result of a court case that has been on going there for ten years now.
Water, that most essential ingredient of life for mankind. It doesn’t belong to mankind though, even when it falls from the sky. It belongs to the State. Allegedly.
A Oregon man has just been jailed for 30 days and fined $1,500 dollars for allowing rainwater that fell from the sky onto his 170 acres farm to drop into the ponds on his farm, thus depriving Medford Water Commission of its rightful drops of water…
Garry Harrington lives in an area of extreme wild fires:
“When it comes to the point where a rural landowner can’t catch rainwater that falls on his land to protect his property, it’s gone too far,”
“The government is bullying. They’ve just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies. So, we as Americans, we need to stand on our constitutional rights, on our rights as citizens and hang tough,”
In the UK, we have become used to hosepipe bans, even as our homes flooded. There is some rationale there, the water companies do pipe the water to our homes; this is going further, this says that even the water that falls out of the sky belongs to the water companies, or the State.
You will buy the very essence of life from the State.
At what point do people rise up and shoot the lot of them?
Ms Raccoon lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France, renowned for its fine wines and gourmet food, so she frequently finds better things to do than sit in front of a computer all morning. She is liable to take off traveling at a moment's notice. Consequently this blog only gets updated these days when it is raining - and it doesn't rain very often round here...
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Ditto air Anna…
Carbon trading?
It would appear that while you’re allowed to collect rainwater in waterbutts etc, what you’re not allowed to do is block off channels that flow into the local river and create dams on your own property (specifically, in this case, two 10-foot dams and one 20-foot dam.)
Not that even that should be necessarily illegal, but somewhat different to the other Daily-Mailesque reports that otherwise showed up on a google-news search.
Dear Sir, How do you stop rain water from falling into Ponds? Thank you in advance for your assistance. Yours faithfully, Elena ‘andcart.
In the UK, our water companies are even smarter.
They charge you for all the free rainwater you collect on their behalf if you arrange to divert it into their collection pipes by placing gutters and downpipes on your roofs. If you choose not to donate them that free water, instead allowing the rainfall to drain to earth, which means they then have to wait a while and spend vastly more collecting it from deep aquifers, then they don’t charge you.
You couldn’t make it up.
Brilliant Mudplugger – I had never twigged that, you are right!
Quite
In glorious Tasmoania, just south of the Oz Big Island, the same farce happens. ALL the water it seems belongs to the ‘Hydro’, so rivers, ponds (or dams as they – we – call them here), lakes etc all contain ‘Hydro’s water’. If a farmer builds a dam (digs a hole) and water collects in it, he has to pay for it. He can ‘buy’ a licence and be ‘allocated’ an amount, for a hefty price. The ‘rationale’ is that were it not for his dam (pond) the water would have tricked into a river somewhere. I understand that the Labor/Green Guvmunt here ( Well you would not expect otherwise would you?) would like to charge us for the rain that falls on our clothes as we eventually take it home.
By the way, the ‘Hydro’ produces all our electricity. The Feds, under PM Gloriana Ju-Liar (Labour, LyingToadsville), has recently introduced a ‘carbon tax’ which she promised not to do. (“There will be NO Carbon Tax from a Government I lead”). You would think that we Tasmoanians would not get taxed on our electricity as the mainlanders do (they have coal-burning power-stations), as ours is produced by ‘clean, green means’, but no. We get taxed too. It is called ‘equity’. But we export it to Victoria and South Oz tax-free. THEY get the benefit that we should enjoy. I am not sure just how this is equitable, but heck, Gloriana is a Feminist and they all have the wierdest ideas about equity.
mate – strewth !
I don’t know about Oregon but certainly in other states of the South Western USA there is a thriving market in water rights. The rights attaching to the water in Colorado, for instance, are explained here.
“At what point do people rise up and shoot the lot of them?”
Drowning would be more apposite.
The realities of life in Obamaland:
See that tasty pie you just took out of the oven Anna? You didn’t bake that, the government did.
See that sparkling clean upper story window from which you look on the french countryside? The window cleaner did not run up his ladder and polish that, the government did.
See that rather smart hairstyle your commenter Mr. Thorpe, poser that he is, is sporting? Justina the hairdresser did not style that hair, the government did.
See that nasty red ink on all our bank statements? We did not spend our money, the government did.
Ian T
We delude ourselves if we believe we are free.
True, but some of us consider ourselves very reasonable.
“a return to the lifestyle of the pioneers”: what? You’re allowed to slaughter the Injuns?
Yes, but only if you give up the 4×4 for a horse-drawn wagon. Oh, and the Injuns are allowed to shoot back….
If the rain fills holes in the ground, that would be fine. Shoving up thumping big dams is another question, though. Like, what happens if they leak or collapse – amateur dam builders are about as desirable as amateur general surgeons.
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