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
Judson Dance Theater at MoMA – Where History Meets Radical Movement
by Thomas Lax & Ana Janevski
October 31, 2018
This interview with Thomas Lax and Ana Janevski, exhibition curators at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, was conducted and condensed by frank news. A discussion about Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, and how the historical exhibition is perhaps more relelvant than ever.
The exhibition is running at MoMA through February 3, 2019.
frank: How was the exhibition conceptualized from the beginning, within the department?
Ana: The media performance department has a long history with Judson. We have already worked with Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton. There was already a series of relationships that were formed with those artists, and somehow also working with contemporary dancers, choreographers, with those visual artists, Judson was always a recurring term. So we thought it was really important to go back to these artists and talk to them, and try to think together about what an exhibition of Judson Dance Theater could be.
Where does the line fall between performance art and dance? Do you think there is a line?
Thomas: In many ways the exhibition tries to trace the interdisciplinary practices that in the late 1950s, and early 1960s produced Judson Dance Theater. These were a group of choreographers, composers, musicians, film makers, poets coming together. At the end of the day, while they worked with one another, inside of each other's work they still maintain their own identities of makers of dance or makers of painting. I think what you see is the emergence of the category of performance art, which wouldn't come about until later in the 1960s and you see a kind of laboratory or a primordial goop through which that term would mean something today.
How do you relate the live performances that are being restaged and the actual objects being presented in the exhibition itself?
Ana: That was a big challenge of the exhibition. It was how to find this great balance between the live performances and the objects and the different kinds of material that are in the exhibition. We did really thorough research of all the material available, the photos, ephemera, drawings, magazines, costumes, scores. We also thought it was important to talk to some of the protagonists.
Also, the way the exhibition is organized, at the atrium, where there are live performances surrounded by the galleries. The fact that there are also some of the live performances in the galleries, it shows how dance can be transmitted and translated in different ways. In all the performances, dance is something that you have to repeat many times. Plus showing films that were done at the time with some of the film makers that were crucial to the exhibition. They were not only recording Judson performances but thinking about how to use film in an artistic way.
Do you think that staging the performances at MoMA changes the way the exhibition was presented?
Thomas: In a major way.
I think the context of the Museum of Modern Art, the context of an exhibition, in particular, allowed for a way to think about the kind of collective social and political history of this group of artists. That is what we have tried to do through a presentation of archival materials and other adjacent sites close to Judson. To say that this group of people didn't emerge out of a vacuum, but there was a specific time and place through which their practices were made significant, but also to have a direct relationship to our moment today.
The history of New York City, the history of dislocation, the history of what it means to come together and work with your colleagues that animated much of the work that occurred in 1962. The stakes of that work live and continue through, until this moment in 2018.
How do you mitigate the difference in freedom, that they had then as dancers and performers, then you do now? With everything staged and recorded, do you think that freedom in some ways is lost?
Ana: Those were definitely different times, so there was a moment of the 60s, there was a moment when those artists were extremely young, they were out of school, they decided to use the basement of the church for doing workshops and experiment, and it is a very specific context that you cannot recreate. Maybe it is not important to recreate? What you can somehow relate to and what it is important to keep in mind is, what happened then? What are those changes? What is the experimentation? What is the community feeling that they had? What are the radical things that they did with modern dance? How they worked together. How they relate to the space that they were performing to the other venues in the city. How they organized their work in a very democratic way. I think those are the important things that can be an element of freedom that we can relate to today or we can aspire to today. For sure the context that was there is completely different to what it is now, but it doesn't mean that some kind of understanding and work with this material is impossible.
What lessons do you think we can learn as far as using dance and performance as a medium for activism, for rage, for communicating? Or do you think you present it and let people make up their own minds?
Thomas: The question you're asking, about the relationship between art and politics, between base movement, pure action, between multiple people, and the significance of that in the larger social world, is one that has animated our thinking about this exhibition from the very beginning but also our own approaches to why we work at a public institution, or what it means to collaborate with one another.
The way I've come to understand how, in this exhibition in particular, the stakes of political action occur is through an experiment or an anticipation of democracy. In other words, thinking about Simone Forti, Huddle, which happens 3 times a day, 3 times a week, behind where we are standing right now, is a work where you have 8 people, in a deep squat, holding one another, in which one person leaves the group and proceeds to climb on top of the people below them, the community so to speak, that supports them, but also that they weigh down on that, can smell them, and feel their weight in their body.
In many ways, I see it as kind of practice for what it means to be democratic. If you think about in the United States, the voting rights act, being the first moment of the promise of democracy beginning to actualize itself. That happens 3 years after that work is made, so in quite literal historical terms, many of the things that are happening, in terms of practicing democracy, anticipate the very instantiation of what democracy could be in the country.
I think that we are still living in that anticipatory moment, where we are hoping for something to come to pass, but it's still a question of whether it can. Physically being inside of that space, you recognize those things, not just as abstractions or ideas, but as actual things that inhabit your body and that are the space between your body and somebody else's body. Starting from that very anatomical, itemized, social and embedded, entangled place is one way that we can bring people into this conversation.
Do you think that dance and performance art are more accessible forms of art for people who are not familiar with art in general?
Ana: I think it depends a lot about the framing, about the presentation. Eventually, any kind of art can be accessible. It depends on how generous you are in presenting the art and explaining in the working and different tools that go around an exhibition. It's not just about presenting something in the space. Whether it's dance, or object, it's all a series of discussions you have with your colleagues or thinking about the different educational materials for a simple label, a title.
This is also what we learn from the Judson artists, because the same stakes the same problems they face somehow fifty years ago are very much the same problem we are still facing politically. From Judson, they also learned how to be political in that way. Maybe they were not exactly at that moment? Then for sure, a lot of them, became later. Judson itself is a church, Judson Memorial Church, it is still a very social and politically engaged place. We also learn from them how to be accessible, they have dance performances on Monday and Wednesday.
With performance, and the Forti and Paxton choreographing all these different moments, do you think it's the same work of art when different dancers are dancing it?
Ana: I think it's not, but that's not the point. It is never the same work of art when they are doing it. When the work is repeated, it’s never when you do it in the 60s or in the 70s. When we can see the David Gordon piece, The Matter, talks about that, from the solo hidden in 62 at the Judson, he incorporated in his piece, The Matter, in the 70s that he was performing since then. It's always the same and different at the same time, and that, I think, is the beauty of that.
Who is this exhibition for?
Thomas: I would say this exhibition on the one hand for a community of dancers, choreographers, artist and their allies and it’s for strangers. It's for people who we don't know, it's for people who don't know what Judson Memorial Church is or was or what the stakes of Judson Dance Theater meant and continue to mean today. I think we try to make a project that people could enter into. Where they would know every name and see themselves recognized on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art. Also, for somebody who would just look at a performance by Yvonne Rainer, and be stunned and moved by how quizzical this thing before them was. Take that experience of not knowing and looking, and looking again, and perhaps through that, find themselves looking closely at the world around them. I think that's who the shows is for.
What's one thing that makes you excited about this exhibition?
Thomas: I am a student of Judson. After working with Ana and Martha Joseph, and many people on a wonderful team, for the last three years, to study everything we could find and talk to as many people as possible who went through the doors of the church in the early 1960s. I am learning something new with every performance I see, and I continue to be a student of this moment.
Ana: Similarly, I would say it's the spirit of the collaboration that is behind this show. Every show is like that, and this show in particular. We claim it, in an important way. As Thomas said, it's about learning and it's about working together.
Thank you.