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
Women At War: An Interview With Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie
by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie
April 6, 2018
This interview with Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, the author of Women at War, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for frank news.
When it comes to women's issues in combat, and female veterans, where should civilians start?
We have been at war since 9/11, and during that period of time 2.7 million males and females have deployed. Mainly to Iraq and Afghanistan and other nasty places around the world, and have come back. About 10% of those have been women. So that's a lot of women, former or present service members.
For both men and women they've lived for long periods of time in nasty or dangerous places where they can be shot at, or bombs can go off any time. Specifically for female service members who are now veterans, there's been a lot of trying to figure out how to manage in that environment. Where you're in a very male dominated environment usually about 90 percent male.
You have your gynecological needs. The what do you do about having a period? For example if you're in a place where there's no toilets or the porta potties are overflowing with feces. Or you're trying to figure out, in a more global sense, what you're going to do about your reproduction.
So am I going to get married? Am I going to start a family? Am I going to get pregnant? What happens if I get pregnant when I don't want to? Am I in a place that may not provide any kind of safe services for terminating a pregnancy?
That's sort of the overview. Let me add one more piece that civilians back home may not think of which is, if you're in a hot dirty environment with few showers, it's really easy to get things like urinary tract infections or vaginitis, and nobody likes to talk about those things. But if you're suffering from a UTI it can get pretty uncomfortable.
Who's responsible for implementing the solutions once you find them?
Traditionally in the military it's logistics. So logistics carries bullets, and bandages, and tampons, and baby wipes, and everything you might need. But for logistics to do that they need to have people saying “hey, this is important to do”. So I would say it’s a combined responsibility.
You have this book saying “hey, this is important”, but do you think it also takes more external pressure for women’s issues to be taken seriously?
Absolutely. So the book you're referring to Women At War is an attempt to gather everything we know about women at the time of the publication and put it together in one place. But simply having a book doesn't mean that that information is going to translate. To the military's credit they've had a lot of interest in women's health issues, and prior to 9/11 we had a very active group that looked at women's health issues and made recommendations. But then 9/11 happened, we went to war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and people got really, really busy. And these issues were sort of pushed to the side. Now with women being allowed in combat units there's more of a resurgence in interest in this information.
How can you make female soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines be successful?
How quickly do you think these suggestions could be implemented? What would that look like and what does it take?
That is a good question and there's some things that are easy and there are some things that are hard. So easy is getting tampons into the supply change. There’s something called a female urinary device which is basically a funnel that you can urinate into. To make that actually be useful, when you’re wearing your uniform, and your Kevlar vest, and your helmet, and your gas mask…well that's another piece of it.
A third level of difficulty is when you get into anything that has to do with reproduction because Congress gets involved. So for example, the issue about providing Plan B in a deployment setting, or abortion's not being legal in Korea, or Japan, or Italy, where many of our service members are stationed…and so what does somebody do if they find themselves pregnant when they don't want to be? That's a really hard nut to crack
Does the military support a woman's right to choose?
I'm not going to speak for the military. I have been retired for a while, and I wouldn't want to speak for the military on that subject anyway.
So ideally there would be a lot of preventive measures and certainly the medical departments, speaking specifically for the medical department from the military, as a whole I think is a group with very fine people who will do the best they can to keep everybody medically healthy.
What does the V.A. need to do to keep up with the new influx of women returning from service?
So just to clarify, I until recently worked for the VA, but I do not speak for the V.A. So this is based on observation. I have pretty extensive familiarity with the VA. I think the V.A. is trying its best to provide services for female veterans. In many places they have female clinics, women's veterans clinics that are very nicely appointed, newly refurbished. But it's a big system, a big bureaucracy with limited flexibility.
What about childcare in the military and at the V.A.?
They're very different systems, just to make sure your audience understands, the military is when you're active duty. And actually the military is very good at providing child care, and have long hours, and take into account people who are deploying or working long hours. Having said that there is still more structure to a male military member, married to a female civilian spouse, who often doesn't work, or has partial work, than they are oriented towards a female service member. But the military has good childcare.
The V.A. on the other hand is not set up for child care. They're not focused on the family. Their mission is to take care of the veterans. And so it would be a tremendous outlay of money and cost to try to provide child care. So again I need to split those missions apart. One of the challenges for the V.A. is that they have an incredibly large mission because you not only have 2.7 million who have recently served in Iraq and Afghanistan and other veterans entitled to V.A. benefits, but you also have the aging population of the Vietnam veterans and to a certain extent World War II, although those there are less among us now. But there is a tremendous amount of business already for the V.A.
I’d like to pivot to your own service. You had a very successful career in the Army. You’re a colonel. Why did you join?
