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
Our "Law and Order" Presidents
by Rick Perlstein
June 18, 2020
frank | What is your background and expertise in?
Rick Perlstein | I'm a historian and a journalist. I'm best known for a series of books on the history of the conservative takeover over of the Republican Party, and their success in changing the ideological composition of the United States. It started with Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, then Nixonland, and then the Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan came out in 2014. In August my book to complete the series, Reaganland, comes out.
My passion is informing people for critical citizenship, understanding how big public questions are asked and answered, and how those affect people's everyday lives.
The comparisons between Trump and Nixon as “Law and Order” presidents have never been more apparent.
I've been very fortunate in choosing the right topic.
You write that prior to Nixon, it wasn't really normal to use some of these tactics of anger and anxiety to garner power amongst your base. Can you talk a bit how Nixon weaponizes that?
I actually have extended my lens to think about these questions in the context of the entirety of American history.
We see it with the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, and certainly with the sectional crisis leading up to the Civil War.
It is important to set the stage to understand Nixon’s role. After World War II and the Depression, the country reset. The New Deal, as a response to The Great Depression, expanded the American state’s influence over people's lives and commerce for the first time. It established the state as a big power. American conservatism really became about stopping the growth of the state. In addition, following World War II, America enjoys some of the greatest prosperity of any society in the history of humanity. It built the first mass middle class. There was an idea that we had solved distribution of wealth, and conflicts between labor and capital, problems that had caused social catastrophes in other societies. Lyndon Johnson, when he signs the Voting Rights Act, basically said, the racial problem in America is over. His quote is, "Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds." People began to interpret this progress as the end of conflict in American life.
And that is the American consensus that I refer to in the subtitle of my first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and The Unmaking of the American Consensus. And those who dissented from that consensus were seen as irrelevant. That's how the Barry Goldwater book ends. People said the Republican party is in trouble, and that it might go away completely, unless it purges the conservatives.
But, long story short: riots break out in Watts in 1965. With that unrest as the backdrop, Richard Nixon begins his second run for the presidency. He was known as a statesman, a solid manager of the country. But he also had a history that was full of the politics of resentment and rage. He was an early red baiter. In 1968, he committed to the politics of fear, the politics of resentment, and the idea that liberalism causes disorder. Nixon, both in the way he ran in 68, and in the way he governed, promises that he was going to calm things down and lower the temperature.
What role do protests play in the campaign?
These riots broke out right after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. For the first time in two decades, an American city burns. It's very baffling to people, because again, the thought was that they had solved racial conflict.
It was huge for Nixon. Nixon said that the students against the Vietnam war, and the African Americans who were violently rioting and committing acts of civil disobedience were a threat to white America. White America needed to be “protected” from these people, and Nixon said that he was the one to do it. By the time the Republican convention rolls around, "law and order" is the big focus of his speech.
His galvanizing political commercial had one image of urban anarchy after another, with scary jarring music behind it. He sets the template for the next many decades, leading us to now where Conservatives still appeal to the electorate by saying that they are going to protect them from these fearful disorders. Democrats, with exceptions, become the party of liberalism in response. And both sides believe the other side is an existential threat to the country and the civilization as they understand it.
What about when he takes office?
When he takes office, one of the watershed moments of his presidency is this absolutely astonishing antiwar strike on October 15th, 1969. The Vietnam war was still going on and there was a lot of uproar about it. Enough uproar that two million people, many plain middle-class Americans in small towns, stay home from work or school on a Wednesday to protest the Vietnam war. And this is a terrifying thing because it makes that sort of insurgency a mainstream thing. It is seen as an enormous threat to Nixon. He was a guy who went absolutely apoplectic when he lost control.
In response, Nixon gave a speech on TV when he said the people who aren't protesting are the “great silent majority” of the country."
He was very good at manipulating base emotions, and people’s fear centers, especially on TV. But, the thing is, all of his addresses, both while campaigning and while governmening, remained quite coded. He never sounded uncivil. He never sounded explicitly racist. It used to be the tradition that when you wanted nasty things said, you said them through a surrogate, often a vice president. His VP, Agnew went around the country and gave a series of speeches in which he blamed everything that was going wrong on the liberal media, or on the unelected elitists.
Between Nixon, Reagan and Trump, there are more moderate republican politicians like Bush, Romney and McCain.
Fascinating transitional figures who navigate the politics of respectability very differently.
With conservatives prior to Donald Trump, there was this sense that lip service must be paid to the values of a liberal tolerant society. The searing lesson of World War II and the Holocaust, was that opening up Pandora's box through demagogic politics could lead to absolutely terrible, uncontrollable consequences. There is intense power to be derived by playing to the base instincts of the electorate, the darkest fear centers of people's minds, and the history of Republican conservatism is full of fascinating examples of this awareness.
When the first urban race riots broke out in the summer of 1964, right after the Republican convention, Barry Goldwater went to the White House and made a pact with Lyndon Johnson to not exploit the race riots for political gain. George W. Bush, for all the reactionary parts to his administration, also built a hard and fast wall against anti-Islamic sentiment. He would always say that Islam is a religion of peace. He was not constantly talking about the terror of “Sharia Law.”
But then, Donald Trump goes down the escalator and says, “Mexico is sending its rapists.” And suddenly we are playing a different game. Immediately afterwards, white supremacists are saying, we have one of our own running for president for the first time.
After Romney lost in 2012, Republicans – led by Reince Priebus, did an autopsy of sorts and concluded that the party needed to broaden – but the opposite happened.
Right. Republican electioneering becomes even more savage than it used to be. They have to squeeze out victories with smaller and smaller popular votes. They embraced systematic disenfranchisement, which has been going on since the 1960s, even more. That is when the pretending begins to disappear. They begin to let the demagogic wall fall.
A lot of conservative ire is pointed at liberal media institutions. How do you think a moment like this is effectively covered? Is there a boundary to the “both sides” argument? The Tom Cotton piece in the New York Times feels like a good example of this.
This is the paradox. Pieces like that are done in the name of respecting conservatism, to show conservatives that they're heard, that their way of seeing the world is included. That, in itself, is a liberal value.
In a lot of ways, conservative reactionary traditions revile pluralism. If you really respected the way conservatives saw the world, you wouldn't show your weakness by surrendering to them. No matter how much NPR or the New York Times bends over backwards to give so-called fair representation to conservatives, if there's a fascist takeover in America, they are still the first people who are going to be lined up against the wall and shot.
Liberals don't get that scientific procedural neutrality is not a universal value. Conservatives see civilization itself under threat, and the very values that we see as universal — pluralism, tolerance — are often weaponized by conservatives in order to undermine the political power of liberalism.
So, what now? Where do you think we go?
This seems to be the long-awaited inflection point. Mattis is signaling to generals to not to follow illegal orders. Across all towns in America, there are protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. There was an old slogan, in 1930s Weimar Germany, "socialism or barbarism." We seem to be on a razor's edge between falling into the abyss or saving our republic.
Where you think we are going depends on the person. I tend to be an optimist. I look at how cataclysms like the Depression created the modern American state, and World War II created the international order that has served the world. I see a possibility that this crisis could lead to some redemptive things.
Certainly this crisis is teaching us that a society that subscribes only to the marketplace, and leaves the technology of life and death to the company that makes the most profit, is absolutely at sea when it comes to an existential crisis. Hopefully at least that lesson takes.