2748. Pebble Mine: “One More Indicator That We Are Undoubtedly the Dumbest Species on the Planet”

By Thomas Linzey, In These Times, November 8, 2017

Residents in southwestern Alaska have been fighting the Pebble Mine for decades. In October, on behalf of the extractive industry, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resurrected the ecologically insane proposal.   (Image: Jim Klug / savebristolbay.org)

Funny how projects that would be holocausts for Earth never seem to stay dead.

Look no further than the proposed Pebble Mine in southwestern Alaska's Bristol Bay. In 2002, after deposits of copper, gold, and molybdenum were confirmed to the tune of $300 billion, the dream of a huge open pit mine was born—with a proposal to remove 10 billion tons of rock, create two artificial lakes over four miles long, and construct a mine as deep as the Grand Canyon and as big as Manhattan.

During the Obama Administration, Alaskans and other groups successfully fought to get the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to declare the area off-limits to mining under a rarely-used provision of the Clean Water Act. The agency eventually declared that the mine would result in the “complete loss of fish habitat” due to the destruction of 22 miles of streams and more than six square miles of wetlands.

But it only took an hour after a meeting between President Trump’s EPA-head Scott Pruitt and the CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership for Pruitt to reverse that determination. His decision now allows the permit application process to move forward.

Problem is, that part of Alaska is the last place in the world that a mine should be built. Fifty-six million sockeye salmon call Bristol Bay home—making it one of the last, great salmon fisheries on Earth. Nearly half of the world’s sockeye catch comes from this one region, supporting some 14,000 jobs, generating about $480 million annually, and feeding 4,000 year-old Alaska native communities.

Sockeye salmon swimming in Alaska's Bristol Bay. Note: their bodies only turn red when they reach their spawning grounds. When in the ocean, sockeye are a blue or silver color. (Image: Ben Knight / earthjustice.org)

Of course, it’s not just the Pebble Mine protections that are here today and gone tomorrow. Whether it’s uranium mining in central Virginia, coal shipping terminals in Washington, or federal land protections in the West, ecosystems and nature are just political footballs; always one election away from being trampled to death.

Enough Already

We treat the natural environment with less legal protections than we treat our own right to carry firearms. And that is just one more indicator that we are undoubtedly the dumbest species on the planet. While our very lives depend on clean air, clean water, and the sustenance provided by this planet, we continue to treat Earth as something that can be sold off to the highest bidder without consequence.

Enough already. The kind of change we need won’t come about because we “raise consciousness,” recycle more, take shorter showers or write more letters to Congress. We need a plain old revolution that elevates nature and ecosystems to the highest form of protection available under our law—that of rights. And we need to give up hope that the foxes in charge of the current henhouse will do anything to move in that direction.

Three dozen communities in the United States, including the City of Pittsburgh, have been leading the way—adopting local laws that recognize that ecosystems have rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and to be restored when damaged. Courts in India, Colombia, and Ecuador have held that rivers, glaciers and other ecosystems possess independently enforceable rights of their own. At least two countries have placed constitutional protections for nature directly into their national constitutions.

In the United States, with the help of those who care about the river, the Colorado River ecosystem recently sued the State of Colorado for the gross malfeasance of governance that has almost killed off the River.

Bring It On

Rivers with a right to flow? Yes. Forests with the right to exist? Absolutely. Wetlands with a right to do what wetlands do? Without a doubt. The climate with a right to exist without fossil fuel emissions? Bring it on.

Let’s dance. And let the naysayers explain why it’s okay somehow to continue to treat places like Bristol Bay as just another dumping ground. They’re the same idiots that defended slavery, denied women the right to vote and stopped African-Americans from voting. They’re the same venal morons who brought us “corporate rights,” “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” and “nuclear power: too cheap to meter.” They’ll say anything to anyone to continue to clutch at their avenues of wealth, control and power.

