Up here amongst the hills and trees, it's easy to think that the Catskills' perennial tensions with New York City over water are something that only locals know or care about. Not so. Witness this audio interview with Tracy Stanton, the "water program manager" at of Ecosystem Marketplace, a Washington, DC-based group that, essentially, wants to put a price on environmental resources like water. (The idea is that if you assign a price to a "priceless" and vital commodity like water, people will stop wasting it as if it is free.)
Stanton is speaking with Deutsche Welle, a German newspaper, about NYC's system of preserving its Catskills water supply. Apparently, our special relationship with the City as its watershed was a topic of discussion at this year's World Water Week, an international event held in Stockholm that ended on Saturday. Still think no one cares about us?
Stanton tells her DW interviewer some interesting things about NYC's unique watershed management system, but particularly intriguing was what she said about farmers. She is asked whether the watershed management system "sets up a conflict between water consumers and farms" because farms are a source of water pollution. In response, she says:
It's an interesting question ... [In the U.S.], in many cases, farmers aren't regulated under our major environmental statutes. And so in many ways, I wouldn't necessarily say it pits the farmers against the water consumers, but it makes perhaps some tensions between the regulated community -- the wastewater treatment plants -- and the farms, which aren't [regulated]. When we talk about the health of a watershed, both of them have impacts, and yet only one of them is the target of regulation.
