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
Getting To Know Sara Goldrick-Rab and her Mission For Higher Education
by Sara Goldrick-Rab
May 27, 2019
This interview with Sara Goldrick-Rab, founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: Thanks for taking the time, I really appreciate it.
Sara Goldrick-Rab: No problem. It's been a busy week. I did a TED Talk.
I saw! How did it go?
It went well. Those are challenging things to do. You never know until it's out there. But I don't do this stuff to just do it. I do it to get people to move and to act, so I think that'll be the test.
You’ve come up in a lot of interviews this month as a catalyst, inspiration, or touch stone for students, advocates and academics alike.
That's lovely.
There are a lot of students saying, “look at The Hope Center, look at Sara's work!” When we spoke with Rachel at Swipe Hunger, for example, she described a transition in her work. She went from spending all her time convincing schools hunger was a problem, to working on logistics because they know it’s a problem – she linked a lot of it to the timing of your work being publishing.
I just recently understood that's actually how you do collective impact work. That's actually a strategy of collective impact work. I didn't know that because I don't know those buzzwords.
It's funny to do something by accident and have it really work. But I'm glad it's made life easier for people like Rachel, because they're amazing and they've been doing so much.
How did you become interested in this area of work?
I actually thought about that a lot because I wasn't a first-generation college student. And I wasn't a Pell recipient. A lot of people in my area have come to it because they lived it in that sense. I think the reason I do this is really because I'm very, very close to my maternal grandfather who went to college on the GI Bill. The first one, the good one. He has always talked about that – way before I ever did this work. I don't know why, but he always has. And I still have him. He's 91 years old.
It changed our family. My grandmother was already highly educated. She wouldn't have looked his way if he didn't go to college. We talked for a long time about how different things are now. He says we're eating our seed corn – so I've always had that. The other thing is my family is pretty social justice oriented. It's not like I grew up going to protests, but I grew up inside the D.C. Beltway, so I've always had a pretty good sense of the complexity of the political world.
Then I became a sociologist, and that helps you see the bigger picture. I was assigned a project as a graduate student to go visit community colleges for a particular professor. Once I set foot on a community college campus I was hooked, because I could see all the bigger-world stuff I was studying in school playing out.
I could see racial and economic inequality playing out right on that campus. I could see all sorts of gender issues. Once you know what's really happening, especially at the community colleges, it's really hard to turn away from that. I've never turned away from them again. When I talk about higher ed they're really at the forefront of what I'm talking about. And the basic needs stuff.
I started doing work on community college campuses around 1999, and I didn't start talking about the basic needs stuff until around 2008. It was almost ten years working on policy. I was talking a lot about financial aid policy and I was studying that. Everything turned on a dime when we were doing qualitative interviews. We talked to a lot of people.
It wasn't like we were like, "oh my God that's terrible and we're outraged." It wasn't like that. It was like, wait a minute. That's not something higher ed is talking about and is that a thing? Is this actually possible that it's affecting more than one person? So then we went out and we did survey work. We were in Wisconsin at the time, and our survey work turned up so much evidence that this was happening all over the state, in all sorts of colleges, and further, that it was related to a housing issue. Frankly, I didn't put that work into the public eye until 2015.
We're studying it, we're talking about it, but I wasn't making a big deal about it in the public eye until 2015 when we started to look at this outside of Wisconsin and do surveys in different places around the country. Once I saw the data we got from that first bigger survey, matched everything we saw in Wisconsin, I wrote about it in the New York Times – and that literally changed everything. That's the entire basis of today's Hope Center. We already had The Hope Lab in Wisconsin. We were already doing work on college affordability. But the big focus of this center now, which is literally making change happen, particularly around basic needs, came from all of that.
That's incredible.
My graduate student and I put this thing together. We published it around Thanksgiving 2015. I hoped it was going to generate tons of dollars of support. Like money was going to come pouring in for both research and advocacy. It didn't happen. What poured in were emails from people like Rachel.
They were like, “we're working on this! We are so alone here. Nobody understands what we're doing. We are getting lost.” I had two months of getting all these emails. By January I said okay the best thing we can do is get these people in a room together. The spring of 2016 we brought all these people to Wisconsin in Milwaukee and got them in a room together. That was our first Real College Conference, and that started this #realcollege movement. That's the origin. Fast forward and we're going to have our fourth conference this year.
It's huge. It's kind of quite overwhelming to me.
You realized something silent, but ubiquitous. What’s the context for the crisis of basic needs in higher education in America?
