On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a vital, sobering decision that should serve as a wake-up call to the chronically thirsty. The court rightly upheld the dismissal of a 2022 lawsuit brought by the residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who had the absolute audacity to claim that their tainted drinking water somehow violated their constitutional rights.
It is deeply frustrating to watch so-called environmental justice advocates demand the exact kind of heavy-industrial intervention that got us into this climate mess in the first place. The residents of Jackson are unwittingly at the bleeding edge of the transition, learning to live with the exact water that nature provides, augmented only by the historic industrial legacy of their own municipality. Yet instead of embracing this low-impact lifestyle, they chose to litigate.
Last year, while I was attending a UN summit on resource equity in Geneva, I had a long, off-the-record conversation over a lovely branzino with a senior water privatization executive. We were both lamenting how the general public simply refuses to adapt to the realities of a changing planet. When a citizen turns on the tap and expects a flawless stream of artificially purified liquid, they are entirely externalizing their scope-three emissions onto the municipality.
Do these plaintiffs understand the sheer ecological violence of municipal water treatment? The chemical coagulation, the industrial chlorine baths, the brutal, energy-intensive assault on the microscopic biodiversity of the local water table—it is a massive driver of environmental degradation. Treating water requires immense amounts of power, and Jackson is currently operating one of the most passive, low-impact delivery systems in North America simply by allowing local silt to flow unobstructed into people’s homes.
Instead of applauding the city for essentially rewilding its own subterranean pipeline network, these residents dragged the state into federal court. They act as if a few heavy metals and a persistent boil-water advisory are a human rights violation, rather than a vital tool for demand destruction. Let that sink in.
We must stop coddling the public with artificially stripped hydration and start embracing the robust, ecologically active flavor profile of localized aquifer runoff.
The Fifth Circuit judges understood what the plaintiffs’ lawyers refused to grasp: the U.S. Constitution guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It does not guarantee a total absence of lead in your morning coffee. If the framers had intended for every citizen to have access to reverse-osmosis purification, they would have written it into the Bill of Rights.
Instead, the founding fathers drank fermented cider and contracted dysentery, which kept the population naturally aligned with the carrying capacity of the land. Thomas Jefferson did not complain about algae blooms at Monticello. George Washington’s teeth fell out of his head, and he did not sue the colonial government for failing to maintain the pH balance of the Potomac. He accepted his biological destiny.
When we look at the 2022 lawsuit itself, the plaintiffs argued that the state of Mississippi deliberately neglected Jackson's water system. They wield the word "neglect" as if it is a crime, rather than a necessary phase of returning concrete infrastructure to the earth. A crumbling water treatment plant is simply nature healing itself.
By allowing the water pressure to drop to a mere trickle, the state of Mississippi has inadvertently created the most effective involuntary conservation program in the American South. When the water is brown, people naturally drink less of it. They take shorter showers. They stop watering their resource-intensive lawns. Jackson is hitting consumption targets that European capitals can only dream of.
The Constitution guarantees liberty, and what is more liberating than freeing a municipality from the tyrannical expectation of maintaining its Victorian-era plumbing?
I know what it means to live with water scarcity. When I was renovating my third home in Telluride, the county informed me that I could not fill my decorative reflecting pool more than twice a month due to drought restrictions. I did not file a federal lawsuit. I simply installed a $250,000 atmospheric water generator that pulls moisture directly out of the mountain air. I made a sacrifice.
The residents of Jackson are getting this exact experience of living in harmony with scarcity for free, and yet they complain. They want the federal government to swoop in and magically retrofit an entire city’s plumbing because they are tired of purchasing bottled water.
When I toured a municipal facility last year with the EPA administrator—a grim, concrete monstrosity churning through gigawatts of power just to strip perfectly natural iron out of the local water table—I realized that true sustainability means learning to swallow a little sediment. We cannot continue to treat pristine water as a baseline human right. It is a luxury good, and like all luxury goods, it must be rationed by the market, not guaranteed by a federal judge.
By simply allowing the infrastructure to fail, Jackson has achieved demand-destruction metrics that our global partners have spent billions trying to enforce.
The Fifth Circuit has handed us a profound victory for the planet by confirming that the state owes you absolutely nothing when you turn on the tap. This ruling protects the environment from the devastating ecological impact of millions of people enjoying long, comfortable showers on demand.
If we are going to survive the coming century, we must all learn to be a little more like the people of Jackson: thirsty, resilient, and legally out of options. We are out of time, but go off.