THE LOCAVORES WAR: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FUTURE
In lightning predawn raids on six Minneapolis ag overcorps processing plants, a Western paratroop brigade stole
half this year's Mid national corn crop and then bandit-trucked from Minnesota through the enemy Dakotas badk to
Montana. "A brilliant feat of arms shifted the war's momentum to us, where it belongs," said the West's interim
president, Romney 4. "Now we want Atlanta's cotton, maybe Atlanta too." The South's Defense and State Departments
declined comment.
--Agence Press-France, November 29, 2067
It started small, seemingly: another summer of water shortages in Colorado and the rest of the American West. It became immense: a major rift in what was until then still the world's most powerful nation. It ended in disaster: a second, still ongoing American Civil War. Even now it is hard to believe that in 2065, the Appomattox bicentennial, the United States dissolved into four permanently warring countries--East, Mid, South and West--because of a dispute over how to pay for a drought.
The actual issue was an aged staple of water law: riparian rights and prior appropriation ones It was the difference between getting water by owning riverbank, lakeside or wetland real estate on the one hand and by not necessarily owning the land but taking the water first on the other. Not one American in a thousand knew about this obscure point of law. Not one lawyer, engineer or politician in a hundred could say two coherent sentences about it, at least before it festered and then exploded into a conflict that shook the nation and finally split it forever.
All these years later the details of America's sundering are still painful to tell. At the 2065 emergency national hydrosummit, Colorado's governor made an unavailing eleventh-hour plea to the Great Lakes states (now part of Mid) for more, cheaper and less polluted water. The defeat eventually resulted in the impeachment of Denver's mayor and her psychiatric commitment for pre-traumatic stress disorder.
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