Leaving water in the river
Most water policy treats a river as a supply line: something to divert, store and deliver until it runs dry. The End of Abundance spends a chapter insisting on a different starting point — that the river itself is a water user. The fish, the wetlands, the estuary and the people who fish, swim and simply like a living waterway all have a claim on the flow. The hard question is not whether nature deserves water, but how we give it water without pretending water is free.
The environment competes with everyone else
Here is the uncomfortable truth the book refuses to dodge: every litre we leave in the river is a litre a farm or a city does not get. “Water for the environment” is not a feel-good add-on; it is a competing demand, and treating it as anything less is how rivers quietly die while everyone insists they support conservation. Once you accept that the environment is a real user with a real claim, you can do something concrete — give it a defined, protected share of the flow, the same way you would guarantee a city's drinking supply.
A river that gets “whatever is left over” gets nothing in a dry year. The fix is to give nature a right to water, not a leftover.
Environmental flows as a water right
The economic idea the book reaches for is the environmental flow — a quantity of water legally set aside for the ecosystem, defined in advance and defended like any other entitlement. Done well, it turns a vague political promise into a number on the ledger that cannot simply be borrowed against the moment irrigation gets tight. Some places go further and let an environmental trust actually buy and hold water rights, so nature competes in the same market as everyone else — cheque-book in hand, rather than hoping for charity.
Why this is cheaper than it sounds
People assume protecting rivers means endless, costly sacrifice. The book's reply is that a healthy river does enormous work for free: it filters water, buffers floods, supports fisheries and underpins the recreation and property values along its banks. We pay for those services either way — the only choice is whether we pay by protecting the flow upstream or by rebuilding what we lost downstream, which is almost always more expensive. Leaving water in the river is not charity to nature. It is maintenance on an asset we all depend on.
This connects directly to the book's core argument that prices and rights should reflect scarcity — including the river's own scarce need. For the wider picture, start with the overview of the book.
