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
An Interview with Jessica Backus
by Jessica Backus
October 11, 2018
This interview with Jessica Backus, the Senior Director of Gallery Relations at Artsy, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: One of the things that we're talking about is technology and how there are so many different ways art is moved online. Art is moved online through the public getting to create it, art is moved online through social media, art has moved online through companies like Artsy, who are providing access to people around the world in every sphere of the art world. And in other ways. Like, performance art going online. I mean, I could go on and on. When you hear this mammoth question, what are the first things you think of as the highest impact ways that people are seeing art online today?
Jessica: That's a good question. You have to think what does impact mean? And that's actually the critical question a lot of us who work in this field are working on now. Five years ago, pretty much anyone who was doing a start up, working in a museum, working in the arts, knew that access had to be front and center. That's shifted today because, by and large, we've increased access tremendously. Even five years ago a lot of museums didn't want to put their images online because they worried about things like copyright, which is definitely a valid concern and you have to understand what it meant to have art online and what the ramifications are for an artist copyright or the artist estate.
But they also thought that it would compete with in person visits. That's something where we've seen a sea change. Today, you have a lot of museums that have opened up their collections via open access APIs. An API is a big data stream that you can tap in and use to develop an app, or use for whatever purposes you want to. And that's been a huge shift, and I think that museums have been very much at the forefront there, also working with various academic institutions, and companies like Artsy. We're working to think about how we can make art—and information about that art—more accessible.
Now, that brings us to today. Where are we today and how do we define impact? I'm going to speak a little bit out of order here, but I think it's worth it to think about what that impact has been for access. A few ways to talk about that access is the fact that every major museum now has a website, they have images available—you can visit the museum website and see a million different objects in the museum’s collection. Other pieces of that impact are at Artsy, and you know, not even just saying this as a plug, but honestly we have something like one million art works published on our site. And those are works from galleries often, from the primary market, from auction houses, works that most people never would have seen before.
If a gallery in, say, Dubai has an exhibition, and I'm based in New York, how am I actually going to be able to see those works? How am I going to know what's happening? You can do that online today. That was not the case five years ago. Yes, there's always room for improvement in terms of access to the actual works that are being created and access to information about artists. Now the question is becoming a lot more nuanced.
I always like to say that availability is not the same as access. You can put something out there, but that doesn't mean that it's going to go into the world and do anything. The big question is how do we get that art actually moving? How do we get it actually moving in the world and moving people? I don't know the answer to that, but I think if we can start to see that impact in a way that many people look at art and they're moved by it, people know more about it, they feel comfortable talking about it, and that they can have a personal relationship with it, I think that's when we'll know that we've been able to actually have an impact on access.
I had this experience once, I was walking by a school looking at a piece of art, they must have been six or seven. And it was Starry Night. And every one of the kids was like, "wait, there's one? There's one Starry Night? I've seen it. What do you mean there's one?" Mind blown. Because they didn't understand, they couldn't understand that there's only one of these paintings in the world.
Yeah.
I think a lot about it. Is that piece of art, that image being available online, is that access, are they experiencing it? Does it matter how they're experiencing it? Does it matter that it's different online than in a museum? You have a really good distinction of what exactly access means. But how would you consider that in person, visceral, once in a lifetime, single painting feeling? Verus how it's put online.
There's nothing like that experience in the world. That in-person experience for the work of art is so unique and it's one of the unique things that we get to do as humans. I think Duchamp said that a work of art is a rendezvous. You are meeting a new thing. You're meeting a new being. And there's a person behind it that created it and this is like a snapshot in time of that person—or a snapshot over time, because it takes a long time to make a work of art.
I can speak passionately about why I love that experience and why I love art. I kind of feel that the closest thing to love money can buy is art. Honestly. When we experience people when we're in love, it's their whole being. It's their whole self. That's why vulnerability is so important in love. And if you're making a work of art, you're making yourself vulnerable as an artist. You're taking a snapshot of part of yourself. I'm not saying that art has to be biographical, I'm not saying it's about you. I don't believe that at all. I think as an artist you have to reach a lot higher and you have to reach out into the world around you to put something forward, but ultimately you're that distillation point through which this new work of art passes into the world.
Another metaphor I like to use about art, can I continue going on here?
Yes.
Okay. This is a fun thought experiment. I cannot take credit for this because I read about it in a New Yorker article. But here's the thought experiment: imagine you're a superhero and you have lots of different powers and some of them require a greater level of energy. How would you rank these super powers? Turning something a different color, making it levitate, making it disappear or making it come into being? What's the hardest?
Come into being, levitate, disappear, change color.
That's what pretty much everyone says, right? I think a lot of us think of artists as those who change the colors of things, but really they're like superheroes who have this unique capacity of actually bringing something into being. That's the hardest thing there is to do. I think that those are all of the reasons why unique art objects and that experience we have with them are always going to be a part of our lives as humans. I don't think that having access to an impression of that via an online channel is ever going to replace that, but I also don't think that's the goal of many online sites or market places.
