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
Forward Union Fair
by frank
October 16, 2018
This interview with Forward Union, a coalition-building initiaitive connecting social justice organizations with artists and creative communities, was conducted and condesned by frank news.
frank: Could you tell me more about how Forward Union Fair was founded?
Jennie Lamensdorf: Shortly after the election, we went through an exercise assessing what everyone was talking about in the news and online. I took stock of my privilege and one of the things that I took stock of was that I have access to space in New York City, and I wanted to do something with that. I work with a real estate developer who had empty retail space in Manhattan that felt too extraordinary not to take advantage of. I have access to this space. I want to do a thing, and I don't know what the thing should be.
I was honestly thinking something small like, "We could make protest banners", or "We could do guided meditation". What could we do? It was around the time of Art Basel and so we were in this mindset "art fair season", and Holly Shen proposed an anti-Art Basel fair.
We didn't want to generate something new because we knew there were all these people doing really good work, and we didn't need to step into the fray to produce something from scratch. We wanted to create a platform that could support the people who already do the things. Then we wanted to do something that created face to face conversation.
Julia Clark: Get people offline.
Jennie Lamensdorf: Get people offline! The internet was already super toxic. It was frustrating all of us, and making all of us really angry. We wanted to create a space, supporting people doing good work, that made people interact differently.
In a tense political climate, do you think art helps us focus on culture? Focus on politics? Or is there even a discussion about people making art for arts sake at this point?
Jennie Lamensdorf:
Artists make their work for whatever it is that moves them. I think maybe it's possible that more artists are being explicit about their political values right now.
An artist we work with named, Emily Noelle Lambert, makes paintings and sculpture and she produced all the furniture for our lounge the first two years. Her work didn't change but her titles changed in a way that made the painting a lot more politically explicate after the election. Her values didn't change, she was just being motivated to be a more political.
I also don't think art has to be about anything ever. It's just I think what I'm interested in might be changing, and what the audience is interested in is be changing, but I don't think the artist has to do anything ever. It's for the greater audience to shift the attention not the artist. Otherwise it comes off fake.
How do you select artists for Forward Union?
Jennie Lamensdorf: We've been working with a core group all three years and it is personal because they came out and supported us no questions asked in the beginning, when we had no track record and we were doing this on a three week timeline, and it seemed a little bit bonkers. There are a lot of artists that have been working with us and continue to do so.
This year we have a big instillation by Jesus Benavente. We have one by Aram Han Sifuentes and Lizania Cruz. The selection process is organized by Holly and me, who we're interested in working with, and who has an exciting project going on right now.
We're not W.A.G.E certified, because we haven't gone through the process, but each artist is getting a fee based on the guidelines that are on their website. In the past we haven't had the resources to be able to pay the artist to produce work for us so that's really exciting. But in order to do that we had to have fewer artists. The first year we had 35, and this year we have 13. We have fewer artists, making fewer things, with better resources.
I think it also comes from learning how the fair works. The first year we had normally sized work on the walls. We had a lot of paintings that we hung by number of artists. What we realized is through an event of this scale, these domestically scaled objects get lost in the fray.
The spirit of the fair is a civics fair more than an art fair. The aesthetic is all over the place. It's rather DIY. We want to encourage that and make everything feel accessible. We want to encourage that in this space, because Redbull Arts is way more like a gallery than where we've been before, it's way more polished and feels a lot more professional, but we also don't want our audience who isn't part of the art world to all of the sudden feel like this isn't a space for them. The big work is more successful. You can see it from all angles, it occupies more space, its responding to the energy.
Who is this fair for?
Julia Clark: It's for everybody. The idea was to bring it offline – this is tangible, this next step, this action. This call to action. Obviously the art world is our audience and our network, bringing the creative community to the organization is sort of this new resource and outlet for them.
Then there are also the advocates and grassroots communities who aren't as involved in the art world, and they're more interested in the participants and the programs than the other things. It's bringing everybody together. Organizations are coming together and realizing that they are all overlapping, and they are having a conversation, and finding out how an artist can come and tap into that, and have a different view or perspective.
In some way the art is a conversation facilitator.
Julia Clark: Yes. And it complements. The same conversations are happening, and you can see them. Art has the capacity to communicate complex situations in an immediate fashion.
You talked a little about bringing things offline. It's no secret we're inundated with visual imagery all the time. When it comes to imparting a political message do you think that's helpful?
Jennie Lamensdorf: I am over the internet in some ways. I get social media specific, where I want to comment, I want to talk to people, and have a conversation, and organizing Forward Union Fair has us tapping into a world that we wouldn't necessarily. Learning about different organizations and being hands on and having a conversation is important. I do think seeing things online is also important.
