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
Poverty and Mental Illness
by Annie Harper
February 29, 2020
This conversation with Dr. Annie Harper was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Dr. Harper has a PhD from Yale University in cultural anthropology. She conducts research on how vulnerable populations, particularly low income people with mental illness, cope with poverty and financial difficulties, and how to support them in this area. She is particularly interested in understanding how the financial services and retail industries could better serve low income people generally, and people with mental illness in particular.
DR. HARPER | Just so you know from the outset, I'm not a mental health provider. I don't have any health care qualifications. I'm a cultural anthropologist. I study individuals and how individuals connect with wider systems, and I also study poverty. I study poverty, finance and banking in particular. I mostly do research on how that relates to mental health, as well as some financial counseling with individuals. But I don't sit in a mental health setting and provide mental health care to individuals. Just so you know.
frank | Yes.
So I can't really speak from that perspective, but I do work with people who do that.
What does your research focus on most closely?
I very much focus on people who don't have much money.
What I've tried to understand in my research, particularly for people who have mental illness and are poor, what type of financial problems do they have, which are the most pressing, which problems bother them most? What are the root causes of those financial problems? Is it mental health symptoms? Is it the fact they don't have enough money? Is it that the banking industry doesn't serve them? Is it that the disability benefit system doesn't work properly? Or even some combination of all those things. Then I try to understand what kind of strategies people use to get over the challenges they have, and then I try to understand what our mental health system currently offers people who have financial difficulties, as well as mental illness.
What are some of the broad conclusions of the work? It seems to me from the outside, that it's a combination of factors that keep people poor and sick. What do you see?
Yeah, absolutely. It is a combination. One of the main findings of my research that I think is particularly important and I like to get out there, is that when somebody has a mental illness and is poor, most of the support they get is channeled through the frame of mental illness. We tend to interpret their financial difficulties as a mental health problem.
That has been a big finding, in that if we can address financial issues that poor people have, generally, we'll be going a long way to helping people with mental illness be more financially healthy.
That's really interesting.
That's been a big finding. Then a second piece is recognizing that when you're on disability benefits, it's great because you have a secure source of income, but it's terrible because of the ways policies limit people's ability to be financially healthy. There's a whole set of government policy around disability benefits that make it really hard for people to do the right thing financially.
The third problem is that when people do have specific mental health related financial problems, whether that's over spending, being exploited, things that happen to people who are particularly vulnerable, we don't have good systems to deal with that, and the banking industry in particular is really unhelpful in that regard. Those are the three buckets. People are poor, that's a problem. Disability benefit policies are a problem, and we don't have good systems to help people who do need help with their money.
Within the second bucket, disability benefits that are problematic, what are some examples of that?
The main problems are related to income and asset earning limits.
Particularly for people on SSI, which is supplemental security income, it's what you get if you don't really have much of a work history, it's very low income in the first place, around $750 a month, then if you earn more than $20 a month, you then begin to lose 50 cents of SSI for every dollar that you make from work. For people who are already very poor, but may have the capacity to work for a few hours a week, that rule really, really puts them off taking the steps into the workforce that they might want to take, and the steps into the workforce that might be really good for their mental health recovery.
The second piece of that is the asset limits, which says that people on that particular benefit, if they have more than $2,000 in assets for any period of time that they have those assets, whether it’s money in the bank or other assets (with certain exclusions) they are not eligible for those benefits. People unwittingly sometimes go over that asset limit and then have to repay social security for any SSI they received during a periodin which they weren't eligible. I will just say here, it gets really complicated, really quickly as you can probably tell. Which is part of the problem because the problem isn't just the income earning and asset limits. It's the incredibly complicated rules and bureaucracy that you have to navigate when you're in that situation.
What would help? What policies work?