If now isn’t the time to have that fundamental battle to remove their cold dead hands from our sustainable future, then I think we’ve forgotten completely what battles are for.

Time to put our big boy pants on, and giddyup. Let’s go.

2505. Life in the Shadow of the Mong Tan Dam

By Demelza Stokes, Mongabay, December 7, 2016

The riverscape of Kunhing township, whose name means “thousand islands” in the Shan language. Photo courtesy of Action for Shan State Rivers.

Introductory Note: This is the third article in a five-part series exploring Myanmar’s Salween landscape amid galvanizing plans to develop hydropower projects along its course.

Part I outlined plans being made by businesses and governments in China, Thailand and Myanmar to harness the Salween’s vast hydroelectric potential.

Part II looks at Salween dams’ already bloody legacy and the projects’ direct or indirect relationship with perpetuating instability and conflict in Myanmar’s Shan and Karen states.

Part IV, to be published Dec. 14, meets actors involved in creating the ‘Salween Peace Park,” combining wildlife conservation and peace-building in Karen state, where the world’s longest running civil war has raged since 1949.

Part V, to be published Dec. 21, focuses on downstream Salween communities’ livelihoods and ongoing changes facing the broader Salween landscape due to Myanmar’s rapid economic development.

*    *    *

Before reaching the Keng Kham valley, the bright green Pang river, the Salween’s major tributary running south through central Shan state, splits into three parallel rivers that form myriad channels creating islands and islets, blurring the line between forests and water in a pristine and biodiverse riverscape. Rarely seen by outsiders, these are the famed “thousand islands,” forming a stunning inland delta that gives the “Kunhing” township its name. To the south, the Pang meets the Salween in a cascade of waterfalls. Seen from the air, white water tumbles down through verdant forested islands on an escarpment hundreds of meters long.

The thousand islands’ labyrinthine landscape and its surrounding forests bloom with tremendous ecological and ethnic diversity.  If plans for the Mong Ton dam go ahead, they will all be lost under the giant reservoir.

Early stages of construction have already started on Mong Ton, the biggest hydropower project planned for the Salween. Logging in the future flood zone and gold mining along the river bed is already stripping the land upstream of the project of its natural resources before they sink underneath the Salween’s murky waters. The dam site is located in a heavily militarized area in southern Shan state between territories controlled by Shan and Wa forces, and its flood zone is projected to be roughly the size of Singapore at 640 square kilometers. In addition to the huge environmental and social costs of building the Mong Ton dam, observers are also concerned that the dam lies near an earthquake fault line, in the “most earthquake prone region in Myanmar”, Hla Hla Aung, a senior researcher at the Myanmar Earthquake Committee told The Third Pole earlier this year.

ETHNIC AND ECOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AT STAKE

Shan state is Myanmar’s largest and most ethnically diverse state, populated by dozens of ethnic minority groups, including the Shan, Palaung, Pa-O, Wa, Lahu, Padaung, Akha and Lisu, all with divergent dialects or languages, customs, traditional dress and beliefs. In Kunhing township, and throughout the Pang and Salween watersheds, rural populations depend on the river and the forest to survive. They grow rice and vegetables in the lands surrounding the river, their lowland farming tracts dependent on river water for irrigation. The river is harvested for fish, crab, prawns, snails and oysters. The surrounding forests provide vegetables and mushrooms, traditional medicines and firewood. For the moment, some communities here get their electricity from mini-hydropower on the Salween’s tributaries. Kunhing township is dotted with historical sites of deep significance to Shan people, including ancient pagodas, traditional Shan chiefs’ houses and sacred cave temples, Nang War Nu, Director of the Kun Heing Foundation and ex-member of parliament for the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party told Mongabay.

The Keng Kham temple is immensely significant to local Shan people and an important part of their cultural heritage. According to local villagers it was built before World War II, when individual Shan states were were ruled by “sawbwas.” Image courtesy of Action for Shan State Rivers.

