This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 28th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In the American West, the right to pull water from a river on your property

isn't as intuitive as you might hope, and the rules governing

water rights may not lead to as much conservation as we might hope.

Reed Watson is president of the Property Environment Research Center, we discussed some changes that could improve the way

American landowners use and conserve water.

We spoke in Bozeman, Montana.

Describe to me how water rights existed once upon a time in the United States.

Well, there's actually two types of water rights in the United States.

In the humid east, there's riparian rights, which basically allows for sharing because there's so

much water there's not really scarcity there and basically if you have if you own

land that abuts of water well you can you can use a reasonable amount that doesn doesn't work out west. We have a lot

less water out here. And so rights out here are called prior appropriation rights

and they're quantified and they're ordered in terms of how old they are.

So oldest rights get their water first,

whereas a right that's established this year

in many years is not going to get any water at all.

And so it's a prior appropriation, it's based on priority

rank, and it's very much quantified. It's not a kind of co-equal sharing. Out west, the original

law was that you had to divert water out of the river, out of the stream, and put

it to a statutorily defined beneficial use, which would include livestock, would include

...