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
In the Studio with John Miller
by John Miller
October 10, 2018
John Miller is an artist and critic living in New York and Berlin, and is a Professor of Professional Practice in Art History at Barnard College in New York. This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news.
To begin, how has teaching fine art and critique changed over the last 20 years?
It's become more bureaucratic and less free. A lot of it has to do with computer technology and the ability to monitor things, just as elsewhere in other parts of the economy. Everybody wants feedback on everything, and I'm not always sure that providing that feedback really improves the quality of education. There might be subjects that benefit from that, but especially teaching studio art, the evaluation process can be restrictive.
The way I taught in the beginning was much more free form, and some things were done in a seemingly primitive way. We got as much, or more, done then as now, with all these different website-based evaluation processes. Because you can access things remotely, everyone feels that they should participate in different feedback operations and that more of them should be put into place.
Have you seen a shift in your students making more work about identity politics and politics in general?
Yes. And, that's a very US-centric thing. A lot of it is in response to our current administration. But not only that – The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining traction before the President was elected. Technology of course plays a role in that, going all the way back to the Rodney King beating. The police abuses that could be swept under the rug before, are less easy to do so now. It's brought a whole history of injustice to the forefront. That's just one strain of identity politics.
I think we are in a period where many are laying claims to identity based on a set, and it's not even ill-intended, but it just seems natural that some sense that identity is trans-historical or something. That's one of the problems of that.
One thing I often think about is the definition of black that we ordinarily ascribe to skin color. But, if you go far enough back in U.S. history, Irish and Italians are categorized as black. It shows how it has to do with social hierarchy and shifts in that.
One funny thing that happened to me over the summer was that we have friends who teach in Koln and Dusseldorf, we did visiting artist spots with them and when we were in Chris William's class, we spoke to several of his students, and they did presentations. Interestingly, none of the work was about identity. Not even the work of a trans-woman in the class.
You're bringing up a great point, which is I think young people and young artists feel the need to respond to something.
Yes.
But, is that in some ways counter-intuitive to the practice of making art that could potentially have a different value; a different intrinsic value? Do people feel like it has to be art for everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone?
There's two things that are happening that might seem to be at cross-purposes. On the one hand, there was the ideal of modernism that the work spoke to a universal subject, and then,
I think that's a pretty important point because if you kick the John Dewey definition of the artwork versus the art object, that the artwork includes the process of a social reception; that it's not just a thing independent of those who look at it. I think that John Dewey's notion of art as experience anticipates where we go with postmodernism with the best parts of postmodernism.
Did you see the Adrian Piper show at MoMA?
Yeah. Cried for a while.
She's someone who positioned herself against postmodernism, which would seem counter-intuitive, but you have to remember that she's also a Kant scholar. She's holding out for a certain ideal of a modernist address, where everyone's included. There was even a statement on a wall text at the beginning of the show, where she was talking about this modernist paradigm as a heuristic paradigm, and one that hasn't yet been completely fulfilled because of racism. So, that's another way of looking at that.
Back in the 1970s, for example, the art world was minuscule compared to what it is now.
As a result of that, in terms of a public response to art, there's probably more broad interest in visual art than there ever was before, and oftentimes, I think of that passing by the New Museum on any random day, and seeing a line of people waiting to get in. I remember when I got out of art school, if you went to a museum, it was almost always empty, unless it was a show of impressionism or something like that.
Now, audiences are really engaged with contemporary art. Art is speaking in a much different tenor now than the days of Greenbergian formalism, that artists are speaking a language that is open to a broader public. The notion that visual art is necessarily difficult, is something else that's kind of withered away.
It's funny. Just today, I was up at the NYU windows at 10th Street and Broadway. There was a guy who had a Ready, Willing and Able shirtshirt on, and he's clearly been doing sanitation work. And I was photographing my window and he was really curious and he asked me what was going on. But, he didn't feel he was excluded from it. He told me he really liked the piece. He wasn't coming from a privileged background. He wasn't an art specialist. He said, "Oh, a lot of people have been stopping at these windows. I don't know if you'd know that.
Cool.
So that was a fairly positive experience today. I like it when people have access to what I'm involved with. I think that broadly, in terms of art as a discourse, I think that that's something that's really changed in the U.S. in the last 30 or 40 years.
There's also a counter-point to that, like what's going on in the art market, where it's becoming much more polarized. Mid-level galleries are going out of business. I looked at technology and the internet as a network that tends to create cartels and monopolistic relationships and that's happening throughout the economy as a whole and the art market isn't exempt from that.
We're seeing more and more strata blue chip artists who do super well, and then, a lot of project spaces, and then this middle area that's sometimes crashing. Not completely crashing, but it's really depressed compared to 10 or 15 years ago. I was talking to Nick Guagnini about that, and he had this very concrete model in his head where capital is globalizing, you're getting CEOs and high ranking corporate people now all over the world who not only have a house in the city, but a country house, and if they're to have cultural legitimacy, they have to hang artwork in those houses. But, they all want works that their peers will recognize as prestigious.
Cultural signifier to their friends.
That's a tendency that's working against the democratization of art. Or, maybe it's some kind of dialectical counterpart or something.