The significance of the land to its residents is profound. Forests, fisheries and waters are assigned not just economic, environmental and political value, but also deep cultural, social and spiritual meaning.  “My spirit is there; I am connected to this land. If I die, my spirit will be there.” a Paw Tao Ma Ha, a villager from the Keng Kham valley living in exile in Thailand, told the Shan Sapawa Environmental Organization in 2009.

The forests bordering the Salween were once home to a rich catalogue of mammals. In an account written at the turn of the 20th century, colonial administrator Sir James George Scott described “secluded and jungly slopes” teeming with tigers, panthers and other cats, rhinoceroses, “all kinds of deer,” otters, bears, badgers, porcupines and monkeys and apes “in great variety.”

In the succeeding century, hunting and deforestation took a heavy toll on the region’s biodiversity, but even today the unique ecosystems of the Salween watershed support globally endangered species. In pockets of remote mountainous forest habitats, the Indochinese tiger, (Panthera tigris corbetti), clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), a type of wild cow called banteng (Bos javanicus), can still be found, among hundreds of other globally important species. But decades of conflict and the remoteness of the Salween mountains and valleys have left the river and its ecosystems woefully understudied, meaning current information on the ecological health of the watershed is extremely scarce. As well as unleashing a myriad other environmental and social consequences on the biodiversity and local people, the Mong Ton project’s vast reservoir would inundate unexplored areas of global ecological importance.

Par Zoi lived in a village in the Keng Kham valley until she was 18, when she was forced to relocate to Nar Sae village. Before the forced relocation due to the Myanmar Army’s offensives began in 1996, the Shan Sapawa Environmental Organization estimated the total population of the Keng Kham community to be 14,800 - in 2009 they reported the population had dwindled to about 3000 people. Photo courtesy of Mong Pan Youth Association.

A $10 billion hydropower project backed by Thai and Chinese developers, the Mong Ton dam will export 90 percent of its energy to China and Thailand. Critics of plans to develop the Salween’s hydropower potential lament that China and Thailand will purchase most of the energy produced by the dams, leaving some of the poorest people in Myanmar — and indeed the world —  to deal with the consequences. The project threatens to evict tens of thousands of people, including approximately 50,000 from Kunhing township, many of whom have already suffered from decades of conflict and displacement. For ethnic minorities that face flooding, their way of life will be over. “The forest and the river are so important not just for me, but for everyone living along the river basin. All of our livelihoods rely on the water and the forest,” 61-year-old Par Zoi from Nar Sae village in Kunhing township told a researcher working for Mongabay.

These riverine communities, who are almost wholly dependent on agriculture, are already increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In recent years, they have noticed increased sediment in the river, changes in its depth, or unusual floods. “Even before they are building the dam, we are already experiencing strange changes in the weather,” Kham Mai, campaign coordinator at the Shan Sapawa Environmental Organization, told Mongabay. “How will they cope when the dam is built? Because some of the villagers live on the islands, small islands in the river, so they are so worried about that.” she said.

The livelihoods of the people living along the Salween and its tributaries depend on the river. Photo courtesy of Mong Pan Youth Association.

The tropical mixed evergreen and deciduous forests in Shan state are some of Southeast Asia’s last remaining “globally significant” tracts. Thanks to projected forest loss due to illegal logging, agribusiness expansion and unregulated infrastructure development, the WWF  has identified the region as one of ten global “deforestation fronts.” The high rates of deforestation prior to the construction of dams, and the loss of forests once reservoirs are filled, will contribute to climate change and incur huge biodiversity loss, further impacting the ability of local subsistence farmers to support their livelihoods.

