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Water doesn’t grow on trees

by Christian Piatt

Recently, presidential candidate John McCain wooed Colorado voters by suggesting that the water sharing agreement made between Colorado and six other states back in the 1920’s be renegotiated.

As much as we love giving away our natural resources for little or nothing in return, Mister McCain, this is likely to go over about as well as a fart in a church pew.

Senator Ken Salazar said that such a renegotiation would happen over his dead body, which seems an incredibly uneven writing surface upon which to try to sign agreements. But we appreciate the offer, Senator. Should it come to that, a table should do just fine, and if we need your body, maybe you can just hold really still.

Before we get too passionate about rejecting Senator McCain’s idea outright, let’s think about the potential upside. Granted, water doesn’t grow on trees: as we all know, it’s painstaking assembled in water factories. So perhaps there’s a burgeoning industry for us here. I mean, after all, we can just make more.

But it’s going to cost you, Senator.

We’re not going to put the sweat and blood of our highly-skilled water manufacturers at your beck and call without a price. Since water is considered a natural limited resource – though I hardly see how anything that falls from the sky can bee seen as limited – maybe we should work out a trade.

With regard to California, we’ll gladly trade you our water for Hollywood. At first, I thought it might be a good idea to annex the whole town as part of Colorado, but really, we just want the money and the free tickets to all the movie premiers.

Utah, you can get your share in exchange for one-third of your mineral rights and Brigham Young University. I don’t really know what we’ll do with it yet, but it’ll sure be interesting to gain access to an institution with so many Mormons packed into one place.

My first instinct with Arizona was to shut them out, because we don’t really need any more saguaros or old people. But then I remembered that the Arizona Diamondbacks are in the Rockies‘ division. If they trade us the D-backs for water, we can dismantle the team, clearing the way for the Rockies to top their division once again.

New Mexico, we’ll trade you Bill Richardson for a few thousand acre-feet, and we’ll throw Douglas Bruce and Tom Tancredo. They’re not doing much other than annoying us lately anyway.

Nevada wasn’t in the original deal, but they’ve gotten way cooler since 1922. Maybe we can squeeze them in. They won’t likely want to part with Vegas, seeing as how it’s their main stream of income. Fine, but we get the Bunny Ranch. Just make sure it’s been checked out and is totally clean first.

Wyoming: sorry, you’re screwed. Drink more Ovaltine.

I’m sure folks will worry that such an arrangement will dry up our rural territories and put our cities into crisis mode, battling each other like the tribes of Braveheart for every last drop. But think about how cool we’ll be with all that new stuff. There’s a price to pay for awesomeness; what’s a little thirst by comparison?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Columns, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.