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
Tinkering Around the Edges
by Alice O'Connor
May 11, 2021
This interview with Alice O’Connor, professor of history at UCSB, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Alice | I teach and write about the history of social policy in the 20th and 21st century in relation to social science and knowledge creation, but more broadly, the dynamics of social policy, inequality, and wealth and poverty. I am also the director of the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy.
frank | What do you think about the inception of philanthropy in the U.S. – and how were the goals of philanthropy defined?
The model of philanthropy that prevails in the U.S. today — dominated by big, well-endowed, and (though they wouldn’t admit this) politically powerful foundations — traces its roots to the late 19th and the early 20th-century era of Gilded Age fortunes. Then, as now, the rise of this kind of institutionalized philanthropy was an expression of the prerogatives of capital. That was the core of Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, which is still invoked as a kind of founding document for modern philanthropy, and was all about asserting the superiority of capitalism, individualism, and the ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Douglass, Neal. The Austin Club, photograph, December 14, 1949; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth63041/m1/1/: accessed May 11, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
But that founding era was also a period of vast economic restructuring, displacement, and increasingly visible inequality — and the mass mobilization of labor, socialist, and progressive movements that threatened the power of capital. So even as Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and their peers sought to use their foundations to put a benign face on concentrated capitalist fortunes, others turned to philanthropy as an institutional venue for reform, and to lay the critical intellectual groundwork for the welfare/regulatory state. That was the case with the Russell Sage Foundation, the early history of which I wrote about in Social Science for What?. While itself veering between applied social work and progressive reform in the decades following its founding in 1907, it served as a kind of hub for a number of progressive reform causes.
In this sense, this foundational era of modern philanthropy was about softening the blows and reining in the excesses of capitalism — albeit without questioning, in fact preserving, the fundamentals of a capitalist economy.
The threat of socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century was seen as real. Philanthropy joined in the effort to realize a degree of redistribution and regulation without looking to socialist alternatives.
Sounds familiar: rising inequality, the perceived threat of socialism, etc. What do you think is similar and different about The Gilded Age and this New Gilded Age?
The similarities are striking. In addition to the immense concentration of wealth and monopolistic corporate power, our two Gilded Ages have been periods of intensified state-sponsored anti-Black violence — the new and old Jim Crow — and of politically mobilized anti-immigrant sentiment, some of it fueled by economic dislocation and insecurity. Striking though these and other parallels are, I think it's important to recognize how structures of intersectional inequality work differently today — often taking the form of highly selective or partial inclusion, or the mantle of so-called “color-blind” meritocracy or some other supposedly race and gender “neutral” mechanisms of containment and control. So, much as I appreciate the power of invoking Jim Crow to call out racist policies and practices — and that is certainly apt in the face of the virulent voter suppression campaigns we’re witnessing today — it is important to recognize critical differences and shifts in the mechanisms of racial exclusion and control, such as the degree to which they are cast in the logic and language of market efficiency.
We’re also in a very different, if in some ways parallel moment in the political and ideological configuration of resistance and reform.
[Arlington Crime Prevention Unit van, 1970s], photograph, 197X; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth176456/m1/1/?q=big%20government: accessed May 11, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Arlington Public Library.
At the same time, the broadly social-democratic left has been fundamentally reframing the conversation about what intersectional democracy looks like, in grassroots organizing as well in electoral politics. Advocates of police and prison abolition argue that public safety requires massive public reinvestment in historically marginalized communities. The idea isn’t new, but it is making headway that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. I see it as one example of how community-based social justice movements, in particular, are pushing toward a state that supports and is accountable to a democratic polity.
How do you see nationalism and the perceived threat of immigration engrained in the philanthropic project?
American philanthropy has a long history of support for eugenics — the pseudoscience that undergirded white supremacist thought and justified racially restrictive immigration policies, sterilization, and other forms of forced reproductive control, among other measures designed to preserve a “better,” which is to say white, breed of American. Fears of white “race suicide” and displacement by an immigrant-fueled mixed-race majority were never far beneath the surface, and as we can see, they remain a potent political force today.