Hydropower development projects are one of the primary causes of deforestation worldwide, and the Mong Ton dam illustrates how this happens. Preemptive logging is taking place along access roads, as is clearing of forested areas that will be flooded by the dam’s reservoir. “Sometimes I go to the forest to hunt for small animals, vegetables, bamboo, mushrooms and seasonal crops. The forest is very important for people, especially local indigenous people like us,” Sai Lu, also from Nar Sae village in Kunhing township told a researcher working for Mongabay. “We have many kinds of wild animals here. I can’t say if they are less or more now, but what I can say is I think because of the logging we don’t see them near the village anymore.” In a study done earlier this year, researchers working with think-tank CGIAR found that 75 percent of the people they interviewed in a village near the dam site reported a negative change in forest and river ecosystem services, which they attributed to the logging around the dam.

Logging trucks pictured at the Mong Ton dam site in March 2016 by the Karen Environmental Social Action Network. Photo courtesy of KESAN.

An environmental impact assessment (EIA) and social impact assessment (SIA) conducted for the Mong Ton dam was conducted by an Australian company, the Snowy Mountain Engineering Corporation (SMEC) in 2015, but has been lambasted by critics of the dam. The company’s consultations were branded a “rubberstamp” by ethnic communities from the area, who were enraged that SMEC appeared to be downplaying the negative effects of the dam. SMEC were unable to complete their survey work in all of the projected dam-affected areas due to some villagers vehemently opposed to the project refusing to take part in surveys, or blocking SMEC from entering villages altogether. They were also blocked from entering the affected area in the Wa region by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) in July 2015. Clashes had broken out between the UWSA and the Tatmadaw in June just north of the dam site. Attempts to contact SMEC by Mongabay were unsuccessful, but in a statement sent to the Irrawaddy magazine last year the company warned that disruption to the EIA/SIA process and their data gathering could lead to “suboptimal outcomes for the affected communities”.

In a set of recommendations sent to the NLD this September, the Save the Salween Network – a group of ethnic civil society organizations – said, “Agreements on the Salween hydropower projects cannot be determined by environmental and social impact assessment mechanisms as they remain illegitimate, lack accountability, transparency and the direct and representative participation and consent of local communities.” 

Incongruities between research done by SMEC and that done by local communities themselves has left locals deeply mistrustful of the company’s activities. Activist and ex-parliamentarian Nang War Nu told Mongabay of the massive discrepancy between her civil society group’s study of the projected affected area and SMEC’s: “I requested to see their mapping, and they showed it to me. I saw SMEC’s map, including Kun Heng, but it was very different from the real map. The original map from the locals shows there are altogether about one hundred villages. But the project has said only about 10 villages will be in the flood area.”

The river and its banks are sites of both daily life and religious observance. Photo courtesy of Mong Pan Youth Association.

Furious with SMEC’s handling of its Mong Ton work, campaign group Action for Shan State Rivers said in a statement released in August 2015, “SMEC had angered locals by blatantly promoting the dam in public meetings, downplaying negative impacts, and promising them electricity, even though the dam’s main purpose is to export power to China and Thailand.” The group also delivered a petition with 23,717 signatures opposing the dam’s construction to SMEC’s Yangon office. “The government should recognize the voice of the people and they should cancel all of the Salween dams because there are no benefits for Myanmar at all, mostly the benefits will go to neighboring countries,” Sai Khur Hseng, a representative of the Shan Sapawa Environmental Organization, and a vocal critic of the dam projects, told Mongabay.

The Myanmar government’s estimated completion date for the Mong Ton dam is 2030-2031. President Htin Kyaw announced a new commission on Aug. 12 this year to evaluate all the planned hydropower projects on the Irrawaddy River, but the Salween has been afforded no such providence. The launching of a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) across Myanmar’s hydropower sector in September this year by the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Myanmar’s MOEP and MOECAF, has been given a cautious welcome by some observers, who hope it could encourage the government and dam developers to adhere to international standards of practice.

