Heavy rains in July 2023 caused flooding throughout New England. Route 113 in Madison, NH was damaged with thousands of yards of gravel washed across the road making it impassable. (Rachel Sharples/Conway Daily Sun)
John Bos
Recent columns in the press about the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts got me to reading Marjorie Kelly’s book, Wealth Supremacy. Kelly is a distinguished senior fellow at the Democracy Collaborative, a national research and development lab for a democratic economy. Four Massachusetts towns – Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott – were completely flooded and ceased to exist to create the reservoir in the 1930s. Approximately 2,500 residents were forced to leave their homes and communities. The purpose of this project was to provide fresh water for Boston and other Eastern communities.
This assault presages Kelly’s view that, “In the unfolding story of water, we can begin to see the architecture of economic system design. In one system, serving life is at the center. In the other, maximizing financial wealth is at the center.”
Kelly asserts that which path we take “will be a matter of which economic system dominates: extractive capitalism, manifest in models like hedge funds and multinational corporations; or a democratic economy where ownership and control is rooted in community (city-controlled water, worker-owned farms, depositor-owned credit unions, state-owned banks) which recognize our inescapable interdependence with one another.” She is making the case for the need for democratic accountability, for building economic pathways to achieve that “more perfect union” of a fully democratic society.
The purchase of water rights in the American west by large corporate agricultural and fossil fuel interests consumes an exorbitant amount of California’s freshwater resources, while over one million Californians lack access to clean water. Water sales from agricultural districts to urban water agencies are becoming more common, with profit as the primary motive. Water rights are not property rights. Yet throughout California, they are being treated as if they were.
We have been lucky in New England, so far. The challenges we face are severe storms bringing devastating flooding to portions of the Northeast. More than a thousand reports of high wind, severe hail, or tornadoes were recorded in 2023 across many Northeastern and Eastern states. Some areas reported up to eight inches of rain within a 24-hour period. Montpelier, Vermont received a record-breaking 5.28 inches of rain, flooding the city and damaging thousands of homes and businesses. These events highlight the increasing frequency and severity of flash floods in the New England region.
Kelly says that we are confronting the question of “who will own the earth, who will own and control ‘ecosystem services.’.” She describes how, in 2021, the New York Stock Exchange created a new investment vehicle entitled Natural Asset Companies (NAC’s), a new asset class to capture and convert the “productive values” of natural assets like forests, water, coral reefs and farms into investor returns. The NYSE website stated that “natural assets produce an estimated $125 trillion annually in global ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity and clean water.”
Finance industry websites like Kiplinger Personal Finance jumped on board by advising, “If natural asset companies are scalable and earn the confidence of investors and stakeholders, they could help ramp up investments in climate solutions. Investors interested should keep an eye out for natural asset companies in the next few months. You might just be able to help keep a forest standing as you feather your nest.”
Feather your nest? Earning the “confidence of investors” has a simple bottom line; profit before everything else.
I was dumbstruck – but not surprised – by Wall Street’s descent into eviscerating the environment for profit over people. So, I went to the web to verify Kelly’s disheartening information. I was relieved to find a Reuters news agency report on January 17 reporting that the NYSE “has withdrawn from the Securities and Exchange Commission a proposal to create a new tradable assets class called ‘natural asset companies,’ or NACs.”
It is bad news that the investment “community” has targeted the growing scarcity of water as the “new oil.” Major sectors of the finance industry are aggressively buying up water rights in the U.S. and worldwide. Several major investment banks and Wall Street-affiliated firms have been acquiring water rights and land with attached water rights across the western United States. Large institutional investors like private equity firms, pension funds, and endowments have also been investing in water rights.
According to water laws in most western states, water cannot be “owned,” although “the right to use that water” can be sold, bought and transferred.
“Different conceptions of rights are at work,” says Kelly; “the rights of corporations and investors to be free of democratic oversight in a ‘free market,’ or the human right to be free of unnecessary suffering as with the right to access to clean water.”
What economic system do we want? One system reveres wealth. The other reveres life on earth.
John Bos is a contributing writer on the climate crisis. Bos is a biweekly columnist for the Greenfield Recorder and his essays have been published in the Springfield Republican, Brattleboro Reformer and other regional publications. Questions and comments are invited at john01370@gmail.com.
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