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 Role of the Alternative
by Mike Elk and Clarissa Leon
February 25, 2021
This interview with Mike Elk and Clarissa Leon of Payday Report, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Mike | We both come out of the alternative media world. Clarissa and I both have non-traditional media backgrounds. We both got our start in The Nation. Clarissa has worked at various places like the Daily Beast, some other groups in New York, and got her MFA.
One day, Politico reached out to me and said, how would you like to found our labor desk and make all this money? And I said, this is crazy. I don't know how I'm going to pay my rent this month, and you're offering me a $25,000 raise.
So I founded the labor desk at Politico. My thought was I would be there for a year or two, put Politico on my resume, and then I would be mainstream. Though my background isn't mainstream. My father was a union rep, and my grandparents were blacklisted. My family fought McCarthyism and the mob at the same time in organized labor. That is the background that I come out of. As a young kid, I started writing about unions for the union newsletter when I was 15, I grew up reading The Nation and other publications like that, so I have always viewed corporate media as part of the problem.
frank | Do you still view it as part of the problem?
Mike | Well, it was interesting to go to a world where they rent the Italian embassy for the Christmas party. It was like, wow, this party is probably the budget of most small publications on the left.
But what wound up happening was I was illegally fired and I won a big settlement, seventy thousand dollars. A buddy of mine who was also autistic, came to me and said I'll set up a website for you — why don't you see how much money you can bring doing your own newsletter? This was five years ago now. I like to joke Payday is just now going off to kindergarten.
I am really proud of the work that we are able to do. I don't know if you saw the Ben Smith story in the New York Times about how we exposed cover-up for sexual misconduct in our union, NewsGuild.
We made a tough call to not name the women who came forward, which I was nervous about. I felt confident that we would publish this story without having to name the women. I had spoken to five women who all knew the same story. Every reporter in town knew that story. There were things we knew were facts, so why should any women have to be named? Many of them had gone onto other parts of their career. Some had quite high-profile jobs. Some had kids. I remember thinking if I was at The Guardian or Politico, and I had tried to walk in the room saying let's do a story on sexual misconduct without naming names, they would absolutely have said no.
But who cares? We were above the liable bar.
Can you cover what you know to be true without overtly verifying that truth?
Mike | Well, there's an insecurity in the left press about this. The left press is always struggling to assert its legitimacy. When I worked at In These Times they would make us over source things to the point that it weighed down the story, in my opinion. At Politico, they were like, “Fuck it. Run with that source. We are Politico.”
Now, what do you cover at Payday Report?
Mike | The goal of Payday is to cover labor in news deserts. We focus on the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and the South. We also cover deserts in the sense that we cover stories others are not covering – things like sexual assaults in unions, and intersectionality among unions, which I think the left press does a really bad job of covering. I think the left press does a bad job talking about race in general. I went to a majority Black high school and when I hear these people talk about race, I'm like, you've never had any Black friends in your life.
These white academic types, these Jacobin types, have this class reductionism that says, "Let's not divide people on race. Let's avoid that." I'm like, I don't know, if you call somebody the n-word, there is no dancing around that. Sure, class issues will help simmer the tension a little bit, but it avoids the big conversation. Jacobin, at one point, wouldn't allow the word intersectionality to be used in the publication. They discard it as identity politics.
When we came out with our Strike Tracking Map we got in trouble with these types. There were several cities that decided to do things like a general strike after George Floyd was murdered. Black Lives Matter Seattle held a general strike, and 250 businesses shut down. The pushback we got was that organizing around it is so terrible because it can be co-opted. I mean, these people just don't understand how to organize.
Look at the stats. African-Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to be supportive of unions. Why? Because African-Americans aren't under the illusion about who the bosses are.
Whereas, Black folks know who has the power. The same goes for other minority groups, the same goes for women. It also really upsets me as an autistic person, a lefty will make fun of someone who is autistic the same as a right-winger. A right-winger might even be nicer and offer to pray for you or some crap.
This whole idea of class reductionism hurts the left a lot.
And they all live in these big cities. They live in Brooklyn. They live in Philly. They live in LA. They live in San Francisco. They live in DC.
Clarissa | I would just add that it is not only how we're writing the stories, but in which stories we chose to cover in particular. We do have some added advantages in that I speak Spanish. And Mike has a long history with some of the unions in the South here. We have the ability to talk to the people on the ground, instead of hypothesizing about these things.
Do you see a link between media coverage of class and how class-oriented legislation gets viewed by the public?
Mike | Well, certainly. I've worked at The Guardian for a couple of years. The Guardian is interested in covering Amazon. They're interested in covering Uber. They are interested in covering these big tech companies because of the SEO magic of those tech companies. In Georgia, six workers, primarily Latino, were just killed from a liquid nitrogen leak at Foundation Foods Inc. Most SEO-oriented media companies don’t cover that because that is a no-name company.