Others are deeply skeptical of the process and worry that the SEA assumes large hydropower development in Myanmar is a foregone conclusion. The World Bank Group and the Asian Development Bank have advocated for and provided loans to construct large dams across Southeast Asia, leaving many to question the objectivity of an assessment guided by IFC. “The SEA starts from the assumption that large-scale hydropower is a given, rather than enabling consideration of alternatives that could inform open discussion on the best means of meeting Myanmar’s energy demands and priorities,” Pai Deetes, Thailand campaign coordinator for International Rivers told Mongabay. The cumulative effects of the Salween dams will also have transboundary impacts in China and Thailand, but these appear to fall outside of the scope of Myanmar’s SEA, which will only involve assessments and consultations within Myanmar, said Deetes.

Clouded leopard, one of the endangered species whose habitat is threatened by the Mong Ton dam. 

Activists, environmentalists and renewable energy experts in Myanmar are urging the government to call a moratorium on the Salween dams. They advocate for greener energy alternatives in place of mega-dams, such as mini-hydro, solar and wind power, which they say can be deployed more quickly to feed Myanmar’s growing need for electricity. “Because 70 percent of Myanmar’s population live in off-grid rural regions, prioritizing small-scale and decentralized energy sources over mega-dams is a better way to meet the immediate needs of local people,” said Deetes (more in Part 5).

“No other rivers in … the region continue to run free and support such lush and pristine forest areas and abundant biodiversity,” Deetes told Mongabay. Without a comprehensive consultation process and consensus, dam developers, “cannot simply press forward with a project that will cause severe and widespread impacts on a globally important ecological system,” she said.

Experience from around the world of large dams — from the cascade along the Mekong that threaten the food security of tens of millions of people living in the Delta Region, to those that are being removed in the US to repopulate salmon runs — leaves critics of the Salween dams dumbfounded that Myanmar’s civilian-led government has decided to continue the projects. The environmental and social costs of the mega-dams, and their role in potentially exacerbating conflict along the Salween, are compounded by the fact that almost all of the electricity they produce will be sold to China and Thailand. 

Upstream of the Mong Ton dam site, where rural communities in the Keng Kham valley and throughout Kunhing township depend on healthy rivers, forests and fisheries to survive, knowledge of the potential impacts of the dam is minimal. Shockingly, some have never even heard of the $10 billion infrastructure project just a few miles south of their homes. Nang Phaung, a 45 year-old from Wein Lon village in Kunhing township told a researcher working for Mongabay, “I never heard about the dam will be built on the Than Lwin River.”

2217. E-Commerce Create a Mountain of Cardboard

By Matt Richtel, The New York Times, February 16, 2016

Ruchit Garg, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, says that he worries that something isn’t right with his Internet shopping habit. With each new delivery to his doorstep — sometimes several in a day — he faces the source of his guilt and frustration: another cardboard box.

Then, when he opens the shipment, he is often confronted with a Russian nesting doll’s worth of boxes inside boxes to protect his electronics, deodorant, clothing or groceries. Mr. Garg dutifully recycles, but he shared his concerns recently on Twitter.

A handful of scientists and policy makers are circling the same question, grappling with the long-term environmental effect of an economy that runs increasingly on gotta-have-it-now gratification. This cycle leads consumers to expect that even their modest wants can be satisfied like urgent needs, and not always feel so great about it.

The new arms race for Internet retailers is speed, making the old Federal Express commercial, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight,” seem as quaint as delivery by horse and buggy. Amazon boasted in a news release in December about its “fastest order delivered to date” — a Miami customer’s craving for a four-pack of Starbucks vanilla frappuccino was sated in 10 minutes flat.

In 10 major regions, Google Express delivers in a little less than two hours from dozens of stores — including toys, drugs, hardware and pet supplies. Postmates, a San Francisco start-up, promises deliveries in less than an hour. It dropped off nearly one million packages in December.

Over all, the $350 billion e-commerce industry has doubled in the last five years, with Amazon setting the pace. Its Prime membership service has grown to more than 50 million subscribers, by one estimate. (And its new faster service, Prime Now, can “get customers pretty much anything in minutes,” its website says).

