interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
The Anthropocene with Peter Del Tredici
by Peter Del Tredici
May 21, 2018
What can planners learn from the natural environment?
Cities are built for people, first and foremost. We welcome nature to the extent that it fits with the human agenda. We want nature to be a certain way. If it's too weedy, or if it's a problem, we don't want that kind of nature. We only want certain things. There's this conflict built into cities with the human agenda versus the natural agenda. What's interesting about nature is, at least in my experience, nature does best when you leave it alone.
Our ability to control natural processes is...we don't have a great track record. You can see this in California super easily when you look at the issue of fire. It’s not working. Leaving nature alone works really well, and it's messy. Nature is a messy thing. It doesn't fit with our aesthetic goals particularly. Harmonizing that with the human agenda is not an easy thing to do.
I know from the students who want to promote biodiversity, I say, you want to promote biodiversity? Leave it alone’. You cannot propose that at a design school, or a planning school. You can’t say, do nothing. That’s going to get you a failing grade. You have to propose some kind of intervention.
What I said to students at GSD is, figure out what it is you're trying to accomplish with your design and just design. If you do a good job of that, nature will take care of itself. Nature will come in and be fine.
You can set the table for nature, and then manage it. Trying to control it doesn't work. Make sure your design is solid and is going to achieve the goals you want as it relates to the people. If you put in enough vegetation and open space, the nature will take care of itself.
Can you talk about Bussey Brook Meadow? How did you approach that?
It really is very complicated. If you have an infinite amount of money you can do whatever you want. Central Park looks the way it does, which is just sensational, because they use a special kind of mulch there. They take dollar bills and shred them and they spread them out two inches thick. That's how you achieve that. Now, if you don't have those resources, then what are your options? Sustainability from a landscape point of view means that you know the landscape design can be maintained with the resources that are available. What are your resources and what can you do? Cities like Boston and New York are prosperous cities. They've got the resources to actually maintain. And maintain is very different from management. Maintain means hold the status quo. Here's the design, and we want to keep this exactly the way it was originally intended. Management is something very different, that allows for future change over time. You are managing it, not to keep it the way it is, but to push it in certain directions. It involves some intervention, but you're not maintaining a fixed design. A lot of these natural areas need management. Nothing is self maintaining.
Go to places like Detroit where they have no money. What can you do when you have very little money, and you've got all this open space? How can we manage the landscape to promote biodiversity, but also make it a little more attractive? Maybe you put a little public art in there and you maintain a good path so you focus your subject, keeping the paths open. So we have good sightlines, so people don't have to worry about it. Or certain key elements that make people feel comfortable and wanting to go in there. But beyond that, you don't worry so much about what's happening in the woods around it.
With Bussey Brook Meadow, there was a group of people that really wanted to help with the Arboretum, and had a moral responsibility to turn that into what the rest of the Arboretum looked like. Which was a well maintained landscape with everything in its perfect place.
Which would do more disturbance, would set everything back. Then you'd have to maintain it. I was in charge of the living collections and we didn't have the staff necessary to maintain a site like that, looking the way the rest of the Arboretum looks. So I said no. We will improve the site, but we're going to keep this as an urban wild.
If you ripped out the non native species it’d be three-quarters of the plant population under the guise of sustainability. People think planting native species is the right thing to do, but it isn’t always.
If you think of any urban site where the landscape totally transforms, think about Los Angeles, there's not a shred of any native soil anywhere in that entire city. It's all been either paved over, or compacted, or turned into some fancy landscape. There is no longer any native vegetation.
I don't understand. The world has changed, those plants that used to grow there before Columbus landed, they were adapted to those conditions. Those conditions no longer exist. Not only from a land use point of view, but also from a climatological point of view. The plants that are best adapted to the current condition are not the ones that were growing here 500 years ago.
Endemic plants are not necessarily what’s best to focus on now?
They're not necessarily the best adapted. As soon as you bring in things from Europe, or Asia, that's nature, that's ecology. It’s letting the two of them fight it out. This is the thing about ecology and about evolution, the good guys don't always win. Whoever is the best adapted wins.
In terms of moving forward with climate change, that's actually what we need. We need the best adapted species in order to deal with this chaos and this mess that we created.
Can you define the Anthropocene?
