Last year some attendees at the Snake Valley Festival were talking about blowing up the Southern Nevada Water Pipeline when it came, this year that topic is not only off the table but chances the pipeline will ever be built let alone blown up have been reduced to slim at least for the time being.
The mood at this year’s Snake Valley festival in Baker, Nevada will definitely be different said Great Basin water network spokeswoman Abby Johnson Wednesday.
“We have had some very significant victories this year,” Johnson said. “So yes we are feeling very optimistic still I have to keep reminding people that while we have on a couple of battles the war is far from over.”
Friends and supporters of Snake Valley will gather in Baker, Nevada during the weekend of June 20-22 for the sixth annual Snake Valley Festival to celebrate and raise funds to help protect the water and environment in eastern Nevada and the west desert of Utah.
All proceeds from the festival events will benefit the Great Basin Water Network (www.greatbasinwater.net) to help protect the water and environment in eastern Nevada and the west desert of Utah from the SNWA’s water grab now over 25 years old.
And for most of those 25 years rural Nevada had been on the losing of court case after court case and bureaucratic ruling after bureaucratic ruling. And while the Snake Valley Festival tried to put on a brave face sometimes the festivities turned a little depressing as a celebration of a way of life headed toward extinction.
The pipeline’s approval was seen as such a foregone conclusion that radical environmentalist became attracted to the issue.
“The SNWA pipeline and other large infrastructure projects around the world are being pushed through by the rich and the powerful with no consideration for the poor, let alone for the health of the land,” said Max Wilbert of the Great Basin chapter of the Deep Green Resistance last May. “This project is an epic mistake, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you see resistance to this project – and many others like it – turning towards militant, by-any-means-necessary tactics. When people have there back up against the wall, and any option for peaceful resolution has been foreclosed, they will do what it takes.”
Proponents of Deep Green Resistance encourage strategies for social action that run the gamut from violent to nonviolent. DGR’s support for violent action all largely center around hard-hitting infrastructural vandalism, such as explosive dam removal, rather than any kind of personal violence.
But then just as sales of the Anarchist Cookbook began to climb in rural Nevada and Utah, rural Nevada won an amazing victory not in the court of public opinion but in a real live court.
In a stunningly strong decision, Senior Judge Robert Estes of the Seventh Judicial Court of Nevada declared the State Engineer’s decision “subjective, unscientific, arbitrary and capricious”, and “unfair to following generations of Nevadans” and “not in the public interest”.
Estes resoundingly rejected the Nevada State Engineer’s allocation of some 84,000 acre feet per year of groundwater in four rural valleys that the Southern Nevada Water Authority planned to pump and pipe to Las Vegas.
“I am ecstatic,” said Abby Johnson, President of the Baker, Nevada-based Great Basin Water Network. “This decision should send a clear message to SNWA and Nevada leaders that this project is doomed to fail and should be canceled now in order to save Las Vegas ratepayers billions of wasted dollars”.
Estes’ ruling requires the State Engineer to recalculate reassess the water available for appropriation from Spring Valley to assure that “the basin will reach equilibrium between discharge and recharge within a reasonable time”, and to “recalculate the appropriations for Cave, Dry Lake, and Delamar Valleys to avoid over appropriations or conflicts with down-gradient, existing water rights”.
“I am ecstatic,” Johnson said at the time. “This decision should send a clear message to SNWA and Nevada leaders that this project is doomed to fail and should be canceled now in order to save Las Vegas ratepayers billions of wasted dollars”.
In addition to the Estes decision SNWA opponents scored a political victory of a sorts when Utah governor Gary Herbert In an 11th hour decision reversed himself and said he would not sign a controversial water-sharing agreement with Nevada that was strongly supported by the SNWA and strongly opposed by Utah ranchers and more recently by the LDS church.
“At the end of the day, when it comes down to those people who have the most to lose — it’s their water, their lifestyle, their livelihood — I can’t in good conscience sign the agreement,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
Finally this year and fresh off their big win in court, White Pine County, Great Basin Water Network, the Goshute and Shoshone Tribes, and their allies took the fight to a new level, requesting that the Federal District Court of Nevada “void the validity” of the Bureau of Land Management’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision (ROD) and “suspend and enjoin any operation on the right-of-way” pending full compliance with federal environmental laws and trust obligations to the Tribal Plaintiffs.
