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
The Right to Remain
by David Bacon
June 29, 2020
This interview with David Bacon, journalist and author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you start by talking about your background a bit?
David Bacon | I grew up in Oakland. The racial politics of my youth was centered around Black people and white people. Learning about how the imperial and racist history of this country affects African American people, Asian American people, and Latino people and their migration has been a lifelong learning experience for me. I say that because, I want to make sure that it's understood that I'm a learner, a lifelong learner.
In the 1970s, I was involved in the Delano grape strike - an effort by the workers in Central Valley. I would stand in front of Safeway and try to convince people not to buy grapes. After a while, I wanted to know more about what was going on behind the scenes. I convinced a friend of mine, a lawyer for the United Farm Workers Union, to let me volunteer in one of their offices. I began working at the union, on a ridiculous salary of $5 a week, taking statements from workers who were being fired or beaten up because of their union sympathies. I worked as a union organizer for about 20 years. As time went by, I became more and more drawn into documenting what I was seeing. So I made the transition to the work that I do now, and have done for the last 30 years, as a writer and a photographer.
I look at the process of migration from the perspective of those who are migrating. I ask: What uproots people and sets the process of migration into motion? What is the experience of traveling as a migrant? What happens to migrants once they reach the place they are going to?
How does your work with the unions inform your perspective of immigration?
The union was a school for me - it taught me Spanish, it taught me about organizing, it taught me about immigration. I’ll never forget how one evening, I was meeting with a group of date orchard workers at the union office. The next day, when I went out to talk to them again, they were being handcuffed and loaded into a green border patrol van. I was just floored by it. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stop it. I chased the van down to the Imperial Valley, trying to figure out how to help them. It was a very brutal learning experience, certainly more brutal for them than for me, but it also taught me something very important.
I've written a lot about the US immigration process over the years, and I have tried to put an analytical framework around the process. The framework I use is this: The penetration of capital from large wealthy industrial countries into developing countries, displaces people. Those who are uprooted then become the workforce of the countries that displaced them in the first place. It's a singular system. And it is a system that is motivated by producing economic results.
What is an example?
Well, there was an economic incentive in the process that made Walmart the largest employer in Mexico.
Mexico used to buy corn from small producers in states like Oaxaca to help those communities survive. They would then turn that corn into tortillas and sell them at state-run markets in the cities to help poor people.
That system became illegal under the rules of NAFTA. Walmart comes in as being the big retailer of tortillas in Mexico, and the tortillas are no longer made from Oaxacan corn, but corn imported from Iowa. What happens to the farmers who were previously supported by Mexico’s system? They become migrants. About a third of the agricultural workforce in California is made up of people coming from Oaxaca. The irony is that Oaxaca is the birthplace of domesticated corn -those farmers are coming from towns that gave corn to the world, but they can no longer grow it themselves, so they became migrants.
You have worked with migrants for many years. What has been the starkest example of change in the migration system?
The border has become much more militarized. Largely that is due to The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
Before ‘86, if a hot band was playing in Mexicali, workers from the Imperial Valley would cross the border, see the show, and go back across the border to sleep at the labor camps that they were living in. In many places, even now, the border consists of nothing. For all of Trump's talk about the border, the reality is that it is still hardly marked at all in some places, but the process of crossing has become much more difficult and much more expensive.
At the time that you were organizing within the Unions what was the perspective of the migrant on US immigration?
People generally looked at the United States as a place that they have to come to work.
The Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 was crucial in shaping this dynamic. Hundreds of thousands of people were recruited in Mexico, contracted a short period to work in the US, and then sent back to Mexico.
We still have programs that are very much like the Bracero program today, such as the H-2A. People have very conflicting feelings about those programs. On the one hand, people want to come here to work. They know the wages they can get here, and they see the programs as a possible way to get US jobs. On the other hand, people know that those programs do not offer you the ability to stay in the US permanently or the ability to bring your family to the US. We literally have thousands of migrants in California who live under trees, and I've talked to many of these folks. They often say, “Well, it's just for a while. I can put up with it for now while I send money home. In a way, it's better for me - if I don't have to pay rent, I can send more money home.”
How does that affect worker organizing?
That sentiment is very important to acknowledge in worker organizing. It means that migrants don’t have much to lose, but they don't have much to gain either. If somebody comes to them and says, let's go on strike here because the wages are too low, they may not be willing to risk their job if they know they are only in the US temporarily. The more someone lives here, as they start to pay rent, as they start a family, the more they come to think of themselves as part of the community. They have a greater stake in trying to change things.
What is interesting is that very often people come to the US with a lot of organizing skills. I remember one man spoke to me about how his father had participated in land reform struggles in Baja, California. He burned down the mansion of the Hacienda owner and redistributed the land in this worker's upsurge. Migrants come with organizing skills. If you can combine those skills with a stake in labor conditions, change can be explosive. We are seeing the results of that in California and in Washington right now.
And how does the opposite work? How do anti-union and anti-immigration sentiments work in tandem?
There are many mechanisms by which this happens.
The most obvious is that people come here without papers. Out of a workforce of about 2.5 million farmworkers, 1.25 million of those folks have no papers. They don't have permission to work, and the employers or labor contractors who hire them, generally speaking, know this. They exploit this vulnerability and to keep wages low. They tell workers, explicitly or implicitly, if you stir up trouble, you can be deported.