It's a geological term and describes the geological time period in which humans have become a dominant driving force in terms of changing the actual surface of the earth. Geology is about describing the surface. In order to have a geological era you have to have a characteristic of rock that defines that era. For the Anthropocene, it's stuff called plastiglomerate.
They found these on beaches in Hawaii and I’m sure down the coast of California. Wherever people build bonfires and burn a lot of plastic trash. The plastic fuses with the sand in intense temperatures and you get this new kind of rock that is some combination of sand and plastic. That has never been found on the planet before. It is actually a geological structure. Plastic is not going anywhere. It’s forever. Plastic is the hallmark, from a geological point of view.
The controversy is, should we start at the dawn of urbanization 2,000 years ago? Or should it be with the Industrial Revolution? Or, does it really come with the advent of the petrochemical? You could argue about when precisely the Anthropocene starts, but it really describes the human dominance of the whole face of the earth.
It implies that we've completely altered, and permanently changed the face of the earth.
Yes, permanently is the operative word.
Yet the controlling of our spaces is coupled with incredibly uncertain times in terms of ecology, and extreme weather events, and climate change. We’ve tried to build a world we can control, but we’re completely unprepared for allowing natural processes back into our practice.
We are now in control of all those natural processes. That's why they're chaotic. They're no longer being managed by people. Whether we know what we're doing or not. And we're dominating all of the processes that regulate life on Earth as we know it. They're all under human influence. That's where the chaos stems from.
What now?
I'm actually an optimist about this because I think first is getting realistic about it. That's why the concept of restoring past ecosystems bothers me. Because that is not a solution to how we move forward. Which isn't to say I don't believe in conservation and the preservation of natural areas. We should definitely do that. But when you come to the urban areas, and the suburban areas, really dominated by human actions, we have to get realistic about what is the best thing to do.
And you’re optimistic about that answer?
I'm optimistic about it if we get realistic about it. In other words, where my optimism comes from is this Anthropocene. It is not the end of the world. It's just a different world. The world is going to go on. It's just going to be a radically different world. That's as optimistic as you're going to get from me.
What do you think it’s going to look like?
I spend a lot of time with my classes at Harvard asking, what's the world going to look like 20 years from now? Because this is when you're going to be at the peak of your practice. You need to think about not the way the world looks today, but the way it's going to look in the future. I can only speak about vegetation because that's all I know. The plants are stand ins for human activities. All of these plants represent things.
Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's not any good. The idea of calling them all invasive species, and calling for their eradication is wrong. You're actually making it worse, doing more disturbance.
I'm not an advocate of just letting them be. You do need to manage the vegetation, but you should manage it for a specific purpose. A lot of these plants are ugly, and people don't like them, and they're signs dereliction and neglect. I'm not advocating for doing nothing. But management and the criteria by which you evaluate a plant should not be, “was this here when Columbus landed or not?”. When that becomes the standard you use to decide which plant you're going to keep, or what you're going to get rid of, that's the wrong standard. From a design point of view, I think designers need to think hard about what plants to use, and know this idea of “we're only going to plant native vegetation”, is misguided.
What tools can planners use to figure out what will survive and thrive here in 5 years?
What it comes down to is that the focus should shift to ecological functionality. What this is actually accomplishing in terms of the big issues: stormwater management, heat, reducing temperatures, being aesthetically pleasing, improving soil conditions etc. Those should be the standards on which you evaluate performance. Function rather than form, and form being, oh what was here 500 years ago?. Emphasis on function rather than form. Thinking about vegetation. Is this doing the job that needs to be done?
What’s your favorite plant?
I am serially monogamous in my relationship with plants.
So at the moment then.
I spent over 30 years of my life studying the Ginkgo Tree. It's a Chinese tree. It's very iconic. It's the ultimate survivor. It's been on the planet for 50 million years. It’s the most adaptable tree. It can survive virtually anything. I spent a large part of my career studying why it is that this plant still exists. It's quite literally like a dinosaur. It should have gone extinct a long time ago but it didn't. What're the mechanisms it uses to survive?
I study how trees survive catastrophic disturbance. That's really what I'm focused on, because disturbance is what’s going to mark the future. It's all about disturbance and what's the vegetation that's going to be most resilient in the face of these catastrophic disturbances. Both on the coast and inland as well.