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
On Disciplining The Poor
by Sanford Schram
July 20, 2020
This interview with Sanford Schram, professor of political science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Sanford Schram | My name is Sanford Schram. I focus on American politics and public policy, particularly regarding the politics of policies that affect people in subordinate positions in our society, especially as stratified by issues of class, race, and gender.
frank | Can you explain poverty governance?
I write about this a lot in our book, Disciplining the Poor. Poverty governance is a question of state management of the poor. Social welfare policy in the United States has historically been not about helping the poor, but managing them.
And less about eradicating poverty.
The US government periodically has said that it wants to abolish poverty, but it really never does much to pursue that goal. Instead, most money goes towards disciplining the poor and getting them to be compliant with standard norms of work and family, so as to make them less of a threat to the established order. When they fail to adhere to that order, the government punishes them.
Over time, especially over the last 30 years, social policy has become more aligned with criminal justice policy. Historically they were seen as at opposite ends of the continuum - as the left and right hands of the state. Social policy is theoretically seen as more maternalistic and caring, while criminal justice is more paternalistic and punitive. Over time, however, I think they've become integrated.
TWO LATIN GIRLS POSE IN FRONT OF A WALL OF GRAFFITI IN LYNCH PARK IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY, THIS PROJECT IS A PORTRAIT OF THE INNER CITY ENVIRONMENT, IT CONTAINS LIFE, GREAT MURALS ON THE WALLS OF BUILDINGS AND PEOPLE ENJOYING THEMSELVES, TODAY’S INNER CITY IS A CONTRADICTION TO MAIN STREAM AMERICA’S GAS STATIONS EXPRESSWAYS SHOPPING CENTERS AND TRACT HOMES, BLACKS, LATINS, AND POOR WHITES LIVE THERE. - NATIONAL ARCHIVES
When did you see that integration start to really take place?
Well, that's an interesting debate that people have. Some people argue that it begins with the War on Poverty, ironically, in the sixties. When Johnson decided to pick up the challenge of addressing poverty that had been left to Kennedy, he declared a war on poverty. There were a lot of initiatives to try and help people at the bottom of the socioeconomic order, but he also started to pour more money into criminal justice, policing in particular. We started to see the rise of mass incarceration, even in the early 1970s. And then you get the famous 1994 Crime Bill where Clinton, another Democrat, feels obligated to say that in exchange for helping the poor, we are also going to discipline them. I think that the two, social policy and criminal justice, have been hand and glove.
Do you think that convergence is understood?
No, not widely.
The public tends to hold contradictory views about what the government should be doing to help low-income individuals and families. According to the polls, most people feel that the government doesn't help the poor enough and that we should be way more generous. On the other hand, people tend to believe that only those who are trying to be self-sufficient through paid employment are deserving of help. They want to help them more, but only if they play by the rules. And of course, a lot of people on the bottom really can't afford the play by the rules.
For example, if you want to have a family, very often, you have to do it outside of marriage. Or if you want a decent paying job, you often have to work off the books. So right there work and family are being “violated” from the very beginning. It is out of necessity, given how we've structured our society so that a lot of people live in the shadow of the legitimate economy, culture, society. And then the state deems them to not be seen as deserving of the generosity that people claim they want to heap on them.
How does paternalism play a role?
Paternalism is very much in play here in a contradictory way. At one level paternalistic behavior means the patriarch dictates what should be done. The state often takes on that role when families or individuals don't conform to the standards of society. That's the negative side of paternalism. The positive side is that the patriarch wants to do this in the name of tough love, or caring for people so that they'll do what's right. A lot of charity, for instance, I think is caught up in this contradiction between the negative and positive pulls of paternalism. A lot of charity is conducted by people of privilege who have resources to help uplift those in their community, or around the world, to better comply with the standards that they have.
You speak of a new wave of neoliberal paternalism. How do you feel like this differs from other modes of paternalism?
After I wrote Disciplining The Poor, I wrote The Return of Ordinary Capitalism, where I discuss the idea of neoliberalism in more depth – and the role of corporations in particular - and the idea of uplifting the poor.