Under the Employer Sanctions in our immigration law, it is illegal for an employer to hire undocumented workers. Employers who are facing an organizing effort by their workers can say, “We've discovered that you don't have any papers. We're not legally able to keep you. You're fired.” Sometimes immigration authorities will initiate that vetting, but sometimes not. In theory, employers should be punished and fined because of who they are hiring, but that seldom happens. It is the workers themselves who pay the price and lose their jobs.
The guest worker programs also have adverse effects on migrant workers' rights. Through these programs, employers can hire foreign workers on temporary visas. The migrant’s visa, and their right to be in the US, is dependent on the job. Through the H-2A program, which is specifically for temporary agricultural work, about 250,000 people, mostly from Mexico, are recruited. A report recently came out about this program. Every single worker interviewed spoke about the abuse of their labor rights, and sometimes these violations were egregious. The precarious nature of workers on these programs results in workers who can’t afford to complain.
The mechanisms differ, but the results remain the same.
A lot of people think about immigration through this lens of sort of opportunity. How would you encourage a reframing of our current view on immigration?
Well, we need a reality check.
There are 40 million people in the United States who were born somewhere else. Why do people come here to begin with? The decision to migrate, often, is not a voluntary one, it is a survival tactic.
We have to look at our own responsibility for that. What kind of policy does the US government pursue in other countries that lead to the displacement of people? We have to look at trade policy. We have to look at NAFTA.
I think that a lot of people do get that that NAFTA hurt people. They often think of it in terms of how NAFTA hurt us, because jobs went south. But people here also, in many cases, are able to think about its impact in other countries and the way in which policies have displaced people too.
This movement of people and this process of displacement between the US and Mexico is not going to stop. You can build as many walls as you like, but it's not going to stop people from coming here. The things that are pushing people are to migrate much stronger than a wall. The need to survive is stronger than a wall. The desire to reunite the family is stronger than a wall.
Given that this movement of people is not going to stop, what do we want our immigration policies to do? Do we want them to make people more or less vulnerable? For working people, it is advantageous to fight to make migrants less vulnerable. If migrants do not have rights, it affects the entire workforce. If you want to organize a union in your workplace, and people are working in your workplace are terrified, and unwilling to be part of that process, that's going to hurt the worker. It makes it harder for the worker.
What sort of policy prescription or framework would you suggest?
We have to find where we have common ground: Where does an unemployed Black person in the US find common ground with a Mexican immigrant?
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee tried to find it in, what I think, was a really effective policy proposal. About a decade ago, she proposed an immigration bill that simultaneously considered both of those groups.
She proposed a legalization program for people who were currently undocumented here, and, at the same time, new jobs creation programs for people living in communities of high unemployment. Who pays for it? Employers who benefit from the immigration system. All of a sudden, you have both interest groups advocating for the same immigration bill, because both people stand to benefit from it. Instead of pitting people against each other in a competition for scarce jobs, we need to unite to garner political power.
How do we look across the obvious dividing lines here and recognize people as people on each side? And not just from a moral point of view, but so we can mutually advance our material interests.
We also have to address voter disenfranchisement. A huge percentage of the working population cannot vote or elect people. If they were not disenfranchised due to their immigration status, maybe we would have more worker-friendly policies. We should look past what's often presented as a moral question “Why should those people be able to vote?”, and ask, “How will we benefit as working people?” If everybody who worked had the right to vote, then we would be able to change politics much, much more easily.
I think the conversation has found some new urgency amid the Coronavirus pandemic because we have had to look clearly at who our essential workers are, and how they’ve been treated or mistreated.
Yes. We're in the process of unpacking that. Essential means yes, your labor is necessary, but essential also means that you can't say no.
So on one hand, we are acknowledging that picking fruits and vegetables, working in meatpacking plants, or working in hospitals is socially necessary work. We are recognizing that we need to value that work and the people who are doing it.
On the other hand, essential is also being used by the administration and by employers as a way of saying your work is essential, and therefore you may not withhold it. You must go to work regardless of what the risks are. We are getting a good education about what actually happens to these essential workers as a result of their immigration status, their poverty, and their lack of rights as workers. We can look at the meatpacking plants. People are being forced into working, with the knowledge that a percentage of them are going to get sick and die. That gets underlined when they passed the relief bills. Not only did people who were undocumented not get relief money, but anyone who was married to somebody who was undocumented or did not get the $1,200 in relief payments. That removed any kind of support that might enable people to decide whether or not they want to work tomorrow.
That this is not lost on people. I've interviewed a lot of farmworkers who say, "This is really a slap in the face. First, you call us essential. You tell us how important this work is. You come outside and eight o'clock in the evening and you clap your hands for us. And yet what does that do for us? We're working the same job, with the same low wage as before, and now we have no choice but to go to work.”
Are you hopeful for meaningful change past this sort of rhetoric?
In the end, I think I am an optimistic person. There have been a series of strikes where immigrants are demanding better protective equipment, demanding social distancing to be put into place, and demanding hazard pay.
One result of the pandemic is that people are being forced to look at their situation and determine how far they are willing to go. Previously, it was a question of whether you were willing to risk your job for a wage raise. Now it is a matter of survival. When the threat is death, the question has become - How can we afford to not take action?
A heavy realization.
A heavy realization, but it produces activity. Crisis teaches people something. I think change is coming. How? I'm not sure. I can't predict the future, but I can see it coming. You feel the rumbling under your feet, right?