I summarize that by referring to what I call the new economics of college. My book, Paying The Price, has a pretty extensive description of that. I do that because I want people to understand, as you're alluding to, a bunch of things did this. It wasn't one thing. It's not just tuition. That's totally oversimplified. Certainly tuition is up, and certainly that is terrible. The fact is that you used to be able to use your Pell Grant and it would completely cover your tuition at the community college and you'd have money left over for living expenses. That's no longer true. States have pulled back on their funding, which has sent tuition up.
All this time we never talked about the other parts of the cost of attendance. Things like food, which have always been in the cost of attendance.
Policy makers were more intent on trying to be sure that college students didn't get access to affordable housing, things that are paid for by the low income housing tax credit. They were so intent on ensuring students didn't abuse this they cut them out of the program. And there's an unintended consequence of that, which is that now there's not much affordable housing at all for these people.
The other really big change that happened is obviously about who comes to college. Today's students don't look like yesterday's students. That comes with consequences. It means our overriding assumption, that a college student has two parents with jobs who basically pay for what they need, is completely false. When there's an unexpected bill – a student has fees they didn't know they would have to pay, or they have to buy more supplies for a class – the parent is not going to be able to help. So the student struggles. And when they pay that bill, because they have to, that leaves them short of what they need for food or for rent.
It's a budgetary pressure. But it's not just a pressure on the student, it's a pressure on the family.
That's very scary.
There's not a lot of money these days. And $500 unexpected expenses happen all the time to college students. The labor market is closely related. Obviously families are struggling in part because we think we have wage stagnation, so wages they're making are not better than the wages they were making 30 years ago, and yet things cost a lot. The purchasing power remains exactly the same. When it comes to the college student, they've always held part-time minimum-wage jobs. Well, there's more competition for them. Some days my students literally have to decide am I coming to class or am I keeping my job?
The value of the minimum wage has declined, so that's the other thing. It's not that these students aren't working their way through college, 70% of all students are working. Our data suggests that probably half of the other 30% are trying to find work, and can't find it. People have said why don't these students just get a job?
Look, I can't say enough about how that's a huge, huge problem for most people.
Changes to government policies around the social safety net which, again, largely exclude college students also contributes. The most prominent problem has to do with the food stamp program. It is deliberately exclusionary to college students, and that didn't used to be so. In the 1970's if you were food insecure, there was more support available from the government and the institution.
The last part of the new economics is the defunding of these schools. This is not just about rising college prices for the student, it's about the fact that schools are being given less money from states to actually provide support services to students. And there you go.
It's a perfect storm.
Legislation is inherently politicized. Have you found effective ways of communicating the work you’re doing without making it about politics?
Boy is this hard. The first thing that I want to be clear about is that the data are viewed as political. And because, as you said, it crosses multiple social issues, I want to flag that we seem to have stepped into a long-standing debate over whether the USDA's definition of food insecurity is a real thing. There are those who have apparently (and I just discovered this world of people) said “there isn't hunger. America doesn't have a hunger problem. The USDA has a definition that is bullshit.
The USDA's definition is about capturing poverty and the effect of poverty on food access, that's really what it's doing. We also get into serious debate now over whether this is food insecurity. Whether it actually is a problem. So I want to flag that.
When we start talking about homelessness, some say, she's just a left-winger who wants everything to be free. This is not homelessness if students are couch surfing. That's been hard. I think it's really hard for my research team in particular, because it's data. We're not supposed to be debating. We shouldn't have to debate this stuff, but it is debatable.
On the political side, I've tried to make clear to people that you can certainly take a left-wing social-justice lens and say look this is just a horrible thing to do to people. To punish them for getting an education. It's also, frankly, economically really inefficient. That's what I try to explain when I'm talking to somebody who wants to walk down the middle. It is tremendously inefficient to make investments at the federal and state levels of hundreds of billions of dollars in higher education for things like student aid, and then leave students just short of what they actually need for food and housing and have them drop out. This doesn't make sense.
It's also really economically inefficient to sacrifice the health of these people so that we can pay for it down the road. I'm increasingly interested in the health community. I am fascinated by the fact that they've caught on here, and they're getting that having a diabetic college student go without enough to eat is a really bad idea. There's going to be things that we're going to live with down the road in terms of additional cost, as a result of literally neglecting and missing the opportunity to do this and address these things during college.
Does it matter who the message comes from? Is it better if it comes directly from a student in the state you’re addressing? If it’s a conservative state, does having a student from the place discuss their personal experience help, so it doesn’t feel like preaching?
