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
Reimagining the Labor Movement
by Neidi Dominguez
March 27, 2021
This interview with Neidi Dominguez, co-founder of Mijente, Executive Director Unemployed Workers United, and a national immigrant and workers rights organizer, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
ND | My introduction to the progressive movement was worker organizing – specifically with undocumented immigrant workers. Growing up, I watched my mom organize day laborers and domestic workers with the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA ), which was one of the founding organizations of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network back in the 90s.
We came to the U.S. in 1997. I was born and raised in Cuernavaca Morelos, Mexico up until I was nine years old when we came to the U.S. My mom, within the first year, found IDEPSCA and started going to English classes through an ESL program. Once she was there, she learned about all of the other programs that they had, such as organizing immigrant women, domestic workers, and day laborers. She quickly became more engaged and started teaching Spanish literacy classes because a lot of the workers that they were organizing with didn't know how to read and write in Spanish. I was 10 years old when my mom started doing that, and I grew up in that world. I grew up going to bi-yearly retreats about neoliberalism and the “new era late-stage capitalism.”
Neidi Dominguez personal photo.
I grew up learning how you have these sorts of “one-on-one” conversations with people. I have been training for this for a long time and I feel privileged, in a way, to have had that structure and been part of spaces that had that discipline, growing up.
It wasn't just that these folks were exploited, it is that they were being exploited because they were undocumented. So we were doing a lot of organizing as undocumented people, but my mom wasn't a union member and the workers that we were organizing weren't union members. I think the only time when I heard about unions back then was when I would overhear about some local building trades unions in Los Angeles being pissed off that these local community organizations were opening up worker centers, that they thought of as hiring halls. That's what I remember of the union. My second experience with unions was in college fighting alongside all the cafeteria workers and janitors on our campus for their contract, there were all AFSCME union members, the majority Black and immigrant Latino workers.
And what are you working on now?
Right now I am working on a project, Unemployed Workers United, that is anchored by five national organizations: Mijente, The National Black Worker Center Project, Working Families Party, People's Action and United for Respect. The project looks at two major things. One is that we know that many have people lost their jobs because of COVID. So one question is how do we move some of those folks to be more for our progressive agenda instead of becoming more conservative? We know that when bad things happen, folks tend to close up. It is easier for people to find scapegoats for all the bad things that are happening to them. People are more likely to look at a bad situation from the perspective of scarcity and are more likely to be okay with austerity measures because of it.
The second part of the project involves putting into practice some of the things that I learned from the Bernie campaign about digital tools, distributed organizing, and how we actually use these tactics to build long-term poor and working people power. I specifically feel like groups in the economic justice sector are way behind in using some of these tools and executing some of these tactics. Most local worker centers or community economic justice organizations, don’t have the resources to have access to some of these digital tools. I feel like part of our problem as a progressive movement is that we have institutions, but we're not growing our bases to scale. The Idea is to have us work together in order to attack these questions and challenges together.
How is the labor movement changing? What do you think the modern labor movement is struggling to understand?
I think the pandemic really accelerated and further demonstrated what everybody knows and feels. It showed us, right in our faces, how there is no safety net in this country for most people. And that there is definitely no safety net for poor people or for working-class people. And that there is absolutely nothing for undocumented people or Black poor folks in this country. I think that this was a big shock in the organizing space. It really pushed us to think about how we are capturing the energy that is coming out of this moment and about how we can use it as a springboard for long-term power building.
At the same time, it really exposed how unprepared we were for it overall. Not just the unions. All of us, as a progressive movement, we were really unprepared for a moment like this.
For as long I can remember, we have been fighting to raise the minimum wage. I feel like this moment has really opened up space so that we can have conversations with folks about universal income for example and further push the conversation about universal healthcare, and debt relief. How do we shift the conversation so that in five years the next campaign is centered around believing in a universal income in this country? Even if you were a person with a job and you were making more than $75,000 a year and you had healthcare and you were doing well for yourself, we saw that in a day, all of that could be gone and there was no answer to what happens after that. So I think the opportunity is tremendous and I feel like we're still catching up to it.
I also think that all of this happened inside a moment of history in this country where we were already reckoning with white supremacy, police brutality, and racism. The pandemic didn't stop Black people from being killed in this country. We just had six Asian women murdered earlier this week. And there's still no reckoning or even recognizing them as workers from anyone in the labor movement.
Again, I think that it shows the limited imagination that exists within the traditional labor movement to meet this moment. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking like this, but I really do think part of the biggest thing that holds us back is the people at the top of these institutions that are so far removed from the reality from the ground. Who are these decision-makers inside these institutions, unions, and think tanks, the ones that have the attention in the biggest stages for contesting for our future?
