Heart of Dryness by James G. Workman

Author:James G. Workman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2000-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conservatives adamantly disagreed. This so-called right didn’t hold water, figuratively or literally. America’s Founding Fathers were not socialists. They would no more have engraved in the Constitution a right to water than they would a right to land, food, medicine, jobs, housing, transportation, or fuel. Doing so might even weaken other human rights by making people increasingly dependent on big government. Certainly, water was a necessity. But nothing good came from calling water’s economic goods and services a “right.”12 To secure access to water, people must simply employ “real” and “classic” political rights like free speech, free assembly, and free press. Indeed, “the trouble with rights like ‘water and sanitation’ is that they often achieve the exact opposite of their aims because they invite state intervention into all kinds of areas. Thus, these rights run the risk of bringing about exactly what human rights are supposed to prevent: an omnipresent state.”13 What’s more, ran the counter-argument, it’s impractical. How would any emerging so-called right to water be quantified? Would people get an unlimited supply? Would it flow as unrestricted as speech or religious worship,14 or would failure to pipe free water to every door, on demand, expose leaders to prosecution for human rights violations? What Thomas Paine said about liberty—“What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly”—could equally apply to water. Instead of ensuring conservation for all species, said conservatives, a human right to water would quickly lead a nation to waste, pollution, corruption, biodiversity extinctions, and, quite literally, state insolvency.

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