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
Rote Memorization Won't Do
by DeNora Getachew
April 15, 2019
This interview with DeNora Getachew was originally published November 7, 2018 in our Civics issue.
DeNora Getachew is the New York City Executive Director of Generation Citizen, the flagship local site of a nine year old national nonprofit dedicated to bringing civics education back into the classroom through a new, engaging pedagogy: Action Civics. DeNora, an attorney by training, was a democracy nerd before it was in vogue. She had her civic engagement moment as a young pregnant teen advocating for her ability to remain at her high school instead of transferring to an alternative high school for pregnant teens. But it was not until after she graduated from law school and began working to eliminate the structural barriers to participation that she realized the power of her experience as a young pregnant teen.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news editors.
DeNora: Thanks for being with me today and giving me the opportunity to talk about Generation Citizen. I'm DeNora Getachew the New York City Executive Director of Generation Citizen. We are a 9 year old national non-profit focused on educating and empowering young people to be civically engaged. Our solution is simple and it's common sense, and it's necessary. We partner with schools to implement Action Civics in the classroom in order to give them the knowledge and skills they need for lifelong civic participation in our 21st century democracy.
Why does this not already exist in public schools?
Civics education does exist. It doesn't exist in the way that it once did. If we look back in our nation's history, back in the 1960s, students took as many as three courses before graduating high school relating to civics and democratic participation. And now, we're lucky if students take one class. But it's not about whether or not there's a class in schools, it's about the quality and caliber of that class.
The reality is, School House Rock might've been great for our grandparents, but if you can like and tweet and activate yourself online using social media, memorizing government facts isn't going make you feel like you can make a difference in your community. So it's about having Action Civics, having experiential learning as a way to educate and empower young people. Civics exists, and the majority of states have some class that pertains to civics, so it's about, is it experiential learning, project-based learning, is it student-led work – Action Civics.
When structuring courses for Generation Citizen, aimed at Gen Z, do you take into account their online lives?
It's a delicate balance because we want to both meet the millennials and Generation Z'ers where they are without also tipping the scale.
I want to be clear, both as a leader, but also when we talk to our educational partners, that you have to engage students to be digitally engaged civic learners, but you also have to teach them that systemic change includes the other tools in the toolbox that require us to meet elected officials in person, call them, write letters, engage in petitioning, etc. and that isn't only going happen online. You still need the actual face-to-face engagement in order to fuel long-term systemic change.
What do you think about organizations that focus on civic engagement through celebrity?
I honestly think that participating in democracy is a full-contact sport, so when you're engaged in a full-contact sport you're going need all the tools in the toolbox. I don't want us to over-celebritize civic engagement, so I am glad that everybody from the Taylor Swift's of the world to President Donald Trump are using social media and celebrity to get people to be engaged in a way that we've never experienced, or we haven't experienced, in a long time in our democracy. We still need every day Americans to know that their voice matters and that they too can push for systemic change, and that's the work we're doing. Both in our urban centers like New York, Boston and the Bay Area, but also in rural communities in Texas and Oklahoma.
Why do you think civics has been largely taken out of the classroom?
I say this with all due respect for the STEM/STEAM movement, we can date it back to the 60s, but when we look at the history it was this moment when America was having its Sputnik moment and thinking about how it stayed globally competitive in the STEM sector, and really how do we race to get to the forefront of that. That forced us to de-emphasize, probably not even intentionally, experiential civics learning in the classroom.
Our founders founded this democracy with the goal of having an electorate, a populace, that understood how democracy works and that they were gonna engage in it. And again, I say that to go back to this fundamental notion that I believe that it takes all of us to participate actively in democracy, and that isn't all day, every day, but we all have to engage with it, and not just on election day.
Once we started thinking more about what it meant to be active Americans from a capitalist's perspective, and not as much from a citizenship perspective and a democracy perspective, we lost sight of the priority, both of our public education system but also of democracy at large and its responsibility to make sure that all Americans can participate in democracy.
What tools are most effective to get people to learn this?
We have to meet people where they are, and I think that's the power of Generation Citizen and our work, and our Action Civics curriculum. We are nine years old and we've been doing this work in six states by-and-large over the last nine. We're in Rhode Island, where we were founded on Brown University's campus at a pivotal moment for our American democracy. It was 2008, if we harken back to that moment, America was having a historic election, potentially to elect the first African-American president of the United States.
And our co-founder and CEO, Scott Warren realized at that time when he was a student at Brown University that Americans are standing in line for hours and participating at record levels at the Federal level, and in national elections. Almost very similar to this one where we are now, where we're seeing early voting turnout in Georgia, three times above what it normally is, but that people don't turn out in local elections, that people don't wait in line to vote for their city council member or their mayor or their public advocate, because they don't view it as a critical responsibility or it doesn't impact their lives in the same way.
He had this idea of, how do we get to the root cause of fixing civic participation at the local level. By reinvigorating civics education in the classrooms. He had this idea of piloting this Action Civics approach in the Providence school district, expanded to Massachusetts, down the Northeast corridor here in New York where I have the pleasure of being our New York City Executive Director. We went to the Bay Area where there's also this big urban center, and a big education system that we thought we could influence there.
