And Not A Drop To Drink…

One of the plot devices in Robert Heinlein’s iconic ’60s novel Stranger In A Strange Land was the sharing of water, a sacred Martian ritual which bonded its participants forever as “water brothers”—even if they were sisters (See Robert Heinlein at 100 – How the science fiction master created the template for our looser, hipper, more pluralist world¹).  But that was in a time long ago in a universe far, far away.  In our own, where the grasping claws of leviathan are never more than one misguided court ruling away, we are in danger of being saddled not with water brothers, but with water tyrants, and their object is not to share but to control. For 10 years, bureaucrats in the EPA have seethed over certain Supreme Court decisions that limited federal jurisdiction over some of the country’s waterways:

[…] over the past decade, interpretations of Supreme Court rulings removed some critical waters from Federal protection, and caused confusion about which waters and wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act. As a result, important waters now lack clear protection under the law, and businesses and regulators face uncertainty and delay. The Obama Administration is committed to protecting waters on which the health of people, the economy and ecosystems depend.(EPA Website – Clean Water Act Definition of “Waters of the United States”)

But all that is about to change: 

On Wednesday, April 27, the Obama administration’s US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) jointly released a new draft guidance for the federal Clean Water Act that aims to dramatically expand both the scope of what constitutes a “water source,” as well as the legal power federal agencies can exert over those water sources.

If enacted, the proposal will basically allow the EPA and ACE to control any stream, pond, or even puddle that they determine “has a physical, chemical or biological connection” to any larger body of water, which includes even privately-owned water sources. (EPA, Army Corps draft new Clean Water Act guidelines that threaten to seize control of all water supplies)

Valentine Michael Smith, the “Man From Mars” in Heinlein’s novel, knew that H²O was the magical substance from which springs all life.  So too do the socialists in the current regime. If they get their way, our water will be clean.  And they will own it.

¹Heinlein venerated the armed forces, most notoriously in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which celebrated an elite military order. Just two years later, he was publishing the counterculture classic Stranger in a Strange Land, with its simultaneously beatific, sexy, and heroic vision of Martian-inspired communal living. A rich mix of bohemian and straight-arrow values, Heinlein’s unique take on American individualism made him the bridge between such disparate ’60s icons as Barry Goldwater and Charles Manson.

Heinlein’s novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.