I hate thinking about web traffic and things like Google analytics. My favorite thing to do is hit a company 12 times. Most publications won't do that. Most publications, even the good ones, are sitting there and thinking, we need to sell “poverty porn” about some big consumer brand because that will give us traffic.
They said, you know, you call yourself a union activist. How do you divide being a union activist, and a labor reporter? I said, at the end of the day, I feel that they’re the same job, if done right, it’s letting workers speak for themselves.
If you grew up in a place like Pittsburgh, you grew up in union culture. Everybody's grandfather was a coal miner or worked in some union factory. Your parents probably did too. I grew up five to six blocks away from a factory that closed in the early 90s where my dad was a union rep. Everybody in my immediate social world was involved in unions. It wasn't until I went away to a junior Ivy, that I met anti-union people. And the perspective of unions in most leftist publications is, “have you heard of this union thing?” 40 million people grew up in union households. 40 million people have a relatively positive association with unions.
In the newsrooms, there are so few people of color, there are so few people from union backgrounds. You end up with these explainer pieces, which I call “yuppie-splaining”, about how a union works. I don’t know any working-class people that need this sort of thing explained to them.
Do you feel there's a path forward for your kind of reporting and the small newsrooms?
Mike | You have to write things people care about. We put out a fundraiser last night. We want to go down to Alabama to cover Amazon. We raised $1500 without even trying. There were probably three to four dozen folks that gave Payday about $300-$400 a year. Most publications struggle to get $20 for a subscription. Why? Because they don’t speak to people's experience.
Why should we save the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, when it supported Trump, covered all sorts of racist topics for years, and covered up sexual misconduct? Let it die, in my opinion. Let it die and use the energy to build something new. It's like banks where they are too big to fail. You don't have to fix these things, you can let them die. Obviously, there are some good small newspapers out there, but it's not the majority.
I think what Payday does well is that we lay the breadcrumbs for the rest of the corporate media to follow. And that's really the role of the alternative.
There should be an effort to make sure journalism doesn’t come only from elites with elite backgrounds.
Clarissa | This is something that has been a problem within the left media that’s been going on for decades now. I think these publications don’t want to face the fact that the forces they are fighting are also contributing to the growing inequality within their own ranks.
Another reason why Mike and Payday Report are getting the kind of traction they are is because people are looking for authenticity. They're looking for people to throw the curtain aside and be like, this is who I am. There is no question Mike will say what he wants.
So often we don't know where people stand. People are becoming more suspicious and less trusting of what they're reading. I think that is why people are turning to Payday. We are seeing a turn towards individual journalists or individual, independent publications, as opposed to maybe the larger ones who aren’t doing the work.
Mike | Not just individual journalists, but also marginalized communities. I am a white guy, but I am also autistic. So I have some small window into marginalization.
I've written about being autistic and growing up, with, on my grandmother's side, Italian family, and my dad's side, Jewish family, I learned to be blunt. I grew up in a neighborhood that was Italian, Jewish, and Black. It wasn't until college, at a pretty white junior Ivy that I really understood what passive-aggressive behavior was. I am serious.
As an autistic and growing up around so many Black folks and so many Jewish folks and old school Italians, very blunt cultures, it's considered disrespectful not to tell someone the truth. You're doing someone a favor by being honest with them. This passive-aggressiveness is from a very white, suburban culture. Throughout my career, I’ve gotten in trouble with those folks because sometimes they'll be like, well, this is too blunt. In my view, solidarity is about telling the truth. We can't really learn from one another without that.
I think in the left press, so much of it is based on being a viral internet personality that becomes this narcissism. These kids come out of heavily affluent, heavily white suburbs. They know how to work within these passive-aggressive games.
I have read so many stories from these people who end up covering about labor and the pieces are lazy. Everybody went to the same picket line in Philadelphia of a hundred workers during the GM Strike. They couldn't get on a plane to Rochester or go to Buffalo or go to Cleveland or go to Nashville or go to any of these places. It is all about one little warehouse of a hundred workers outside of Philly and we can take the train there, so that's just what we're going to do. It's lazy. It's uncreative.
There is this thing of unrooted elitists. Working-class people tend to stay in the communities they grow up in. Their communities are defined geographically by the people around them, whereas intellectuals see their community as all over – like, I know this person here in Boston and in Chicago and in London. That is not the way most people in the world define their community. If you look at who Teen Vogue or The Nation or Jacobin is targeting, they're targeting high-income people that they can sell ads to. I think it's time to get rid of that corporate media model.