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
What Positive Adaptation Looks Like
by Morgan Phillips
September 30, 2019
This interview between Dr. Morgan Phillips, the co-director of The Glacier Trust (TGT), and Meleah Moore, a volunteer for TGT, was edited and condensed by frank news.
Meleah: Hey Morgan. Can you introduce yourself and give us a run-down of your work with The Glacier Trust?
M: I am the Co-Director of the Glacier Trust, a small UK NGO based in London. We exist to enable climate change adaptation in Nepal, more specifically in the foothills of the Himalaya. And as well as enabling climate change adaptation we are increasingly trying to advocate for adaptation both in Nepal, and in the UK, and trying to get it up the agenda a little bit more. We know that people are adapting anyway, so The Glacier Trust focuses on encouraging adapting in mindful ways. And not causing more harm than good in the ways they are coping with climate change.
Meleah: Can you explain more of what you meant when you say that adaptation can be more harmful than good?
M: We are getting to the stage where people are consciously and unconsciously adapting to climate change. Sometimes it's really incremental and small adjustments to the way people live. There is always a danger that they’ll adapt in kind of a self-interested way, that they might end up doing things which are good for them, but have a knock-on impact on other people.
Meleah: Do you have an example of unmindful adaption?
M: In London in the summer we now get prolonged periods of very hot weather, and so the sale of air conditioning units and desk fans is going up, as people try to keep cool. That’s an example of a maladaptation. In running these appliances they are using more electricity, which is coming from fossil fuels, which is causing more climate change. We’re in danger of that happening on a mass scale if people aren’t aware of how they are adapting.
Meleah: So working against nature instead of with it. Is there an example you can think of specifically in an agricultural sense that would be maladaptation?
Yes, climate change makes it harder to farm, so one way to cope would be to say, well, let’s cut some corners. Examples would be farmers using inorganic farming methods or pursuing a high yield through using inorganic pesticides, chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
Meleah: Can you talk more about the specific agriculture-based adaptation methods that The Glacier Trust is supporting in Nepal?
There are lots of intersections going on in terms of the development agenda and poverty eradication - if people improve their livelihoods they become more resilient to climate change.
Our work enables agroforestry, which is working with farmers to grow different tree species in a layer-farming method that increases agricultural productivity. Coffee production, which is becoming more popular in Nepal, is a perfect example. Without a shade tree, like banana or moringa, there is a danger that the sun will be too direct or pests will have more access. So, in farmers learning these techniques, the coffee has a better chance of surviving.
Meleah: Coffee is largely grown in regions that are extremely climate vulnerable. Have you noticed any changes in the industry more globally?
Climate change is having an effect on coffee plantations all around the world, especially in zones of lower altitude where the heat of the sun is lasting longer or the monsoon pattern is changing. It’s also having an effect because of insect pests coming to destroy the crop. The crops are not as resilient as they once were.
However, at the same time, as more people enter the middle classes and have the means to start buying coffee, the demand for coffee is increasing. We’re seeing new areas like Nepal, where they can grow at high altitudes, beginning to fill the gap in the supply. In Nepal, only around 5% of the land which could be growing coffee, is growing coffee. So there is a huge potential to grow a lot of it.
Meleah: We’ve talked before about the true cost of a cup of coffee, but in places like America and the UK its still pretty cheap. I just bought a cup for $2.50 this morning. There is a whole chain of events, from picking, processing, transporting, roasting… that lead up to getting coffee into your cup. Couple that with climate change and shifting regions of production. Is there enough getting back to the farmers? Is it a sustainable way to earn a living?
M: Yea, it’s tricky. I mean one issue is that value is added to the coffee once it leaves the country of origin. The people who grow it don’t tend to make the big profit margins on it, that tends to happen once it’s been roasted, packaged and marketed. The knock-on effect is the “if” - if coffee farmers aren’t getting a good price for their coffee, they will just stop growing it. It won’t be valuable to them. We’ve seen in Nepal that there are coffee plants but no one is looking after them, or tending to them, or picking the coffee beans, because they’ve never seen a way to make money from it.
What we’ve been doing is to try to get the coffee roasted in Nepal so that the money from roasting stays in the country. We’d like to be able to increase that even further up the chain, so the farmers themselves are able to roast the coffee.
The exciting thing with coffee is that there are so many benefits. In a layer farming method, you’re also growing fruit and vegetables, which improve local diets and can be sold in local markets. So it has a triple-win effect. At a very local level the small areas in which the coffee is grown are noticeably cooler, and helps people deal with the heat. It’s a mitigation effect as well.
Meleah: What are the transfer ideas or methods from Nepal and from crop sharing that could work in countries like the UK or US, were it’s not necessarily a development effort but it does need to happen?
Adaptation would be descaling from these massive factory farms, which have enormous machinery, fertilizers, all that stuff. We need to peel that back if we’re going to be working more in harmony with the land. Which would be going, I don’t want to say back, but in the direction of what we see in Nepal. More hands on and more people working the land.
