Water Rights in Film--a beginning

Contemporary water rights issues come to the fore in Quantum of Solace, with control of land and water like that found in Chinatown nearly replicating the 1998-2000 Cochabamba, Bolivia water wars instigated by the World Bank, a connection noted only by Joshua Clover in the Film Quarterly review, “Cinema for a New Grand Game.”  These wars began when the World Bank “refused to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in the city of Cochabamba unless the local government sold its public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to consumers” (Barlow and Clark 154). Bolivia complied, giving control of water to Aguas del Tunari, “a newly formed subsidiary of the U.S. construction and water giant Bechtel,” but when water rates increased by almost 35%, tens of thousands of Cochabamba citizens protested for a week, with 90 percent of residents opposing Bechtel, so the Bolivian government broke its contract with Bechtel. The World Bank President Wolfensohn argued against the change, but protest coordinator Oscar Olivera disagreed, declaring, “I’d like to meet with Mr. Wolfensohn to educate him on how privatization has been a direct attack on Bolivia’s poor…. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 have seen their water bills jump to $20 per month—more than they spend on food” (155).

            Perhaps because water is both abundant and necessary, it serves as a protagonist in films from the silent era to the present. Water rights take different roles in contemporary feature films. Floods take the center in silent films such as Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), New Deal features, such as Our Daily Bread (1934), and contemporary features such as Michael Polish’s Northfork (2003). Drought, on the other hand, serves as the protagonist in features from the John Ford epic Grapes of Wrath (1940) and contemporary documentaries, including Jim Burroughs’ Water Wars (2009). All of these films, however, draw on environmental history and environmental law, paving the way for films grounded in America’s sometimes conflicting views of water rights, views almost always grounded in the nineteenth-century American drive for progress. Although this grounding in environmental law is most explicitly illustrated by the documentary Tapped (2009) and an animated feature, Rango  (2010), it reaches the mainstream in more subtle and powerful ways in the 2008 James Bond action adventure, Quantum of Solace (2008), an unlikely rhetorical film that not only demonstrates the dangers of commodifying water but also offers solutions that look back to earlier historical visions of water as a right

            Water rights are steeped in environmental history in films with water at their center. Chinatown explicitly highlights the continuing influence of the 1877 Desert Land Act and the doctrine of prior appropriation. Water rights in America respond to at least three political, historical, and economic perspectives, all of which have throughout U. S. history addressed water distribution during times of both drought and abundance of water. The first of these, the riparian doctrine, connects water with the land adjacent to it, so that “Riparian land owners can access water for a ‘reasonable use,’ so long as downstream users are not adversely affected” (Donohew 90). A second approach, the appropriative doctrine, grounds legislation that opened up the West to pioneers. See, for example, the Desert Land Act (1877), the General Mining Act (1872), and the Homestead Act (1862) which rested on the doctrine of prior appropriation: “Water rights with older priority dates are more likely to receive their full allocation and hence are more valuable” (Donohew 89). A third perspective focuses on groundwater rights, which are more difficult to define and measure, so specifications differ from state to state. For example, “In some states, including parts of Texas, unlimited ground water pumping is allowed by a landowner so long as it is put to a beneficial use” (Donohew 91), but in others, state or local agencies regulate groundwater usage more closely.

            Contemporary films with water at their center illustrate the ongoing power of this environmental legal context, as well. Some water rights films focus on the ramifications of riparian rights, especially when they are less effectively regulated by organizations such as the EPA and the 1972 Clean Water Act. In A Civil Action (1998), for example, water rights are represented as the right to clean, drinkable water, and a clear legal solution is provided—EPA intervention. In GasLand  (2010), however, filmmaker and activist Josh Fox reveals the negative externalities attached to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for natural gas, a new oil and gas extraction process seemingly condoned by legislatures in both the Western and Eastern United States. Other contemporary feature films explore water rights in relation to water not as a resource but as a commodity. In Battle: Los Angeles (2011) and Rango (2011),  water is exploited for personal gain and constructed as a product to be stolen or bought and sold. Rango demonstrates the consequences of usurping riparian rights with an appropriative doctrine. Tapped illustrates both the dangers of an appropriative doctrine in conjunction with groundwater rights. Both films effectively reveal the long-term ramifications of commodifying water, turning it into a product that can be owned and sold. They both also propose a viable alternative that returns water to its democratic community roots. Quantum of Solace makes similar arguments, but within an action-adventure genre that amplifies the message, not only with near-death car chases and maximum explosions but with a narrative grounded in current affairs documented in contemporary water rights documentaries released the same year, Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008) and Flow: For Love of Water (2008).