That was very much embedded in the original philanthropic project. Philanthropy has not really grappled with the implications of the legacies of these and other expressions of its commitment to white supremacy, nationalist ideology, or of perpetuating whiteness as normative — nor the degree to which social policies have been structured around those commitments.
It seems there are people, even on the right, who are willing to embrace welfare policies when they're seen as being for “you” and “your people” – but as soon as the definition of who benefits expands, progress stalls.
I would agree but I’d also push the point further, to recognize that, historically, even incremental moves toward racial and intersectional democracy have sparked a backlash against those policies and countermobilizations that don’t just limit but actively undermine the democratic project. It’s no coincidence that the movement to reform and ultimately to end welfare started to gain momentum in national politics only after women of color began to benefit from the program in greater numbers. Today’s voter suppression campaigns build on a long history of active disenfranchisement in the wake of any kind of voting or civil rights gain — an issue that foundations were reluctant to approach until after the passage of federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
The larger point is that building multi-racial democracy is really hard. And if your starting point is offering inclusion to institutions and processes that are themselves based on the values and norms of whiteness, and of maintaining white privilege, that will come back to haunt you. A big part of the story of the 20th century is this failure to reckon with the degree to which our cherished institutions of democracy and of capitalist enterprise were themselves embedded in structurally racist policies.
So it is something that philanthropy has never fully grappled with.
KXAS-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [News Clip: Conservatives], video, October 25, 1982, 6:00 p.m.; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1246517/m1/?q=conservatives: accessed May 11, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
Do you think it's grappling with that now?
Well, I think it is being pushed to. Especially with the emergence of more and more critiques that point to the basic contradiction at the heart of the philanthropic project: the claims philanthropy makes about promoting equality even as by its nature philanthropy depends on inequality for its very existence.
The big foundations that dominate the philanthropic landscape are creatures of extraordinary run-ups of wealth inequality and concentration, and yet the “problem” of inequality provides them with a rationale. They exist to "solve" the problems of inequality. There's this great contradiction there. I think they're being pushed, but I'm not quite sure how far that is going to go. It is hard to tell.
One thing that seems to be a big priority amongst emerging grassroots movements is having people push past shame and rally around being poor as part of their identity. The Poor People's Campaign does this effectively. I wonder how philanthropy contributes to how we conceptualize class status?
Well philanthropy, even though a core focus is ameliorating the conditions of poverty, in a lot of ways does so in a way that mitigates a class project like the one the Poor People’s Campaign is currently working toward. The philanthropy approach is about creating certain conditions that will give people better opportunities within the existing system. It is a highly individualized way of thinking about what it means to be poor and about what poverty means, rather than demanding power and systemic change the way the Poor People's Campaign is.
Having people identify as “poor,” or acknowledging that they experience poverty, is also about challenging the stubborn myth that poverty is about some isolated group of “other” people, a condition that is and should be morally and socially stigmatized. The reality is that poverty is a structural feature of our political economy, which relies on low-wage and precarious work conditions for its decidedly unshared prosperity. The media coverage of the American Rescue Act tended to reinforce this myth by framing it as a measure that would “lift” millions of families “out of poverty” and cut the child poverty rate in half. The reality is that what makes this an effective anti-poverty policy is not that it will make some submerged group of poor people suddenly not poor (especially if that simply means putting their incomes above the hopelessly inadequate poverty line) but that it recognizes the extent and scope of economic precarity that exists throughout the bottom half of the income distribution and vastly expands the safety net in response. Important though its provisions are, we need much more than an expanded safety net to address the poverty and precarity that remain economic facts of life for millions.
