|
Neither could the king sell public trust assets
to a private party. The nineteenth-century legal
scholar Henry Schultes described public trust as
“unalienable.” He explained that “things which
relate to the public good cannot be given,
sold, or transferred by the King to another
person.” Henry William Woolrych, another
leading legal scholar of the period, added that
“notwithstanding such a grant, if the public
interest be invaded, or the privileges of the
people narrowed, the grant, pro tanto, is void.”
Following the American Revolution, each
state became sovereign, inheriting from King
George III the trusteeship of public lands and
waters and wildlife within its borders. Both the
Federal government and the individual states
recognized the public trust in their statutes and
ordinances. For instance, Massachusetts’ “Great
Pond Ordinance” of 1641 assured public access
to all consequential water
|
bodies, and the federal government’s Northwest Ordinance
of 1787 gave all U.S. citizens unrestrained
access to all the tributaries of the St. Lawrence
and the Mississippi and proclaimed that those
waters and “the carrying places between shall
be common highways and forever free.”
The struggle for control of water is
intertwined with the fight to preserve
democracy from the corrosive impacts of
expanding corporate power. The best measure
of how a democracy functions is how it
distributes the goods of the land; the air, waters,
wandering animals, fisheries, and public lands,
otherwise known as the “public trust,” or the
“commons.” By their nature these resources
cannot be reduced to private property but are
the shared assets of all the people held in trust
for future generations.
The struggle over the world’s water resources
will be the defining struggle of the 21st century.
|
…. Local public utilities across North America
are even now conveying water supplies that have
benefited from substantial public investment to
private companies, often at fire-sale prices. In
recent years, only vigorous protests by citizens
have kept corporations from privatizing
the water supplies in places like Lexington,
Kentucky, and Stockton, California. In The
Grand Canyon and elsewhere, a more subtle
but equally effective privatization of public trust
waters is occurring as governments subsidize
reckless and unsustainable water usages that favor
avaricious developers, powerful utilities, and
agribusiness barons over the American public.
Destructive government policies are draining
our nation’s rivers and aquifers and trampling
our democratic rights. It’s time for another kind
of Battle of Runnymede, a peaceful uprising
that will return to Americans their fundamental
rights to their waterways.
|
