The Sulphur River rises in northeast Texas and flows eastward through some of the last and best hardwood bottomland in the state. Culturally and ecologically, this region is the South, a country of turbid waters flowing beneath white oak, bur oak, Shumard oak, and ash. Here a few cowmen still work in the Cracker manner, with the help of rough “cur-dogs” that might pull night shifts baying feral hogs.
Scattered about the region are small communities—Cuthand, Naples, Omaha, Dalby Springs. All support, and are supported by, farming, logging, and the broader timber industry. Hunting and fishing are deeply embedded in the culture. Recreational hunters from urban areas pay landowners for access to forest and field and patronize local businesses.
The first Anglo settlers trickled into the region in 1820s and began displacing the Kickapoo, who had settled there after the contagion-induced collapse of the Caddo. Area farmers eked out a living growing cotton, peanuts, and corn. Half-wild cattle and swine foraged on open range. By the early 1940s, descendants of those who first plowed former Caddo land found themselves displaced when urban land buyers began to put up fences to keep out free-range livestock. Many smalltime stockmen left; others resorted to sharecropping. Fence cutting was common.
Some held on, however. Their heirs still draw all or part of their livelihoods from the land. But a new threat looms. While sixth-generation Sulphur River farmers look at their grandkids and see eighth-generation landowners, 120 miles west, on the semi-arid Blackland Prairie, Dallas-area business interests and water developers see in the verdant Sulphur watershed the essence of unlimited urban and suburban prosperity.
They want Sulphur River water “to ensure continued economic growth” and claim that their region’s economic contribution to the state gives them a right to it. If they prevail, 67,000 acres of prime hardwood bottomland—all privately owned—will be condemned, taken under eminent domain, and drowned beneath a reservoir that will supply water to a growing Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Then, to satisfy environmental requirements, additional land—as much as 140,000 acres—will be condemned and set aside to mitigate the loss of high-quality wildlife habitat.
The taking of private property has a way of provoking unlikely alliances—whether small farmers and anarchists fighting construction of the planned
Aeroport du Grand Ouest in France, elderly urban preservationists and youthful hipsters beating back philistine incursion from chain stores in America’s urban cores, or in this case, Northeast Texas farmers, environmentalists, hunters, loggers, timber companies, and local real estate agents fighting to protect their independence from outside power.
Traditionalist conservatives concerned about community and continuity and libertarians offended by threats to private property share common enemies here, though these neighbors on the political right fight on different fronts. Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard dipped an anarchic toe into the roiling Texas waters in a 1993 article, “Environmentalists Clobber Texas.” Rothbard blamed environmentalists and the Endangered Species Act, calling them egregious obstacles to private and municipal use of water and suggesting that the Sierra Club preserve endangered “critters of various shapes and sizes” in zoos. More seriously, he suggested,
A longer-run solution [to water-use conflicts], of course, is to privatize the entire system of water and water rights in this country … . If all resources are privatized, they will be allocated to the most important uses by means of a free price system, as the bidders able to satisfy the consumer demands in the most efficient ways are able to outcompete less able bidders for these resources.
He has a point. Water development is heavily subsidized, and Dallas-area residents and businesses are among the most profligate water users in the state, in part because they aren’t paying anywhere near true market value. Surface water is treated as a public resource—despite, in some cases, byzantine systems of junior and senior water rights—and the citizens of northeast Texas can’t claim Sulphur River water as their own. By extension, since flowing water must be impounded for use by large municipalities, landowners in the Sulphur watershed now stand to lose property that has been in their families since before the fall of the Alamo.
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Just more evidence why libertarians totally suck, nothing but shills for the 1%ers "free market as perfect solution to all problems" lie.