This really is fixable. Without mentioning any names, more than one of our current contenders for the democratic nomination have excellent policies to address it. The best policies out there are really around increasing those limits. They still have their set limits but rather than being able to have assets of up to $2000 you should be able to have access of up to $10,000, and rather than cutting off somebody's supplemental security income at $20 of earnings, you should allow some hundreds of dollars of earnings.
Then we can talk about ways to entirely reform the system around employment. There are larger conversations to be had about things like universal basic income, which I have concerns about that frankly, but there are things that are probably not realistic in the short run but that we need to think about in the long run.
What does your research show in regards to people getting out of poverty with mental health issues?
If you can alleviate poverty, generally it will take care of many of the problems that people with mental illness have. So generally, we need a higher minimum wage and more regulations and rules around job security. Better labor laws, more available, affordable housing, all of those things that are good against poverty generally will improve the situation of people who are poor and have mental illness. Particularly for mental illness I think recognizing that just because someone has a mental illness doesn't mean they can't work or they can't contribute productively to society.
The most effective way that we can help people with their financial management problem, is to have a system that recognizes most people are somewhere in between those two extremes, whether or not they have mental illness.
In listening to all this, there’s a clear focus on policy. Outside of politics, what else is there to do? Are there solutions to be found in and out of bureaucracy? What about cultural responses?
That's a great question. And it's something that I grapple with all the time. I really try and keep my eye and my attention and my research on the systems, structures, policies, because I think we do too much in the other direction. We put a lot of focus on individual recovery and individual empowerment, individual financial literacy, individual X, Y, Z. I tend to focus my research away from that. But that doesn't mean that it's not important. We might be able to change a policy in five years, but in the meantime people need to live the best life they can live.
I think there are some things you can do. We have, thank goodness here in New Haven, recently managed to get funding for, and now have a financial counseling center free for residents. There's a place where anyone can go mental illness or other or not, and just get advice about their finances. I mean, that's a systems change thing but it's available, it's targeting individuals. Helping individuals understand what their financial decisions are, helping them towards their financial goals, helping understand their debt and manage it.
I think that's important. Making sure individuals don't just have access to good mental health services, but also have access to good financial advice services. Culturally you mentioned, that's a big thing. There's so much shame and stigma around financial failure. People are sometimes more willing to talk about their psychosis or their schizophrenia than they are about their debt.
Right.
For me, that's something I think we all need to be thinking about.
We have a societal level problem with debt and the more we talk about it and acknowledge it and talk about our difficulties and our solutions, the more we all learn about how it can be different.
Right. Do you feel like poverty is politicized? Can bills around the issue be bipartisan?
It's actually a great question because the area where I work, with financial management, depending on how you frame it can be entirely bi-partisan. The idea that we all need access to good financial services to be able to make the best financial decisions about our spending, about our investments, et cetera, et cetera. The importance of access to good education and of being educated about your financial options so you can be responsible are things that people would tend to agree on.
I think where it tends to diverge is in the area of individual responsibility. Some people would argue that in order to change the situation, we really need to emphasize individual responsibility. We need to provide more education and training so that people don’t make such bad spending decisions. Where I would fall in a slightly different place in that, I believe individual responsibility matters, but individuals are also facing a set of decisions that are shaped by systems beyond their control.
When we focus excessively, in my opinion on individual responsibility and then when people fail to do well, our assumption, if they have mental illness, is they don't have the capacity to be responsible. So we have to remove control from them. And that for me is a big problem. When we think that people aren't responsible and they have a mental illness, we basically take away control from them through either assigning a representative pay or conservator.
That's a really clear way of phrasing it. Mental health and self care have become so forward facing. But it can also feel like a privileged person's game.
Yeah, absolutely.
What are the arguments you found effective in terms of discussing the limits of personal responsibility?
It always surprises me just how much that argument needs to be made over and over again in different ways. It's either because I'm wrong or because it's so ingrained that it's super hard to get people to see something differently.