The interesting thing, which I’m exploring at the minute, it’s that it can be less about the farmers adapting to climate change, and more about them adapting to people's concern for the climate. I read the other day that some farmers started growing chickpeas in the UK for the first time. That’s a response to the increased demand for hummus as more people eat plant-based diets. It’s literally that. It’s an indirect adaptation to climate change, because they’re adapting to consumer preferences changing. Consumer preferences are changing because of our knowledge of climate change.
Meleah: I think that’s really interesting.
M: I think that is becoming a bigger, faster driver of change.
But we have to ask the question - are they growing those chickpeas in environmentally sensitive ways? Or are they just growing them as cheaply and efficiently as they can to service the demand?
M: I mean we see more vegan and plant-based options everywhere… Do you have Impossible burgers yet?.
Yeah, that’s happening for sure. There are vegan options everywhere and more importantly, the brands are talking about them, they’re advertising the fact they’ve got them. They’re not embarrassed about them. It’s being pushed and it must be having an effect on what farmers are doing. They will meet that demand.
You hear different stories on avocado sales and how that’s affecting farmers of the world who are growing avocados and cutting down a load of forest to get it done. This is again about having mindfulness in adaptation.
It’s a bit of a ...
Meleah: A double-edged sword
M: Yea there’s a disconnect there. It could all be a lot less harmful if they started to do things like the layer farming and agroforestry methods and not doing monocultures and so on.
Meleah: I think it’s really interesting to talk about adaptation in this everyday sense. I want to unpack the difference between adaptation and mitigation. What are your views on what adaptation can achieve and what kind of balance do we need between adaptation and mitigation?
M: That’s a nice small question (laughs).
I think about this a lot. I came into this job three years ago, not knowing very much about adaptation. I came from an environmental NGO perspective, and in the environmental sector it seemed to me that adaptation was almost a dirty word.
We’re acknowledging that, with the best intentions, the Paris agreement or anything else isn’t going to prevent 2 degrees of warming and that change is locked in. Adaptation is going to happen anyway. So if we’re not talking about, we have no control over how it’s going to happen. It could lead to dangerous outcomes for marginalized people who don’t have a strong enough voice to be able to make sure they’re not being screwed over by people's adaptation policies.
A project like agroforestry is adaption, but mitigation at the same time. Because if you plant more trees it’s going to absorb Co2 and help mitigate climate change, while also adapting to it. So they’re not separate in that sense - there are overlaps. It’s good to be trying to do both within a project.
Meleah: So breaking down some boundaries of solutions thinking.
Yeah, if you try to keep the strategies separate and reinforce two camps it’s dangerous.
You can see that happening in response to the Jonathan Franzen article in the New Yorker last week. Lots of people from the mitigation ‘camp’ really attacked the article, and it deserved attacking in some ways because there was a lot of sensationalism in it, but at the same time Franzen was realistically pointing out, in ways that David Wallace Wells or Jem Bendell or Extinction Rebellion in the UK have been pointing out, that the truth is we are in a much more perilous situation than the media commonly tells us.
Franzen was adding to that job of saying, things are really bad, worse than you think they are, and we’re going to have to adapt to them. But people don’t like to hear that. So you’ve ended up with this kind of divide happening. And that divide is really dangerous because we should be looking for overlaps.
Meleah: I like the overlap idea, the visual of that.
M: Yeah, I mean, it has historically been the case that we think of an environmental movement on one side and an international development movement on the other, and the international development movement has always been promoting adaptation as part of poverty eradication and equality work.
Meleah: I guess mitigation gets to a global level, the carbon-capture and geoengineering and so on, but adaptation seems a lot more localized, or individualized even.
M: The difficulty is we need huge amounts of mitigation as well. Every 0.1 of a degree of warming we can prevent, the better. But the reality is there is only a limited budget for spending on climate change and the balance of the money is still heavily weighted towards mitigation, grant funding and climate finance. You can make more money off of mitigation projects. And so the danger is a load of money is put out for mitigation in the hope that it prevents the need to adapt, but the reality is that people need to adapt already.
A lot of the technologies that are being invested in, large scale carbon storage and negative emissions technologies - we don’t know if they’re going to succeed anyway. So it’s a gamble to spend it all there. We need to spend more on both, that’s the reality of it.
Meleah: That’s very true.
M: Overall for me there’s still a need to shout from the rooftops about adaptation because it is in the shadow of mitigation. Still. Although, it’s starting to emerge. I think during the next big UN COP adaptation is going to be far higher up the agenda than it was previously. Sometimes I see adaptation related stories on the news, on the mainstream news - which it never was before. Really, it’s time. The environments that we care about are being attacked by climate change, the environment is attacking itself.
Meleh: Well that’s a really positive note to end on.
M: No, I do have hope! I do have hope. I think that I've found hope by seeing adaptation projects work. Because if we just leave communities to cope on their own, without any investment, then there will be social collapse. But there are adaptation strategies we can implement.
Meleah : You’re work in Nepal is completely that. It's so cool to see a community given the tools and resources to thrive and change their situation.
M: Yea, it’s really inspiring. That’s where I find hope - there are ways to cope.