I mean, the classic, trite example at this point, would be an artist like Basquiat, where he is now very trendy amongst the wealthy tech elite.
Yeah.
Because they're seeing him as a cool artist, which of course now, he sort of lost his relevance because of the collecting. His prices have shot way up.
Right, right.
But, he's such a visually arresting, immediately recognizable artist that he sort of ushered himself into that group of Koons and Warhol, where if you have a huge scale Basquiat other techs CEOs will recognize it.
It's crazy. I have a New York Times app, and it was a lead story one day.
I think about this a lot, you get this New York Times push notification. If you take step back, and you think about art and access to art, that's a great example. Every New York Times reader is getting Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for 50 million dollars, or whatever.
Yeah.
That gives a really warped perception as to what art is, how art is made, how the art world or world's function, and how the art market functions. One of the things we're trying to do is break down this perception of the fact that that's very rarely reality.
I think there is a broad public fascination with the art auction. Jacques Alain Miller who was a Lacan scholar, discussed the psychology of the art market, on the one hand, the mythology of the priceless work of art, and then, trying to represent that through ever-escalating prices, which, in an auction situation, is enacted through bidding. Each bid has to be higher than the previous one.
There's that fascination on the part of non-specialists. Also, that art is something unconventional in economic terms, something that's useless.
Kind of like why people go to Las Vegas, where the rules that govern their lives day in and day out seem to be magically suspended, when in fact, in Las Vegas, they're even worse than the day to day rules, but they appear to have evaporated or something.
It's a great point, in that art is seen as useless, but more important, art is seen as separate from your day to day life. In a world where I'm being inundated with images, I'm left wondering, where are we drawing the line as to how art does and doesn't enter my life? I see a hundred photographs on my phone a day, that are professional photographs, that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. That's a change.
Another part of that too is, what people are doing who aren't professionals. A lot of things people are doing, back in the 1960s and 70s, would have qualified as conceptual art projects.
You think of Alan Kaprow's trying to think himself out of the institution of art in some way, with these different anti-art, un-art, non-art categories. And now, there's a whole flood of activity that Kaprow envisioned as a sort of Utopia or something; that people are just doing for it's own sake. Most don't care if it's recognized as art or not.
There's this whole outpouring of activity, and it seems like it ought to be good. And, parts of it are, but it's not just that. There's other things going on too.
This is a bit of a pivot from our current discussion, but we were speaking about the academic side, and access entry points through writers starting in that 60s legacy. Are there people you look at that are looking at art and access to the institution regularly, and who would you say are the best people to be looking at as the general American public?
Starting in the 60s. Can I sort my own favorites out from who would be important?
Definitely.
I still think Dan Graham's work is incredibly important, and I think he's probably at this point underrated, and I think part of it has to do with, especially the work that he did that dealt with feedback, and it was partly a parody.
There was a whole generation of video artists who were working with video feedback, which was a brand new and mind blowing thing when it appeared. And, you could get that by hooking up a video camera to a monitor and then, if you point the camera into the monitor, you get an infinite regress. It's like putting a mirror in front of a mirror.
Dan Graham played with that, and one of his famous pieces was continuous past's present, where he did time delay feedback, so every frame as you went back was five seconds into the past. But then, he took that into a piece called Performer Audience Mirror, where he described himself in front of an audience, then he described the audience, then he did the same thing looking into a big mirror where he and the audience could see each other, and I think that that's kind of a model for our current media situation.
Part of what he did in that piece that I think was ingenious was that he completely removed the technology and boiled it down to language.
It's funny too, because I think it produced a state of identification and alienation simultaneously. Alienation through the attempt to articulate how you saw yourself exactly in the present moment in formation.
And then, Dan Graham being who he is; he's off on a jag now, about how he doesn't like conceptual art and how his work doesn't have anything to do with it, and he'll just say, "All my work has always been about comedy." And, at first, it seems like he's just pushing your buttons, but then, when you go back and look at it, and if you listen to the recordings in these performances, it is like a very dry standup comedy.
There have been times that online technologies have helped. In my art criticism class, I started having everyone post discussion questions. That way I know they read the material, number one. But then, I found that the level of the written questions is much higher than what our verbal discussion is in class. That's one of the things I'm wrestling with, but I'm pleased that there's this online forum where people can post their questions, read other's questions, and it goes fairly deep into the material, and it does open it up to multiple perspectives. That's been something that's good. Although, now I feel like I should try to make that happen in the actual classroom discussion.
Has there been a lot of interest in doing fine art? Have you noticed in the last couple of years?
It's funny. Our numbers have gone down a little bit, but for a couple of years, we had too many people, and it was hard. If the numbers had kept up, we would have had to restructure. But then, at Barnard, it's hard because there's the committee on academic instruction, so it's not just the simple supply and demand. Like, the studio courses have to be kept in proportion to academic courses. You can't just grow the studio to whatever. So, we're always up against that.
For a while, we were bursting at the seams. Now, it's gone down a little bit. Two or three years ago, enrollment in Art History really dipped. It was just the lowest it had been since I had been at Barnard. Now, it's bounced back and nobody knows why there was this dip.