On Monday, Spokane City Council voted 5-2 in favor of a modest ordinance restricting local water use during the dry season. Although Mayor Nadine Woodward has openly opposed the measure, City Council had enough votes to override a mayoral veto, making it far more likely the ordinance will go into effect this summer.

The ordinance prohibits watering outdoor vegetation from 10 AM to 6 PM between June 1 and October 1. Kara Odegard, City Council’s Manager for Sustainability Initiatives, said the ordinance’s purpose is to minimize the impact of drought by reducing overuse of the Spokane River ecosystem and its primary source, the Spokane-Rathdrum Aquifer, saying “hopefully we’ll have less drought response needed.”

When I read this ordinance, it strikes me as obvious. I grew up in Arizona, where similar water restrictions were and continue to be commonplace because of the Southwest’s decades-long megadrought.

Now, Washington State is bracing for similar circumstances as the effects of climate change continue to worsen. According to the Washington State Department of Ecology, the spring of 2021 was the second driest in the state’s recorded history. As a response, the Department issued a drought emergency declaration for 96% of the state, excluding only Seattle, Tacoma, and Everette counties. While the Department of Ecology has recorded a much wetter spring this year, it reissued the drought emergency status, which was set to expire June 1, for eight Eastern Washington counties covering five watersheds, including Spokane County.

The Department notes that “a drought can be declared when the water supply in an area is below 75% of normal and there is an expectation of undue hardship.” Part of that hardship includes the lingering damage of last year’s heat dome, which Eastern Washington’s water systems have still not recovered from.

An emergency declaration is more than just a statement. It has some concrete consequences. For example, it allows irrigators to request emergency water rights permits or transfers. The way the Department puts it, “Waters of the state belong to the public and can’t be owned by any individual or group. Instead, a person or group may be granted a right to use a volume of water, for a defined purpose, in a specific place.” In this sense, the new ordinance does not restrict access to a finite resource, but only limits how much of that resource we can utilize to discourage its overuse.

Sadly, we’ve been here before. In 2015, The Inlander contextualized that year’s drought mitigation efforts—the Slow the Flow campaign—by calculating the ten biggest water consumers in the city. At the top of the list was the city of Spokane itself, through its wastewater management system. Second on the list, using 125,970,680 gallons, was Gonzaga University. Others on the list included gated communities, colleges, and tech companies.

The ordinance is a good first step. Anyone from Arizona can tell you that. But at this point, we also have to recognize that the abuse of water rights is such an immense problem connected to even more immense problems that regulating individual lawns will have little immediate impact and probably no long-term impact. Unfortunately, such small-scale and hyper-individualized ordinances over individual rights, the kind that address the symptoms of climate change without actually addressing the causes of climate change, are the kinds of approaches that we will likely see more of in the future: placing responsibility on the majority of citizens and not the 100 corporations responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse emissions.

Internationally, though, some communities have taken significantly more radical steps to protect their own rivers by recognizing those rivers’ legal rights—and by extension, the obligations countries have to protect them. In 2017, New Zealand recognized the rights of the Whanganui River, and two years later, Bangladesh granted rights to all its rivers. This innovative approach to conservation overrides what the Washington Department of Ecology refers to as a person’s right to use public water by elevating the livelihood of ecosystems to that of human life.

Here in the states, the Grand Canyon-wide gap between what the majority of Americans actually want and the ability of a minority of public officials to deny them what they want has already tapered this process. In 2019, citizens in Toledo, Ohio, overwhelmingly voted in favor of a ballot measure to enact the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, to protect their local ecosystem. A state judge struck it down as unconstitutional a year later, claiming it was too vague.

While all of these laws have different frameworks, different modes of implementation, and varying degrees of success, they nevertheless inform new approaches to local environmental activism. For example, some of the best river advocacy in the West has been connected to salmon migration. A coalition of organizations including the Idaho Conservation League, Youth Salmon Protectors, Salmon Orca Project, Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment—nonprofits, Indigenous organizations, state and local movements—have collaborated to draw attention, however limited, to the interconnectedness of species, ecosystems, and human economies.

Could a similarly diverse and dedicated coalition of organizations come together to lobby City Council to enact a bill of rights for the Spokane River? Could a massive mobilization of groups like 350 Spokane, the Spokane River Keepers, Trout Unlimited, Dishman Hills Conservancy, and the Lands Council work together to force the city to protect the life of the river, thereby recognizing that greenhouse gas emissions are not a debate for future generations but are, right now in 2022, an ongoing violation of our rights, as people and as ecosystems? Perhaps it’s not a question of how realistic such a proposal is so much as how realistically we can survive if we don’t start organizing now.