Why is it illegal to collect rainwater in some places? It doesn’t make sense to me
In: Economics
any water you collect is water that isn’t going into the river, which therefore isn’t feeding the local ecology and isn’t available for irrigation downstream.
As such the amount water per person available from the river is tightly regulated, farming communities have a “water master” who determines who gets what water when
Note that “personal use rainwater collection” is almost always legal – e.g. catching the water that comes out of your gutters from your normal roof in a rainbarrel – it’s setting up collection systems that catch hundreds or thousands of gallons of water from your 100 acre farm.
It’s actually brought up that for this reason rivers make TERRIBLE borders (and because rivers move occasionally), and that an “intelligent design” regional setups would place administrative borders on watersheds boundaries instead – with the borders at ridgetops so each river and all the water that flows into it makes a unique region.
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