I have to be honest and say we haven't gotten the opportunity to do good work in a lot of conservative states yet. I worked in Wisconsin under Scott Walker, but we weren't working with the politicians at that point. There was no point. It was an impossible situation. I've certainly been in those places, but it is notable to me who calls and who isn't calling right now. I am actively working with legislators in California, Oregon, Washington state, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. These are fairly left-leaning places. Minnesota, we're not yet talking. Last night I sent an email over to Tennessee to flag for them that they're not really having the basic needs conversation while they're having the College Promise conversation.
Interesting.
I'm hoping I can make some headway there. I do know all those people on the College Promise side. In terms of how the students talk – I have been everywhere, I've spent a bunch of time in Kentucky, as an example – and there is a remarkable similarity to how the students talk across the country with probably one difference being in California.
They really, really do. If you ask them why these things are happening they will offer you an individual critique, not a structural critique.
We know that in this country we blame the poor for their poverty. We really teach them that. I talk a lot now about the fact that I find this in all of my interviews and in my daily interactions. These students will have heard me give a talk where I make this structural critique, and then I ask them about their story, and it will always come with self-blame. And this narrative of all their failures and how they weren't financially literate enough and all of these things.
The exception seems to be in California, where I really do think it's in the water practically to be offering a critique of the system.
In terms of how the students think about this issue, it's not that they're not fighting mad and all of that, but I really do think that until they truly get what the causes are it's going to be hard to move past advocacy purely based on this just sucks. You know what I mean?
When you explain your argument about structural and systemic issues to students, do they believe you?
They do. That's one of the things I find so fascinating. Both listening to them and then telling them that they're not alone, and this is not their fault. Telling them that I know this is not their fault because of who I am and what I know. Even when I cannot give them money, which they always want, and they know I have a small non-profit that does give money, I still see changes. I have so many emails from students who said I never thought I could talk about this stuff, and I really thought it was just me.
One of the students I worked with a lot really recently is a woman named Jenae Parker, who is a former community college student in Ohio. I met her briefly at an event and then later connected with her because we were looking for people to testify before Congress, and she ultimately was selected. I had volunteered to help her prepare, and I asked her to write her narrative, what she wanted to say. She wanted to tell her story. But in the process of getting it really ready I gave her the statistics.
When she would talk about how she ran short of money to buy food, I would let her know our estimates of food insecurity among college students are the following. She just kept saying, "I had no idea. I had no idea. This is happening to other people? I had no idea." And at the end of the day, she delivered testimony that recognizes her own personal story, but it links it to the broader structural system. I have watched this young woman emerge into an advocate. She really got it.
I really hope that all of us that are getting to interact with these students are doing that for them, because I think it's really empowering. We have been trying at The Hope Center to find a funder to allow us to do this work with a much bigger group of students, because we think it's so insanely important. And we're going to be trying to do it with Max and RISE, because we think this would create more change.
What are you working on right now?
We've been testing the efficacy of a variety of supports. Rachel's got Swipe Out Hunger, right? We need to know how much Swipe Out Hunger actually moves the dial. Not just does it address food insecurity, but does it change student's grades? We have a set of things we've been in the field testing for the last two years. We have a food scholarship intervention in Houston. We have a meal voucher program in Boston. We have a housing voucher program in Tacoma. We're starting to look into work in Chicago.
I'm really excited about what happens when we start to have that knowledge, and start to be able to talk not just about the problem, not just about all the poor issues, not just about student's impact, or effects on the students and their feelings and all of that. But when we actually address these issues here's what we get. That's what we really need. Frankly that's what I need with Republicans. I need a chart that just shows this. Here's how many people are affected. Here's what happens when we put the money in here versus there. Look, you're going to save overall on the spending.
Right.
I mean, I certainly know of reasonable, level-headed Republicans who will listen to that. I also know that there are others who ideologically are just never going to get there.
Because the word "free"?
Right. Because the word free is attached. The word free is a funny thing. I feel very strongly about the word free. I don't want things attached to it. I don't want any of this other crap.
They need to hear it. They need to know that they will not be paying that cost. It's why advertising people and marketing people use this word all the time. That's how attractive it is. It gets something achieved that I think is so necessary. The question of what I can get achieved here is a question about building the biggest constituency that can accept it.
It'll happen when rural communities in particular start to understand that they're being locked out. When you start opening opportunities, and when the white working class begins to understand how much they stand to benefit here, and how screwed they would've been if we didn't make high school free. We'll get there.
We'll get there.