The short answer is I joined the military because they paid for medical school. And that was a great decision, one of the best I made in my life, because it enabled me to go to medical school and not have any debt afterwards. Backtracking a little bit, my father served in the Korean War, my grandfathers both served in World War II. Like many of their generation the men usually serve, but I did not grow up in a military household. So for me, it was also an atypical career choice. It wasn't something, for example, in college my friends ever thought I’d do. I was a hippie back then at Harvard.
But I went to an expensive medical school and they paid for it. And then I did my internship and residency at Walter Reed, and went on to keep being offered interesting jobs with lots of chances to travel and really do a lot. That's one thing that the military offers at a relatively young age, you usually have a lot of both support, but also responsibility, a lot of authority. And so that was useful. So military pays for a lot of different schools, college or some other professional schools, besides medical school, or they have loan repayment programs. So I would urge anybody who's looking at school and the cost of schooling to talk to a recruiter and see whether they could get some or all of their schooling paid for. Of course you owe some time to the military afterwards depending on the program the time will be different, but again, I thought it was a great decision. And my friends and colleagues who have been in the military have been very happy with that.
Was psychiatry your immediate focus when you entered medical school? Or was that something that came to you later?
It was not my immediate focus for undergraduate. I did a double major in biology and folklore and mythology. I didn't know it at the time, but that was perfect for going into psychiatry because you're looking at various plants that have pharmaceutical properties, you're looking at anthropology, human behavior, and it was a good background. But when I went to medical school, like many students, I debated between internal medicine, neurology, flirted with surgery, and then settled on psychiatry as being the most interesting of all the different fields of medicine.
It's especially relevent to the military.
Yeah, absolutely, and that has been true since World War I at least. Great advances in medicine are often done on the battlefield. And that's true for surgery. It's true for Emergency Medicine. It's true for psychiatry, and that's another hour at a discussion that I won't go into right now. Specifically for post-traumatic stress disorder and the idea of stigma — first let me define PTSD in case your readers don't know what it is:
There's a number of different symptoms to include: intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares, which you can kind of deal with. And then there's numbing and avoidance, and that is actually harder on family relationships. And then there's some other symptoms. What I see most often in veterans is they can't go into malls, they can't tolerate crowded places, it can be hard to drive, they get road rage, then they get panic attacks. But having said that. These are all reactions that in many cases go way over time. It's when the reaction is so severe that you can't go out of a house and you sit in the basement drinking Jack Daniels with your shotgun. That's when it really does get dangerous.
Do you think that the treatment options that are available are good enough?
No. But there's a lot out there.
When I talk to my patients about treatment for PTSD I talk about three buckets for treatment. First, I talk about medication. Second, about psychotherapy or talking therapy. And the third bucket is everything else, which includes things like yoga, meditation, or acupuncture.
Coming back to the first bucket, as a psychiatrist that's what I do, is medication. We do have medications that are used for post-traumatic stress disorder. Usually we talk about safe, mild antidepressants called SSRI’s, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, that's a long name. Your readers will have heard of some of them like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. The problem with these medications is they have some side effects, and specifically they have sexual side effects. In many cases that includes delayed erection, lack of erection, delayed ejaculation, lack of libido or desire, and most of the young men and women that I treat don't want to be on medications with sexual side effects.
I always talked about bucket number two and bucket number three as well. Bucket number two being psychotherapy. The third bucket, the everything else, I really like because it gives a person a control over their symptoms with less side effects. So if you think of PTSD simplistically as a disorder where your adrenaline is unchecked, your fear or flight response is on, things like meditation, yoga, exercise, it can all calm down the brain. There's also some interesting work being done with working with animals for example and especially horses and dogs. And then finally there's a range of newer treatments that we're just beginning to get the data on. Those are things like cranial magnetic stimulation and others that I think are very promising, again with less side effects than the medications.
Do you think there's anything to say about the reception of veterans coming home today? Compared with our other wars?
First of all, I think that the environment is much better for veterans now than it was for example in Vietnam when they were spat on and called baby killers. When I was in uniform in the airport, and that's one of the things I miss since I retired, people would always come up to me and say thank you for your service. Having said that “thank you for your service” is nice but it doesn't necessarily help. What most veterans are interested in is finding a job and being able to support their family.
If you've got jobs to offer or other services to provide for veterans that can be very helpful. I would emphasize you have to know what the needs are before you rush out and offer services. A lot of times people kind of hang out their shingles and say, “free mental health care” and nobody will come to that, or free this or that, free stress balls. Well you know that's not necessarily very helpful. So see what the needs are in your community. And then whatever you can do to help meet those needs.