Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

complex commodities for our legal system to deal with. I don’t remember if I’ve
said this or not, but if you think about it there’s four basic things you need for
human life; air, sunshine, land and water. Only one of those is easily
transportable. And that’s the whole history of the West to the hydraulic society of
the western United States. It’s interesting, our legal system in its sort of Anglo-
American traditions, has what we think of as private goods and then what we call
public use goods. The ultimate private good is land. We buy and sell land. We
own land. Even when the government has land, it owns the land and it can sell it
or manage it or whatever. That’s in contrast to Native American systems that
treat land as a common use good. Our systems treat air as a common use good.
It’s free. Take it. Use it anyway you want. You can pollute it at will. The
tragedy of the commons applies because each of us doesn’t have sufficient
discipline to stop polluting on our own. And sunshine is a common use good in
our system. Water is the only one that is both. Sometimes it’s public; sometimes
it’s a private good. If it’s underneath your land and you can pump it and use it,
it’s a private good. If it’s flowing through your land, we treat it more like a public
good. You’re allowed to take it and use it, but you can’t really sell it anywhere off
your land. It’s the complexity of that difference that’s created the distinctions in
Arizona law about subsurface water and surface water that are probably not
hydrologically realistic but are historically so important that it’s really a complex,
difficult problem. And in Prescott and Prescott Valley that’s a lot of what they are
arguing about right now; those differences.
Interview with Grady Gammage
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