Four hundred years of one ditch
In the high valleys of northern New Mexico the acequias still run — community irrigation ditches, some older than the United States, governed not by a state agency or a market but by neighbors who elect a mayordomo to ration scarce water by custom. When the snowpack is thin, the rules everyone agreed to decide who waters when. They have worked for four centuries because the people bound by them are the people who depend on them.
We trust the watershed to the people who live in it. The lobster gangs of Maine police their own grounds better than any warden. Residents with cheap monitors have caught polluters that state sensors missed for years. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel for documenting what the textbooks called impossible: communities governing a shared resource, sustainably, for generations, without either privatizing it or handing it to a distant state.
We share the property-rights camp’s distrust of far-away control. We just think the answer is the commons governed in common, not carved into deeds. And we’ll take the policy-first camp’s national floor — a floor is worth having — but a floor is not the same as stewardship.
Where we concede ground: Proximity isn’t always virtue. Plenty of towns voted to let the one employer keep dumping, because the paycheck was local too.
What would change our mind: If community watersheds consistently score worse than markets or federal rules on measured outcomes, stewardship doesn’t scale.
Read the full synthesis: What would it take to clean up the air and water?