You can talk about race, right? You can talk to someone about income inequality and wellness equality in the country and they'll just say, "yeah, well these people work harder than these people". But when you add the racial dimension – racial income inequality is horrendous. Racial wealth inequality is just, I mean, it's almost unbelievable how large it is. There's few people who would acknowledge and I think actually believe that there's something about people of color, which makes them work less hard.
Right.
That narrative certainly still exists in the country, but I think it's much, much less powerful than it was. How can you expect somebody who's started off from a position of so much less wealth and take that back through history and explain why people of color have much lower wealth. How can we imagine that an individual starting in that position has the same opportunity as the person who doesn't?
Right.
And then you acknowledge continued racism today, the fact that people who have black sounding names are less likely to get jobs than people with the same qualifications with white sounding names. There's tons of research that shows that racism still exists. I think that argument can help people understand the limits of what individuals can do. Because it's so obvious that there's nothing about race that shapes, you know what I mean? That's not about people working hard or not working hard. It's about systems and cultural norms that keep certain people back and let other people ahead.
You always want to point to the non-anecdotal information.
Oh yeah. Because people will always point to the black millionaire.
Right.
And say “Well that can't be true because this person managed to be successful”.
Right.
But I think that's where looking at aggregate data really matters and there's such a wealth of great data, of really fantastic visuals, that help people understand the extent to which inequality is foundational, the foundations of inequality in this country and why we need to change things on a systemic level rather than expecting individuals to continue pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Where would I find that information?
It's Pew, P-E-W charitable trust. They have some great charts and stuff based on research they've done. There's also EPI Economic Policy Institute. They have some really fantastic charts. You could just kind of scroll through the website and find charts that visually represent what I'm talking about.
Those would be two good places to start.
Do you think you have to have a conversation about the limits of personal responsibility repeatedly because thinking anything else negates the ‘American Dream’?
Absolutely.
You’re British. If you zoom out can you see clarity in this issue?
Yes. Obviously this is a particularly American process and I'm not sure that I'm best placed to actually be an effective communicator in that regard because althoughI am actually American, my mom's American, but I was raised in the UK, so I was raised in a different cultural context. Sometimes I just feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall like, "why don't you see this"? And that's totally unhelpful. Especially because I'm also a Yale academic.
Right.
So many probably thinkt she's just a foreigner, who's an academic and doesn't get the real world. I think what is helpful is to maybe talk about the enabling context. That all of this is about empowering people to be who they can be, and that it's not taking away individual agency. It's providing the conditions for people to live in so that they can flourish as individuals and you know, pursue their dreams and fulfill their potential.
I'm not very good at making that argument, but I think that's what I need to actually get better at.
It’s easy to get tongue tied in that explanation. My parents are immigrants, I can easily say, "look what they could accomplish, how uniquely American. How exciting". But there’s so much more. So many layers of why.
I think what you said is important because one of the things I'm starting to do more and more when we talk about poverty, when we talk about people who are vulnerable, and I'm guilty of this as anyone, we tend to focus on understanding their lives. I spent a lot of my time doing qualitative research with people who are poor and have mental illness, who've been in prison and understanding the trajectory of their lives and how it's been so hard for them to get ahead, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
In fact just when you called, I'm working on this article about people who've had mental illness and have been in prison and their debt. It's all of these sad stories about the multiple barriers that people face.
What we don't do enough of is getting similar narratives from people who've had privilege, had opportunity. I'm experimenting with telling my own story or the stories of people who live in my neighborhood. I was able to do a PhD because I didn't have any student loan debt, and I got into Yale because I went to a good university before that, and Yale is rich so they paid for me, and then I was able to buy a house without any savings because my dad helped me with the down payment. The trajectory of people with privilege helps us understand that my success is not just because I worked hard.
Yes.
I had the support in place to enable me to work hard and to make the decisions I made, and I think we need to be doing more of that. Rather than just getting endless narratives of people who are struggling, getting narratives of people who aren't, to get a better sense of what was it beyond their individual hard work that helped them get to where they are.
I think about that all the time. What luck.