Action, re-action: It's a fine old physics principle stated clearly three centuries ago by Sir Isaac Newton — and it also has political application. Sometimes the reaction is delayed, like the lurching of so many boxcars after a train engine starts moving — or like some Pecos Valley farmers' response to a long-in-the-works scheme to bring water from Eastern New Mexico to Santa Fe.

Julie Ann Grimm reported on the project more than half a year ago: A Roswell businessman had corralled a handful of farmers around Fort Sumner who are willing to retire their alfalfa fields and sell him their water rights. He, in turn, proposes pumping groundwater water 150 miles northwest, and 4,000 feet up, to Santa Fe.

Wow — think of all the subdivisions a new source of water would promote, and the new shopping centers, and traffic, and schools we'd need, and police, fire and other services to a growing population; a cacophonous notion to many Santa Feans, but music to the ears of developers, with the rhythm section supplied by them rubbing their hands together in anticipation of vast new wealth ...

But on Wednesday, the City Council's Public Utilities Committee heard from the folks downriver — and it could hardly be called harmony: The Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District has filed a protest against moving water out of its basin, while some of that area's agricultural people showed up in Santa Fe to protest it personally.

A couple of them made great arguments that such a move would upset a delicate hydraulic equation — and that math includes Texas: Interstate compacts apply to the Pecos, and New Mexico's use of upstream water already has caught Austin's attention.

Those hoping to sell their water rights speak blithely of them as property they've purchased — and have a perfect right to sell.

But before Santa Fe buys, our leaders had better look into the cost our community's taxpayers will bear — as well as the environmental impact of drying up a distant basin and suburbanizing a nearer one. The damage to streams, ditches and aquifers — not to mention plant and animal life dependent on them — might be enormous.

Inter-basin transfers, within our state and throughout the West, are overdue for administrative and political scrutiny worthy of the scientific research long carried out by our state's Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources at New Mexico Tech. A proper study is sure to show that they should be avoided.

There's an old Western dictum, defying another Newtonian law — the one on gravity: Water flows uphill ... to money.

Too often that's been the case — and, too often, the downhill damage is irreparable. Santa Fe's leaders should recognize not only our geographic limitations, but the economic and environmental ones our whole state faces.

This proposal belongs on City Hall's back burner — with the gas turned off.