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Show 514 THE APPROPRIATIVE RIGHT Excessive Allowance of Water Previously in this topic "Measure of the Appropriative Right," attention has been called to a wealth of authoritative expressions of legislatures and courts pointing up the need for conserving and making beneficial use of water and avoiding unnecessary waste, for better service of the public welfare. The policy statements that appear in so many court opinions do not deviate from the principle that reasonable beneficial use is the goal and that, as a necessary corollary, unnecessary waste of water is abhorrent. They show no trace of compromise. Despite all this, wasteful practices were tolerated by the courts in many areas, chiefly in the earlier decades. At first, when water was plentiful, the accepted practice in various communities was to use it lavishly. Thus were precedents set for careless handling of what was to become an increasingly scarce natural resource. Appropriative rights to the use of unnecessarily large quantities of water were litigated and decreed. The farmer's right to more water than he needed became of record. Added to this were the burden of increasing costs of making substantial improvements. Further complications grew out of the widespread efforts of water users to hold title to maximum quantities of water to which their rights related. Unfortunately, a result was much excessive and therefore wasteful use of water which contributed to shortages in quantities available to newcomers. Comments on these early extravagances in authorized uses of water were made in an opinion of the Montana Supreme Court in a case decided in 1924. Although the court's discourse pertains especially to practices in that State, comparable conditions obtained in various other western regions as well. With this reminder, several pertinent paragraphs of the court's thesis are reproduced here:390 In Montana, as elsewhere, when the early settlers made their original appropriations they had little knowledge of the quantity of water necessary to irrigate their lands to good advantage. Ample quantities of water being available in the streams the settlers claimed extravagant amounts. * * * Al- most every irrigator used an excessive amount of water, some all they could get. * * * When the country became more thickly settled and the people began to farm more thoroughly and according to more approved methods, it began to be understood by practical as well as scientific experience that the use of excessive quantities of water was detrimental rather than beneficial to the land. * * * Yet here, as well as elsewhere, many still adhere to extravagant use of water, although it is apparent to the enlightened that these users are raising smaller and poorer crops than they would raise if they used water more sparingly and intelligently. * * * 390Allen v. Petrick, 69 Mont. 373, 377-380, 222 Pac. 451 (1924). |