Uber calls its new UberRush service “your on-demand delivery fleet”; Jet Delivery offers “white glove” service in less than two hours; Instacart can deliver groceries to your door in less than an hour.

The environmental cost can include the additional cardboard — 35.4 million tons of containerboard were produced in 2014 in the United States, with e-commerce companies among the fastest-growing users — and the emissions from increasingly personalized freight services.

“There’s a whole fleet of trucks circulating through neighborhoods nonstop,” said Dan Sperling, the founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the transportation expert on the California Air Resources Board. He also is overseeing a new statewide task force of trucking companies and government officials trying to reduce overall emissions from freight deliveries, including for e-commerce.

Dr. Sperling said that consumers shared as much responsibility for the environmental cost of the deliveries as the companies that provided the speedy services.

“From a sustainability perspective, we’re heading in the wrong direction,” he said.

There are possible trade-offs, for example. As people shop more online, they might use their cars less. And delivery services have immense incentive to find the most efficient routes, keeping their fuel costs and emissions down. For its part, Amazon said that delivering to consumers straight from huge warehouses cuts down the need to distribute to thousands of stores.

So far, though, shoppers appear to be ordering online while still driving to brick-and-mortar stores at least as much as in the past, according to Dr. Sperling and other academics. One recent study explored the environmental effect of Internet shopping in Newark, Del., and found that a rise in e-commerce in recent years by local residents corresponded to more trucks on the road and an increase in greenhouse emissions.

Ardeshi Faghri, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware, said the increase of various emissions — which he estimated at 20 percent from 2001 to 2011 — “could be due to a multitude of reasons, but we think that online shopping and more delivery trucks are really one of the primary reasons.”

“Online shopping has not helped the environment,” he said. “It has made it worse.”

Other scholars say that, at least for now, online shopping appears to be complementing brick-and-mortar shopping, not replacing it.

“People who shop online also like to see and feel things,” said Cara Wang, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who studies transportation issues and has written a paper about habits of online shoppers. “And they have to return things.”

Dr. Wang and other researchers say the demand for instant delivery, in particular, creates challenges for trucking companies trying to be efficient. Instead of taking big truckloads to single retailers they now make more scattershot deliveries.

Many drivers deliver just one item. This is often the case for Postmates, which has a fleet of 15,000 freelance drivers signed up to make deliveries of whatever the customer orders — an Uber-like service, but for deliveries. The cost typically starts at $5, and a 9 percent service fee applied to the cost of the item. (The company says it also has about 5,000 deliverers who go on bike or foot in dense urban areas).

And the push for speed from marketers gives shoppers little incentive to wait.

“Why select one week if I can get it in one hour?” asked Miguel Jaller, an assistant professor at U.C. Davis who studies urban freight patterns.

Such is the case for Monica Rohleder, who admits to using Amazon Prime so much that “my husband jokes we keep Amazon in business.”

Ms. Rohleder, who lives in Los Angeles and works at a public relations firm, said she liked overnight delivery, but “within a couple of hours is best” because she is busy with work and her two young children. So she often does not order something until it’s urgent. “There’s the immediate gratification of getting something and checking it off your list,” she said.

Nordstrom, for a Hawaii trip, including bathing suits, workout clothes and coloring books. Some of the clothes did not fit, so she returned them.

She thinks more about the cardboard that comes into her house than the truck emissions, she said. “It’s embarrassing,” she added of her mass of weekly recycling.

Dennis Colley, the president of the Fibre Box Association — the trade group for the corrugated paper, or cardboard, industry — estimated that the use of boxes for e-commerce was growing faster than most other market segments. However, he emphasized the industry’s efforts to be environmentally conscious, and that 90 percent of corrugated packaging were recycled.

Amazon is aware of the cardboard issue. Since 2009, it has received 33 million comments, ratings and photographs about its packaging as part of its “packaging feedback program.” Amazon said it used that feedback to make sure that cardboard box size was consistent with the size of the product. It also works with manufacturers to send some products without additional cardboard packaging, said Craig Berman, a company spokesman.

