The concept of “the commons” is something we talk a lot about at In the Public Interest, so when it was brought up at a book talk last week in a suburban Cleveland library community room, I was pleasantly surprised. The book is called Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves, written by Wendy Johnson, an activist and physician who practices family medicine in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She previously lived in Cleveland, where I met her a quarter century ago.
The context was the care and upkeep of the network of irrigation ditches that brings water from the Rio en Medio, down the mountain to her neighborhood at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains on the outskirts of Santa Fe–when there’s water to be had. Reading from the book’s opening chapter, Wendy explains how she and her neighbors–rich and poor–get together to clear ditches in the spring and, in the fall, to shore up the cement and sandbag structure–the splitting box–that diverts the water from the river to their land. In addition to sharing the responsibility for the waterway, she says the neighbors “also share and connect and build relationships with each other” as they wield their rakes and shovels.
The channel was built in the 1870s when two communities came together in what Wendy calls a “magnanimous display of cooperation and willingness to share a scarce resource.” It was, she says, “an early recognition of one of New Mexico’s unofficial mottos: Water is Life.”
Her talk reminded me of my favorite regional sewer district social media account–okay, the only regional sewer district social media account I know of, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD), which we’ve mentioned in this space previously. NEORSD consistently underscores how infrastructure’s purpose is to connect human beings to one another. Water, whether above ground or below, flowing freely or in pipes, connects us all.
The natural infrastructure and the person-built infrastructure are examples of common goods. That such resources are simply part of the landscape–or buried beneath it–makes it easy to forget just how vital they are. That’s why we’ve written many times about the importance of keeping water systems in public hands, including an in-depth report about recent water privatization efforts in Pennsylvania, and a story map about citizens’ campaigns against such privatization.
“Water is life” isn’t just a motto, it’s a simple fact, and the care and maintenance of it is far too essential to leave up to the market, whose only interest is to squeeze as much profit from it as possible. Such a common good always must be held in common.
Jeff Hagan
Communications Director