There's parallels with the way we live our lives online. You can FaceTime with someone, but it's not the same as seeing them in person, but you're still going to FaceTime with them. Online access to the arts is kind of that analogy.
I've heard many times that we used to go online to escape our lives.
Like, via Second Life?
Right. But now, we shut our phones off and we get offline, to escape our lives. I wonder if the availability of art online is almost having the opposite effect that museums worry about and it's driving people into the in person experience. You see that with magazines. Now there's a ton of festivals around magazines. Music festivals are doing well. More access to art is going to create more desire to see them in person or go to a museum.
Do you think there's a bright side to having so much imagery in the sense that maybe that makes that moment even more valuable?
Yeah. I'm actually trying to think, what is the downside to having so much imagery everywhere? Historically, when we talk about the downsides, it's a fear that it's going to detract from in person visits. Or that people are going to have access to images and recreate them, and so copyright infringement has been a fear.
I think if anything, here I want to draw on Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. If anything, that is something to be aware of, in that it is going to form how you interact with these images and there is great power in being able to contribute in the way that that access is created. I think that's undeniable.
Being able to see more art is always a good thing. I do think if you're a creator and your images are getting out there, obviously you want to know that whoever is creating the ecosystem for these images has your back. You want to know that it's going to be an even playing field. You want to know that you're going to be presented in the best light. All those things are important.
A lot of people don't know, for example, that you can go to so many different cities around the world and go into a gallery for free and look at art and nobody is going to bother you, you don't have to pay anything, you don't have to know anything about it, you can do that. The more familiar people can get with the concept of galleries where they are, what you do in a gallery, what kind of art you're going to see there, that familiarity is actually going to decrease those barriers to entry. To go out to a part of town that you maybe never knew before and actually feel confident walking into this foreign space and know that because you have that online connection to this offline world, you can feel comfortable in that.
You bring up an interesting intersection, galleries are for commerce, but in some ways, galleries are more accessible than museums, because most museums you pay for. When you're an artist that makes too much art, your value goes down. You want to be accessible but not too accessible when it comes to the market. How do you feel about the intersection of the commerce, gallery, auction world?
There's a lot there to unpack. It's funny because there's always been a market for art. I think that's a constant. And at the end of the day artists needs to sell their art to make a living. That's always existed. This is maybe a bit of a personal bias—I studied East German art history and see what happens when the arts are almost fully government funded. Obviously that's one extreme, but basically if you don't have a market for art, the question is, how else do artists survive?
I think the market is a vital part of how art exists in the world today and it's not so much about this divide between the commercial side of the art world and the not-for-profit side of the art world that we should be making, but more a question of how do we improve the infrastructure across the entire art world so that the artists can survive? Because every part of the art world needs the other part. You need a market for artists to be able to sell their work and survive. You need museums for people to have access to art they might not otherwise have access to. You need to have curators who can work as art historians and keep that infrastructure up and running, and also look historically back at the past and make sense of the present moment in the context of the past.
And you need auction houses to ensure that there is the secondary market for art (if you purchase a work of art and you want to resell it, you typically resell that work at an auction house). It's similar to a secondary market for concert tickets. This is a very testy subject, but, if there is a strong secondary market for tickets, people are often more likely to purchase them in the first place because they know that there's a value attached to them that they can resell. The same goes for art. That's not to say people don't buy art out of love for their art. I think most people buy art that they love, that they've fallen in love with, or that moves them. But when you're shelling out sometimes thousands of dollars for a unique work of art, the more you know that it's also some sort of value, the likelier you are to also spend more.
I like to think of museums, auction houses, and galleries not as opposed to one another, though certainly frictions crop up, but they really all are supportive of one another.
Who do you wish could see more art?
Fair.
Everyone?
Let me rephrase the question. What do you think would get more people to look at, be moved by, and have access to art?
This is a huge question. I wonder if any single person knows this. I'm a bottom up kind of person in that I think the people who are closest to these issues are on the ground: artists who are actually creating their art and want to be able to create more of it; artists who want to be able to survive from their art.
For me this question comes down to who are the change agents? The art world creates something like three million jobs, and the services that people working in the art market take advantage of creates an estimated additional few hundred thousand jobs. That's a lot of people! There's also a new generation of people coming up working in the arts today.
I do want to highlight, too: I think it's very much a privilege to be able to work in the arts. The barriers to entry are high. You need to have a good education. It's not the most meritocratic industry out there by any means. If it could be a more meritocratic system I think we'd be able to attract a more diverse pool of people who work in the arts. Not that I want to make assumptions about who those people are, or what it is that they want to do, what their goals will be with their own career path, and with the place that they want art to have in the world. But I do think that the trend in the world at large is for industries to become more diverse and for the people in those industries to look for more. To want to grow the industry that they're in and to want to open up access.
What do you love most about your job? And your job could be your job at Artsy or your job as an art historian.
Wow. You know it's funny that I've talked about art a lot this time, and I've talked about it as very close to being human, but I'm also like any other person. I think one of the big things that drives me and the work that I do and the company I'm at is the people I get to work with. That's true.
It's a truthful answer.
It is, yeah.