In my opinion, companies shouldn’t have “water rights” in general, regardless of whether their owners/founders/whatever that person is are alive or dead. If you think critically about how our resources are used, the idea that someone can just wander along, buy up some land, and then consume all the resources that are on it or pass through and charge other people for them is completely insane. Just because you have a big fat wad of money, you get to fuck everyone else over by claiming critical resources? What??

That’d be like Elon Musk blocking the sun with a giant rocket umbrella, then charging everyone a twitter blue sky fee to literally see sunlight (maybe I shouldn’t give the guy ideas… he seems the type of ruthless capitalist who’d actually do it).

At least in the case of farming, there’s some honest work and genuinely beneficial product coming out the other end that leaves us with a reason for a company to own and control the land. Though, I’ll not pretend that all farming is equal or good, some of it isn’t conscionable either. But sucking down fresh stream water to shove into crappy plastic bottles is just an insane thing for us to allow to exist.