Though recycling can make consumers think they are helping the environment, the process has its own costs, including the emissions from shipping it to recycling centers, which use a lot of energy and water. Don Fullerton, a professor of finance and an expert in economics and the environment at the University of Illinois, said one possible solution would be to make the retailers responsible for taking back the boxes. That would create incentives for them to come up with solutions for less packaging.

“And maybe not put a box inside a box inside a box,” he said.

Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, San Francisco’s main recycling processor, which collects 100 tons of cardboard every day, has a simpler solution: “Slow down consumption,” he said. “Slow down.”

1354. United States: West’s Drought and Growth Intensify Conflict Over Water Rights

By Michael Wines, The New York Times, March 16, 2014

Under restrictions, a Mumford, Tex., farm on the Brazos River could not draw water from it, while cities and power plants could. CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

MUMFORD, Tex. — Across the parched American West, the long drought has set off a series of fierce legal and political battles over who controls an increasingly dear treasure — water.

Just outside this minuscule farm town, Frank DeStefano was feeding a 500-acre cotton crop with water from the Brazos River 16 months ago when state regulators told him and hundreds of others on the river to shut down their pumps. A sprawling petrochemical complex at the junction of the Brazos and the Gulf of Mexico held senior rights to the river’s water — and with the Brazos shriveled, it had run short.

State regulators ordered Mr. DeStefano and others with lesser rights to make up the deficit. But they gave cities and power plants along the Brazos a pass, concluding that public health and safety overrode the farmers’ own water rights.

Now Mr. DeStefano and other farmers are in court, arguing that the state is wrong — and so far, they are winning.

“I understand cities need water, people need water, but it kind of gets to me how agriculture is pushed to the back of the line,” he said. “We’re on pins and needles wondering when the next call is going to be made. It’s hard enough to make a living without things like this.”

Residents of the arid West have always scrapped over water. But years of persistent drought are now intensifying those struggles, and the explosive growth — and thirst — of Western cities and suburbs is raising their stakes to an entirely new level.

In southern Texas, along the Gulf coast southwest of Houston, the state has cut off deliveries of river water to rice farmers for three years to sustain reservoirs that supply booming Austin, about 100 miles upstream. In Nevada, a coalition ranging from environmentalists to the Utah League of Women Voters filed federal lawsuits last month seeking to block a pipeline that would supply Las Vegas with groundwater from an aquifer straddling the Nevada-Utah border.

In Colorado, officials in the largely rural west slope of the Rocky Mountains are imposing stiff restrictions on requests to ship water across the mountains to Denver and the rest of the state’s populous eastern half. Fearing for their existence, Colorado farm towns on the Arkansas River have mobilized to block sales of local water rights to Denver’s fast-growing suburbs.

In Arizona, activists and the federal government are fighting plans to tap groundwater used by a vast housing development — a move that would reduce the water level of a protected river. Kansas accuses Colorado and Nebraska of allowing their farmers to divert Kansas’ share of the Republican River, which flows through all three states. A similar dispute between New Mexico and Texas is before the United States Supreme Court.

California, in the midst of a major drought, so far has witnessed but a few local skirmishes. In January, environmentalists and sport fishermen sued to halt the drilling of hundreds of new groundwater wells sought by Central Valley farmers, saying more pumping would lower stream levels.

That may not last long, said Stuart Somach, a Sacramento water-rights lawyer. California farmers have long grumbled about big-city designs on their water; Northern California has long grumbled about being the spigot that supplies most of the water to the dry south.

“We’re very close to the time that people are going to start staking out rights. We’re right at the cusp,” Mr. Somach said. “If this drought persists, depending on how state and federal agencies react, you’re going to get some real conflicts going.”