Do you think art and activism are headed offline in a bigger sense?
Jennie Lamensdorf: No, I think we need both still. For example, Swing Left is coming to the fair and their big initiative now is called hashtag the last weekend (#TheLastWeekend) and that's because it is known that the most important moment to get out the vote for an election is the Sunday before a Tuesday election. #TheLastWeekend is a project to promote phone banking and knocking on doors on the last Sunday in October. What they're doing to promote that is a really big digital online social media push. The name of the project has a hashtag in it, in order to engender things to happen offline. In that way, I don't think you can remove the digital from anything.
Even here. We're basically only promoting the existence of the fair with online promotion. We did have print yesterday. We were in the Metro, New York.
Julia Clark: We did have a street team with post cards.
Jennie Lamensdorf: We did do some post cards. But mostly we are sending lots of emails we have a website, we are doing social media, and all of that work to get people to show up in real life.
Why is none of the art at the fair for sale?
Julia Clark: Selling art is a really hard job and we are not equipped to take on that role. We aren't sharing art that is very sellable and if someone was like "Oh my God, I am in love with Joiri Minaya instillation. I would like to acquire that" I would say "Amazing, here is Joiri's information." Selling art is really hard work and despite the fact all of us are from the art world, none of us are from the commercial art world.
Jennie Lamensdorf: When we organized the first fair, we without thinking used an art. A curatorial methodology, being that we though about the issues that were critical to our subject. Our subject being like "Oh My God that just happened, like Trump is now the president." So that is now the subject "What do we do next, what is going to happen? How do I survive? How do I get through the panic and the dark?" That was the subject matter and we used a curatorial methodology we looked at the subject matter we thought about all of the issues and we wanted each issue represented in some form. So that's how we targeted different organizations to participate.
Julia Clark: We felt like, we have to have representatives from immigrant communities, social justice communities, the health care community, gun control, LGBTQ etc. And that's how we reached out to all these organizations, and that's how we ended up with this, I think very diverse intersectional group of organizations because we have a lot of return. Every year there is some change but by and large we're getting lots of organizations over and over again. Turns out that is 100 percent the wrong way to organize an activist event. And environmentalism obviously. When activists do events is very subject oriented. So there is environmentalism and they have their events and there is women's reproductive health and they have their events and there is prison reform and they have their events and this is in part due to funding structures, they need to be tight to be on brand, on mission. Its tight because of the complexity of the issues.
Jennie Lamensdorf: In order to be an expert you have to be quite focused. I think its tight because of the way lobbying works and the way changing legislation works. So what we did was we did it wrong because none of us are traditional activists and we did it using the traditions and the structures of the world we come from and we ended up creating this amazing event that has all of these voices and one of the beautiful take aways from Forward Union is the incredible interdisciplinary networking that happens and opportunities for collaboration or thinking and idea sharing that come from it. So with the fair we actually open to the orgs two hours before we open to the public and we serve breakfast and we have this open mic where they can talk about what they do and do calls to action so they can all engage with each other.
I really think that the doing it wrong-ness and using the traditions of the art world to design a program that isn't exclusively for the art world is one of the things that makes Forward Union very different and very special and I think valuable, and adaptable, because it has morphed over the years and I think it has opportunity to continue to do so as like the world changes.
Julia Clark: That's interesting. That access in itself. Its taking a somewhat closed off seeming methodology, a curatorial methodology and overlaying it on an industry that doesn't look at things that way. Right?
Jennie Lamensdorf: Yeah, we disrupted them.
Julia Clark: Yeah, that's an element. I agree with that. That's exactly why I think its important and interesting.
Jennie Lamensdorf: We did by accident the first year, and we sort of leaned into it the second and third year. The first year we didn't have the open mic, we started the open mic last year. We did it one day last year and it was so successful we're going to do it two days this year.
Julia Clark: And it was literally like "Somebody canceled what do we do?" Thing. And it ended up being all of our end of the day roses and thorns. It was so great.
Activism is weird in the sense that I think people really do stay in their lane. That's a shame.
Jennie Lamensdorf: So much! It's super weird.
Julia Clark: Activism has its traditions. I'm sure they look at us in the art world and think we do things wrong and I think it's just our outsider perspective that accidentally allowed us to create something beautiful.
There is an irony that the art world has an exclusivity reputation but you guys were the outsiders in this case. You were not the insiders.
Julia Clark: I find the art world to be an incredibly welcoming and inviting place, but I think because so much or what people outside the art world know about us is from headlines like "$350 million paintings", it tends to be really grand market stuff, and not the lived DIY reality of most people.
I agree.