Douglass, Neal. [State Department of Public Welfare], photograph, September 24, 1951; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth74657/m1/1/?q=welfare: accessed May 11, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
Do you think the public perception of the government's ability to move levers and change people's lives has changed with the pandemic? Do you think what we demand of the government will change?
I think that comes back to this really fraught question of how do we actually build a democratic state? And one I think the left could use some more time talking about.
I think it is important to come back to the question of whether it is possible to have a critical perspective on the democratic state, yet still, understand what the project of democratic statism aspires to. Now seems like a pretty good moment to revisit that.
I think that is what the Poor People's Campaign is doing and something I really appreciate about them. They are making very visible and vocal connections between voting, political participation, and the fight against poverty.
There was a surge, in the seventies and the eighties, of heavily ideological, right-wing, philanthropy groups. Why does that happen, and is there a specific ideological wing that you think holds the most power in these foundations now?
If you ask the foundations on the right, they would say that they have never been the heavyweights in the philanthropic world. They would say that this space has always been dominated by the left and point to the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller, Ford Foundation, the post-1945 Carnegie Foundation, among others as examples of the liberal hold on philanthropy and on the public conversation about policy, in fact on the whole apparatus of policymaking, and certainly on the think tank world.
One part of that narrative was the claim that liberal philanthropic dollars were being used to undermine capitalism. Right-wing business leaders, in turn, were mobilized to use their philanthropic dollars strategically, explicitly ideologically, and moralistically, to save free enterprise from the threat of what movement activists depicted as creeping socialism. That is the narrative they created and organized around in the 1970s.
And today, we can see how the movement ideology that informed right-wing philanthropy became institutionalized in the way they used it to fund a now extensive and highly influential network of right-wing think tanks and legal institutions like the Federalist Society. They have tried to mirror the liberal establishment by creating this conservative counter-establishment.
KXAS-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [News Clip: Conservatives], video, October 25, 1982, 6:00 p.m.; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1246517/m1/?q=conservatives: accessed May 11, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
In terms of who is leading the way these days, I mean, the right was able to leverage outsized power, partly because they were willing to be strategically ideological and tap into the energized conservative movement activism in a way that liberal establishment foundations have historically shied away from. The Koch brothers are a good example of this, but they are hardly alone.
Some historians point to this contradiction that liberals are really valued – this idea of fairness and decency and “both sides” are traditional liberal values, whereas the movement conservatives are willing to break the rules. One gains power and one doesn't.
I think one thing the rise of the right demonstrates is that there is power in the willingness to use and to overlook contradictions. This has been a signature feature of the conservative movement, with its marriage of free-market anti-statism and disciplinary social policy, and of plutocratic economics and populist outrage. That is why it's a little bit hard to take the conservative anti-Trumpers who are now suddenly discovering that they have a soul seriously when for a long time they were willing to look the other way and create fake ideological consistency in order to gain power.
There is also a place to criticize liberal mainstream institutions on this “both sides” front. They responded to these really deep and profound ideological challenges from the right by essentially accommodating the movement and continuing to insist on their model of maintaining neutrality and pluralism in the name of supporting the ultimate triumph of evidence over ideology.
At the same time, in terms of politics, the so-called “new” Democrats went out of their way to avoid what George H.W. Bush called the ‘L word’ and set out to create a political majority by courting the suburban vote, without actually really looking at the degree to which this whole idea of maintaining ideological neutrality is not particularly viable and not particularly an accurate recognition of what they had been about from the start. In fact, the now-infamous Clintonian ‘triangulation’ strategy was a way to create a distance from, if not an outright abandonment, of the party’s New Deal commitments — to labor, to so-called “big government,” and at least putatively, to making capitalism accountable to democratic norms.
The internal contradictions of the New Deal order, from its compromises with capitalism to its accommodation of white supremacist demands, continue to hamper the would-be coalition for intersectional social and economic democracy. One of the most significant developments in recent politics is the emergence of a widening cohort of activists, including elected representatives, who are willing to take those contradictions on.