In many places, the rules for owning or using groundwater are still in flux: In Texas, landowners own the groundwater beneath their property, but a neighbor pumping groundwater from the same aquifer can siphon it away without penalty. The Arizona court battle over a proposed housing development hinges on the still-murky question of whether the state can allow the builder to pump groundwater that sustains a river that is under federal control.

In contrast, the prevailing law on rivers and streams is all too clear: The earlier someone stakes a claim on a stretch of water, the more bulletproof that owner’s right to it.

“If you’ve got the oldest claim on that river, you get to use that water regardless of what you’re using it for — agriculture, industry, whatever,” said Gabriel Eckstein, a professor at Texas A & M University School of Law and a lawyer with Sullivan and Worcester. “That’s regardless of whether you’re doing it efficiently, regardless of whether it’s the highest use.”

In the rural West of days past, when even arid climes held enough water for everyone, that principle worked well. In the booming West of today, it is increasingly a recipe for conflict.

The Lower Colorado River Authority decided last month to cut off water deliveries to rice farmers after concluding that two reservoirs supplying Austin and other upstream towns were dangerously low — at about 38 percent of capacity. The farmers had no recourse, because they had no water rights: They had sold them to the authority decades ago.

The cutoff nevertheless has come to underscore the tinderbox relationship between the state’s rural past and its urban future. At a packed hearing before an administrative law judge last month, farmers and others downstream complained that they were surrendering their water while Austin residents continued to wash their cars, groom golf courses and water their lawns, albeit only once a week under water-saving restrictions.

Urbanites argue that drinking-water reservoirs were not intended to irrigate farms, a point the farmers contest, and that recreational businesses along the reservoirs are going bankrupt. A town on one of the reservoirs, Lake Travis, has to truck in water to keep taps flowing, they say.

“The tensions exist in every river basin in the state,” Jason Hill, a water-rights lawyer now representing the Texas city of San Angelo in another rights dispute, said. “You don’t really know the value of something until you run out of it and know you want it again. And water has historically been an underappreciated resource.”

Across Texas, as in Austin, rural interests clearly are waging a rear-guard battle. The Texas Water Development Board, the state’s planning agency, figures that cities’ demand for water will rise nearly 75 percent by 2060, while the use of water for irrigation will decline by 17 percent. By then, cities — not farmers — will be the dominant consumers of water.

But the farmers are not giving up without a fight.

In 2011, the Texas Legislature gave a nod to that shifting priority, authorizing the state’s Commission on Environmental Quality to suspend water rights in emergencies like droughts. While the commission still had to allot water to rights holders in order of seniority, the Legislature said, it also could consider — as much as was practical — how that water was being used before ordering a rights holder’s pumps shut off.

A year later, when drought left the Dow Chemical Company’s Freeport petrochemical plant short of Brazos River water, the company asked the commission to honor its 83-year-old water rights and to order more recent users to make up its shortage.

And the commission did — but only after deciding that 66 Texas towns and electric utilities should be exempted from a cutoff for health and safety reasons, even though hundreds of farmers and others who lost their water held more senior rights. Indeed, court documents state, the exempted towns and utilities held rights to 96 percent of the water affected by Dow’s claim. The remaining 4 percent, mostly farmers like Mr. De Stefano, lost all right to irrigate their crops until the suspension ended several weeks later.

In the ensuing lawsuit, Mr. DeStefano and others argued that the commission could not pick winners and losers when enforcing water rights enshrined in law. “State law says that first in time, first in right. That means what it says,” said Joshua Katz, an Austin lawyer representing the farmers’ interest. Prudent cities, he said, do what prudent farmers do to brace for drought: They buy more senior water rights.

A trial court sided last year with the farmers, and the case is on appeal. But should the region’s drought not let up, people here say, further lawsuits in Texas and across the West are all but inevitable.

“It truly is a good time to be a water attorney in Texas,” said Mr. Hill, the lawyer in San Angelo dispute. “There’s work here as far as the eye can see.”