Neoliberal paternalism often involves the private sector - economic actors are incentivized to try and get involved in helping those on the bottom and promote the collective wellbeing of society overall. Once the private sector and the public sector boundaries are blurred, paternalism can take many different forms. It often takes the form of charity. It can also take the form of corporate social responsibility, as they call it, where corporations don't just try to make money but try to do so in a way that engages and uplifts the poor. It can take the form of taking on state responsibilities through privatization or contracting out.
It involves getting the state enlisting market actors to try and create a public good, but to create it according to the market logic that they are most accustomed to pursuing. The risk of trying to fulfill a public purpose by private means, according to private logic, is that that can often lead to people trying to make money off these endeavors and defeat the public purpose of it all in the end.
PUERTO RICAN BOY PLAYING BALL IN HILAND PARK OF BROOKLYN NEW YORK CITY. THE INNER CITY TODAY IS AN ABSOLUTE CONTRADICTION TO THE MAIN STREAM AMERICA OF GAS STATIONS, EXPRESSWAYS, SHOPPING CENTERS AND TRACT HOMES. IT IS POPULATED BY BLACKS, LATINS AND THE WHITE POOR. THIS PROJECT IS A PORTRAIT OF THE INNER CITY ENVIRONMENT IT CONTAINS ARCHITECTURE AND THE RESIDENTS ENJOYING THEMSELVES - NATIONAL ARCHIVES
That feels like a really easy way to distract a lot of people at once. Corporate entities that can afford the PR to be constantly in our face, who are in our face anyways, taking on social issues.
Distraction is an interesting term. It’s not only distracting but it also obscures public initiatives.
Torture is an extreme example of this. At one point in the War On Terror, we found out that the RAND corporation and other actors were involved in the torture program of the Bush administration. And we wanted to know more about it and they say, well, you can't, that is proprietary information of our corporation, and we're not allowed to share trade secrets with you. They say this even though they were torturing our enemy combatants, as they were called, in our name.
A more moderate example is when the government contracts for-profit providers for welfare to work programs. There’s the risk that they'll just funnel a bunch of people into dead-end jobs so that they can make money as cheaply as possible while claiming to fulfill the objective of helping poor people become self-sufficient and take personal responsibility. There is also the risk that they will do it in a way where we don't know what they're actually doing. They fudge their books, their bookkeeping is suspect, we have to sue them sometimes, some people go to jail for the fraud that's committed in these operations. Neoliberalism blurs the boundary between the market and the state, and there are many challenges associated with that. One of them is that it obscures public activity by sheltering it in the private sector so that we don't really know what's going on.
Military contracting certainly feels like a deliberate effort in obscuring. Do you think the state using corporations to support domestic social issues is an intentional choice, made specifically to hide information?
We wrote a book that comes out this week, entitled Hard White, the Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics. In it, we argue that elites have been stoking what we call out-group hostility in the mass. They do so in order to put someone like Trump in office so that they continue to get their tax cuts by claiming that they're going to stand up for white people and assuage their anxiety, the anxiety that they helped agitate.
The question there is, what's the intention? Are they just cynically trying to manipulate people, or are they true believers? Are they mobilizing people because they feel there is a real need to be concerned about immigrants or people on the bottom of the socioeconomic order, those who are seen as a threat to the established way of life, a threat to white middle-class people? We don't really know.
The same question exists about social welfare programs. Did the government make the welfare reform bill in 1996, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, intentionally so complicated that we can't understand it still all these years later? Did they make it harder for people to get assistance intentionally? Maybe. Did they make it complicated because they didn't really care about poor people and whether they would be able to get assistance? Maybe. Or is it just complicated because they are legitimately concerned about making sure nobody gets benefits when they don't deserve them? We don't really know.
I don't think they know, they just did it. We'd have to ask them, but they don't like to talk to us.
When you say elites, who do you mean?
There are multiple ways of understanding the elite.
Some see the relationship between the elite and the masses as largely top-down with the elites cynically stoking out-group hostility. Richard Fording and I argue that there is a dialectical relationship between the elites and mass reflective of the power dynamics implicit in their relationship. We think that while the elite stoke fear among the mass, the elites are also responding to the mass and the mass’ growing anxieties.