To put it into context, the majority of union members are female. And by 2030, the majority of union members will be people of color.
And Black women are the largest minority in unions.
ln addition to that, we need to reckon with the fact that the relationship between employees and employers is not what it once was. We cannot just think about collective bargaining or concerted activities in their most narrow definitions, we need to expand it else we are going to put ourselves further behind. The gig economy is growing. More and more workers are becoming, “self-employed” through these apps and being massively misclassified as independent contractors what does that even mean? And what else is going to be automated, in the next 20 years? I just feel like we need different ideas and approaches to organizing working people in the 21st century.
Neidi Dominguez personal photo.
Americans have this problem imagining that things could happen to them, even when disaster is happening all around them. COVID really blew that up.
You have a lot of big ideas to capitalize on this moment. How do you see them playing out in reality over the next year? What do your priorities look like?
For us it looks like three ideas.
The first bucket of work is about scale. And the scale question for us is really about can we move people to find a political home locally? In my own organizing experience,sure you want to have a national entity, but ultimately, if we still don't have somebody to call in from and mobilize in Tennessee, or Montana, or Alaska in support of our agenda, then we are not really growing our power.
We want to bring more people into our movement and then help them find a rooted political home so that local worker centers and community organizations can grow; grow to the thousands and hundreds of thousands.
The second bucket of work is really just around finding new spaces to train a new cadre of organizers for the future who knows how to both have a one-on-one conversation with someone and also how to use digital tools to have a broader reach like a CRM (customer relationship management), or know how to set up a peer to peer texting program, look at data and help them with targeting, etc. We want to figure out how to build up organizers who are people of color, and who are women and immigrants that have all of these skills.
I think that this part of our work is also to create more space for BIPOC young people, women, and immigrants that they have a place in the labor organizing movement too. Perhaps this part of our work is reckoning with the idea that we see ourselves as part of the labor movement who want to contest some of these engrained ideas. Whether or not the labor movement thinks of us as part of them is a different question.
The third bucket goes back to organizing with unemployed, underemployed, and people in precarious working conditions. Most people in the traditional labor movement probably think the work we are doing is a joke or won't go anywhere. Their questions are: Why are you trying to organize unemployed people, they don't even have a job? Do they have a capital lever? And in a way, I get that. Most of these people don’t want to stay unemployed, neither do we want them to stay unemployed.
But, when talking to people who have lost their jobs, one of the most obvious things that they all have in common, whether young or old, is debt. They don’t talk about it that way, of course, they name being afraid of losing their home, not being able to pay their utilities, and not having any healthcare coverage. But when we go further, we start hearing about their debt; because of medical bills or because they are months behind paying rent or their mortgages, or having student loan debt or car loan debt.
People always say, well what is the leverage when organizing unemployed people? When you have a job, you go on strike, and that job is the leverage.
What does it look like to have a collective of debtors who say, we're not going to pay our debt, we need to reform this whole system? The capital that they can leverage is actually the debt that they own. This bucket of work is in the very early stages, and we have a lot to learn from others that have taken some of these questions on before us but we are asking ourselves what it looks like to have a debtors union and how that can help grow the political power of poor and working people in this country.
The South is an area where there's a massive history of civil rights movements. How does your work think about that history?
All of our experiments are in the Southwest and Southeast, and that's just a personal commitment I have to continue to support the growth of Southern organizing capacity. But it is also because it is in these Southern cities that some of the most exciting and innovative organizing is already taking place too, and all of us should be supporting it.
Some parts of our projects require a national approach, but we have growing partnerships and campaigns in Houston, Nashville, and Phoenix right now. I think the narrative and the strategy really need to be driven by people in the South. I really hope that the work we're doing really helps prop up those Southern leaders to be able to have their own line on this, that is our strongest intention that guides our everyday. Our success as Unemployed Workers United will be measured by the growth of those local organizations we are partnering with in the South.
One of the main reasons so many local Southern organizations or efforts have not grown is because they have not been funded in the way they need to be to be able to thrive.
Most unions are not investing what they need to be into the South. Foundations will not be enough. I really worry about that. But if we do figure out a way to support the growth in a way that creates sustainable models, we could have a really beautiful chance to actually change things in the next five to ten years. But, without the right resources, all of these exciting efforts are just not going to survive.
This is the time to get really creative and think about sustainable models. This is also why I encourage these organizations to think about the for-profit side of things too. If the unions and the foundations aren’t going to do cover the long term then, we the people are going to have to do it. How do we use our skills and gifts to do that? All of this takes money, real resources.