Then took a pause in our organizational growth, and launched our two new sites in Oklahoma and Texas, and realized in this moment, what is missing, is we are not teaching young people experiential learning as much as we are in the classrooms anymore. With all due respect to the education system, it is by and large driven towards metrics based outcomes – how well do you perform on a standardized test. But not all learners perform well on standardized tests. In fact many young people who drop out of high school, one of the largest reasons they drop out of high school is because of the fact that they don't perform well on standardized tests, and in fact experiential learning resonates better with them.
When we think about the work that we are doing, to reinvigorate civics education and making sure that it's student led, it's project based, it is action oriented, is making sure that we could make it the most exciting subject that's taught in the classrooms again as opposed to the most boring.
By getting young people to build consensus about an issue that is personal and local to them, and getting them to understand that they can be in the drivers seat for how they can affect change in their community, we are activating them to use all the tools in their toolbox to be change-agents, be that now in the short-term in the confines of a classroom, or, and more importantly, in their lives largely.
I want to say unequivocally that we do this work in a nonpartisan way and we do it with the goal of activating young people to be civically engaged long-term. It isn't just about what happens in the classroom, it's about how does that civic knowledge, understanding the branches of government, the School House Rock component if you will, and those civic skills, so if I have a problem in my community, who are the decision makers, what am I asking them to do? Is it legislative, is it policy-making, is it budgetary in nature, is it increasing youth voice in decision making, the skills are what's going help them understand how to use that knowledge and apply it and be motivated and have that sense of agency or disposition long-term.
What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving that goal?
That that's the exact opposite of what's happening in a public school classroom. When you ask teachers, when you talk to them about the importance about civics in the classroom and experiential learning, they're excited about it, they're hungry for it, but no one's educating them, no one's equipping them to teach that in the classroom. In fact, the incentives structure and how we compensate teachers is driven towards that metrics-based, outcome-driven success for students, so if their students are performing better on standardized tests, then they achieve tenure, or they get bonuses, or they get raises. When instead we're not preparing teachers to prepare students to be citizens. Often times the barriers that we face are that educators themselves don't have that sense of civic knowledge or civic skills. And so they're like, how do I teach someone else how to participate in democracy when no one's taught me? The number one question we often get at Generation Citizen is, do you have this for adults? And the reality is, many of us need this.
It's a problem for our democracy. We don't actually understand how it works, understand why it relates to us, then how are we going engage in that full contact sport? The biggest question and the biggest obstacle we face, is educators who don't want to reveal that they themselves don't have that core set of knowledge and skills. We want to equip them to do it, so that they can equip the next generation to do it.
What's been the most surprising thing about working at Generation Citizen?
I don't know if it's surprising as much as it is inspiring, that young people, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. So part of it is as a society, there are certain things you cannot do until you reach the age of majority. To be that 18 or 21, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish. But that young people have this insatiable appetite for change and for thinking outside of the box that we don't always give them credit for.
What's powerful to me about this work, is that when you go into a classroom, you have these young people who started the semester skeptical, and they'll be honest. Because they're also so pure, the cynicism hasn't set in yet, they don't understand what they can or cannot achieve. They look at us and they're like how did you get here, who invited Generation Citizen to the classroom? And so they're skeptical and they're like what is this Action Civics thing, why do I care, how is this different from anything else I'm doing?
You're going let me, during class time, call an elected official, or write a piece of legislation, or advocate for something that I need in my community, be it something as simple as a traffic signal at a dangerous intersection, to legislation to allow for updating the school curriculum around how addictive opiates are? You're going to let me do that, in this classroom?
Once you see that spark get lit up for them, to me that's what's inspiring. It's both an obstacle and a source of inspiration for why I do this work. Then you see the power of young people to lead change, and if you look at it from a history-nerd's perspective, that young people are always at the forefront of change, we just don't always give them credit for it because the adults always have the bigger microphone, the bigger voice, the better kind of sophisticated language to talk about what it is. I'm always proud of that, of just seeing that if we let young people lead, if we give them the chance and the opportunity and the tools to do so, they rise to the occasion again and again.
What's one key take-away that you want people to know about civics education that they don't already?
That despite it feeling in vogue now, my phone rings more often, I get more emails inquiring about our work and how to engage with it than I ever did, two years ago when I started here, having left the structural barriers to the participation side of the house, as I fashion myself a democracy nerd for life, civics education was always this luxury item that was gonna be at the bottom of the list. If we fixed all the structural barriers, we'll make elections more accessible by having reforms like early voting, and automatic voter registration and online voter registration, you name it. And if we can have a better campaign finance system so that every day Americans can run for office, then we could re-institute civics.
I got here two years ago, and I'm like, but no we need to re-institute civics now, and forever, because if we don't, if we get rid of all the structural barriers of participation it'll be for naught because no one will understand why it matters. For me, that's the power of Action Civics and that's why we need it now and forever. I don't want to get caught up in this cliché of like, "it's the most important thing we need," or "this is the right moment." We've always needed it, the founders believed that over 240 years ago, I'm sitting here very humbly saying we need it today, and I want all of us to understand why.