Trump is very racist, but you kind of get the feeling that he feels obligated because that's the base he ended up getting, and he can't betray them. He wants to always stay popular with them. So he keeps going back to the well of racism to stay popular, which he might not do if they weren't so racist. It’s kind of like a death spiral that's occurring in the United States and in other parts of the world. The elite feel obligated to throw more red meat to the mass that wants it.
Do you think discomfort with poor people is uniquely American?
It certainly relates to this idea about American exceptionalism, which for a long time held that the United States is this special, different, better city on the Hill. Of course, historians have spent decades pointing out that that's a crock. The United States is not a special, different city on the hill. And in fact, if we are special and different, it’s in negative ways, it’s because of the legacy of slavery. We need to appreciate how that history is distinctive to the United States, and how that might encourage the United States then to be more reluctant to talk about class differences in inequality and the subordination of the poor, because it's often so often racialized, and becomes all the more fraught.
And of course, one of the reasons social welfare has worked better in European countries than here was race. We are racially divided and white people were and are more reluctant to want to give their resources to other non-white people. The racialization of welfare politics is an ongoing struggle in the United States and really has held us back.
Europe had a set of racial relations, a different set of politics, and a different set of state market relations that enabled European countries to have something closer to a social democracy. It gave them a more robust welfare state based on a stronger sense of inclusion and made them more willing to focus on poverty reduction. Now that immigration is becoming a big issue in Europe, there have been fractures in that line of thinking, and you start to see the Americanization of the welfare state in Europe. If it keeps up, there is not going to be much of a difference.
YOUNGSTERS ON THE JULY 4TH HOLIDAY AT THE KOSCIUSKO SWIMMING POOL IN BROOKLYN'S BEDFORD-STUYVESANT DISTRICT, NEW YORK CITY. INNER CITY RESIDENTS ENJOY USING THIS INTELLIGENTLY LOCATED POOL. THE INNER CITY TODAY IS AN ABSOLUTE CONTRADICTION TO THE MAIN STREAM AMERICA OF GAS STATIONS, EXPRESSWAYS, SHOPPING CENTERS AND TRACT HOMES. IT IS POPULATED BY BLACKS, LATINS AND THE WHITE POOR. - NATIONAL ARCHIVES
We tend to tie poverty to morality, rooted in this white Protestant culture. Do you think this makes poverty more difficult to discuss or solve? When dictating a sense of morals to the oppressed controls the conversation?
Well, no, it's a great question. All these countries have morals and values, they are just a bit different. And we get our Christianity, our Protestantism, the Protestant work ethic, and notions of personal responsibility from Europe.
But I think our morals are so hard and fast. As in, if you don't play by the rules, we'll put you in jail or we will cut you off with no benefits and you'll have to go beg for charity at the homeless shelter or the food pantry. European countries are actually more moralistic in the sense that they feel a greater sense of social obligation than we do. We have a more hellfire and brimstone approach to morals, in a way that I personally consider to be immoral. The right in the United States has kidnapped the idea of morality and made it its own, and everything else is immoral.
The hypocrisy is so obvious on the right, but do you feel like the left has also adopted an aggressive moral code and hierarchy recently?
So, I wasn't asked to sign “the letter”, but I would have signed it. I talked to several people who did sign. Of course, they are all over 75 years of age - I have to keep reminding myself that I am old - but the old left, we used to be the new left, is concerned about this.
Take David Shor. David Shor shared a paper by Omar Wassow at Princeton, showing that rioting works best when it's nonviolent.
He was fired based on the idea that what he was sharing was criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. I knew about the Wassow article before it was published in the APSR. I thought his research was really interesting, not that I necessarily agree with everything in it, but I shared it with people the same week that David Shor shared it and was fired. So I’m like, Oh man, I almost lost my job. What's going on here? The young people are going to come and take away my job because I shared the Omar Wassow article with people!
Like what's wrong with the left? We're supposed to hide good research because it might complicate how we think about Black Lives Matter? My God. I would have signed the letter for that reason alone.
Race relations can be very fraught, and the only thing you can do is be honest about it and try to work through it. Like, I haven't thought of everything. I have bought into the culture unreflectively. I have reproduced patriarchy. But we have to deal with it, instead of, especially in a cancel culture, just calling someone out, we have to open it up somehow. So yeah, I would have signed the letter.