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
Individual Mobility is a Farce
by Erica Kohl
May 13, 2021
This interview with Erica Kohl, professor of American Studies at UC Davis and the author of The Self-Help Myth, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
How did you begin this inquiry into philanthropy?
I suppose there are many entry points to my career in looking at philanthropy. I was born in Berkeley in 1968 and raised by radicals. My parents were organizing all sorts of crazy projects, and have been involved in a lot of movement organizing over the years.
I started working in the nonprofit sector in the Bay Area in the nineties. During that time, I had multiple moments of disillusionment with the confines of the nonprofit structure and the limits of working with private funders. I thought I was going out into the world and doing radical work, but I came against all of these limits in my early twenties. So, I found my way into research out of frustration, I suppose.
What specific frustrations led you in that direction?
Two major organizing projects led me there.
One was working in rural coal mining towns in Appalachia. I worked through the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. I found my way to a small town called Ivanhoe that was organizing against the industrial model of development in rural Appalachia.
Tennessee Valley Authority. Appalachia Dam Project. US National Archives.
I was working alongside popular educators and organizers and a fierce, amazing woman Maxine Waller, the wife of a coal miner and so much more, to transform the town which was experiencing industrial abandonment. And then, about a decade later, when I was working with a farmworker organizing coalition in California, Central Valley.
They built upon the long-standing myth of self-help. Entrepreneurship was very acceptable, but anything that took on industry was not. And both Appalachia and the California Central Valley are incredibly poor regions in the United States that have been defined by large-scale industry. Their poverty was produced by relationships of production, not by people’s poor choices or bad behavior.
What is the myth of self-help? Both conceptually and historically?
It underpins the age-old bootstraps capitalism. You can look back to Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation to see this foundational philanthropic idea that if we help people help themselves, they won't want to confront industry. If they busy themselves fixing stop signs in their neighborhoods or improving schools for their own kids, then they will not confront the structures that are actually creating poverty and inequality. We get this American myth of individual mobility. We are told that if you just work harder, you can succeed in this world.
We published an interview a few months ago that talked about how if you busy yourself with mobilization and getting better, you always think one day something will change for you. Why do you feel that there isn't this moment of realizing, I am working seven days a week, one hundred hours a week, and nothing is changing?
Well, most social movements do grow from that collective recognition that the systems designed to serve us don’t work for most of us — and that the individual mobility script is a farce. You can look to most movements in this country and see that they grew out of this sense that the system wasn't built for us, so we've got to change it.
Your question though, initially made me think about angry white people. This idea of white exceptionalism is obviously very alive today— this idea that if I'm still struggling and I'm white, then I better find someone to get angry at, to blame. There is a lot of pain and anger in that failure, so poor, disenfranchised white people have been taught to turn to people of color, to immigrants as the problem. Or to some magical thinking that leads them to believe that the system or our society disadvantages white people — when in fact it disadvantages poor people. This moves much towards the radical white libertarian view. These are ‘common sense’ myths that confuse people about their own best interests and hide the broader structures of capitalism that produce the problems.
Right. It does involve some sense of denial, but also I guess, a sense of accepting what you hear from the government. How has this self-help attitude been codified by leaders and policies?
It is also important to think a little bit further back to the sixties, to the expansion of the welfare state and of civil rights. Goldwater loses the election, and Johnson builds upon the ‘Great Society’ programs by increasing social spending.
Cochran, Jimmy W. [Photograph of Barry Goldwater], photograph, October 1964; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth847110/m1/1/?q=goldwater: accessed May 14, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Midwestern State University.
He launches the War on Poverty, promotes, at least in language, community action, and control, and increases funding for other forms of social welfare support like Headstart.
In response, the right gets quiet. They go back to the trenches and intentionally build not only a policy plan but an ideology that attacks the social infrastructure built from the New Deal to the War on Poverty.
Conservative academics, theoreticians, politicians, and foundations — which we don’t focus enough on in philanthropy research — start touting this idea. The Heritage Foundation, for example, produces its Mandate for Leadership. These were a series of reports that served as a roadmap for policies that would disinvest in the welfare state, reinvest in the police state and in the military state, and loosen up corporate laws and controls. They wrote a pretty simple prescription that Reagan ended up adopting.
President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dancing in Cross Hall during a State dinner for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom. US National Archives.
The Reagan-Thatcher era cemented a new ideology against poor people, against so-called ‘welfare mothers’ evoking racist stereotypes, and against a ‘bloated state’. This enabled concrete policy shifts against social spending and against racial justice organizing and policies.
At the same time, anti-immigrant sentiments came to the forefront. You have the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 passed by Reagan that sought to take away all public benefits from immigrants.
You also see disinvestment from poor communities and communities of color and reinvestment into policing, whether that be in the form of stop and frisk in urban areas, deportation in the Central Valley, or mass incarceration across the country. Those policy shifts are connected to the ideological project that convinced people that folks just don't know how to take care of themselves and that they are a threat to civil society.
And then we move into Clinton, a self-described “new kind of Democrat.” In retrospect, a lot of his policies, particularly politicking policies, doubled down on conservative ideology. How does nonprofit and philanthropy change from there?
Right. From Clinton through Bush, there was a through-line where the nonprofit sector came in. We have gutted our welfare state, but we still have people in need. And the needs are growing and becoming increasingly visible. Clinton and Bush both talked a lot about pluralism and the responsibility of civic institutions to come together to solve our problems. This idea of a responsible civil society can have a very rosy glow to it, right? Yes, we need to all roll up our sleeves and help out. That sounds great.
Movement organizations begin seeking funding, not from the public or from members, but by twisting their tongues and writing grant proposals to private foundations. They lean into this new civic engagement framework of the eighties and nineties, rather than mass organizing against the system. Though organizing of course does continue on many fronts. It never stops.
The Clinton and Bush-era really ushered in this idea that we can all get along and do this together. It’s not bad per se, of course, we want to be civically involved and we want to help one another. But this becomes the dominant new narrative, and private funding becomes the dominant means of deciding what gets funded and what doesn’t. Many organizations that took a more direct or more confrontational approach to organize real change were defunded or left behind.
The nonprofit industrial complex is thrown around a lot — how do you define it?
I think that the term, “nonprofit industrial complex” can easily be misunderstood as a kind of monolithic, top-down, controlling cooperative force of private foundations that force non-profits to do things a certain way. That is a misread.
The idea of the nonprofit industrial complex builds upon the ideas of prison abolitionist scholars, like Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and others, the idea of the prison industrial complex. It talks about how, basically, if you imagine a birdcage there are multiple bars holding the burden. It’s a system that contains freedom, that contains working, living, dreaming, otherwise outside of the system of dominant capitalist control, that whenever you try to get out, another bar is there.
The nonprofit industrial complex refers to all the things that have happened since the fifties that have confined the kind of work that people organizing through the nonprofit sector can do. There are obviously certain laws and rules about philanthropy tax status that creates the world we are living in — but beyond that, there are more subtle notions and norms.
Capacity building, for example, is a buzzword in nonprofits. Basically, a funder will say that they are going to fund you to build your capacity. That usually comes with certain kinds of understandings of what a board of directors should look like. What kind of people should be governing your organization? Do they have to have certain credentials, certain kinds of status, certain kinds of sectoral expertise? You might be building someone's capacity away from serving a more radical mission by requiring certain kinds of people to sit on the board.
Another thing funders often do is they don't fund really small grassroots organizations unless they've been proven to be worthy of funding and are trustworthy. So they want to see other funders fund them first. Rather than just saying here's some resources to do what you have to do to create change, they say, well, first you need funding from a community foundation. And then you need a $50,000 grant to prove to us you can manage it the way that we approve of before we can give you the $250,000 grant.
[Inside the Office], photograph, 1960~/1969~; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth389054/: accessed May 14, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
Another whole area we could talk about would be professionalization — what's deemed as acceptable for nonprofit staff members, how they think, how they feel, how they behave.
There is also the busyness of one's time and effort and labor. And there are many nonprofit grassroots organizers I've interviewed, who said, you know, we were doing amazing work. We were on the ground. We were working with people. We were understanding the needs of the community. We were pushing for changes, but then five years in, when we became successful and received so much more money, I had no time to get out of the office. I know one organization that decided to scale down the size of the organization, so they could actually just go out into the community again.
It points out the irony in the critique of government as a slow, bloated bureaucracy. Philanthropic organizations can be just as slow and bogged down.
Absolutely. After about a decade and a half of working in the nonprofit sector, I became very frustrated and tired with the lack of deliberative work of learning and thinking and deep analysis about the issues. We were always so busy getting the next grant, trying to write the next report. It was so much busywork. It's a certain form of bureaucracy that really didn't allow for the deep analysis that is at the heart of movement building.
Do you think our dependency on philanthropy, or the tendency to make heroes of large philanthropic organizations will ever go away?
I have so many different and maybe sometimes conflicting answers to that question.
One of the things that I have learned from my research is how there are many successful, effective movement leaders who understand their work with foundations as a hustle. For example, I found archives of the meeting minutes of the United Farm Workers where Cesar Chavez calls nonprofits the “hustling arm of the union.”
Dolores Huerta stands with her United Farm Workers (UFW) colleagues outside of a hiring hall. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
He was conscious of receiving money for certain things, knowing that that money wouldn't fund other things. For example, private funders, including the Rosenberg Foundation and Ford Foundation would fund leadership development for farmers, and they were critical in doing that. But, of course, they were out when there were strikes and violence on the picket lines.
Foundations are creatures of capitalism. They're only set up to do certain things. There are key limits that they have. Are you willing to take on industry? Are you willing to take on capitalism? When the issue becomes about stopping industry from abusing workers, what will funders do then? Those are the hardline questions.
I will say that, today, there are innovative funders that are giving away money with fewer strings attached. They are basically saying, “do what you need to do.” A lot of them are millennial funders that are not trying to build big foundations with endowments and the traditional sense of trustees, but rather trying to build quick movement funds.
The last five years or so has seen a resurgence of the critique of philanthropy and the big foundations. And in a way, that is easy. They are the easiest targets. They are institutions of big money that were made in industry.
But, a lot of the politics of power and the drift away from the core mission, happens within smaller nonprofits and movements. Often after a leader becomes big, they become the face of the movement, and they become more removed from the base of people they were initially organizing with. It’s not an intentional abandonment, but it is a drift that comes with operating at different levels. I recently published an article in Boom Journal with Erika Grajeda. We looked at domestic worker organizing and how attachment to national campaigns often makes local grassroots serve national organizing campaigns and lose touch with what is going on in their own local community. These scaled up movements are ones where the question of power and organization are really fraught.
I want to touch on the Central Valley – how are Central Valley workers organizing post Cesar Chavez?
The Central Valley is still one of the poorest regions in the country.
And the agricultural industry still dominates the area, especially the Southern San Joaquin Valley, as a major economic driver. The levels of farmworker poverty have not gotten much better since the days of the farmworker movement. A majority of field workers are immigrants increasingly from indigenous Mexico, many of whom don’t speak English and also speak limited Spanish.
The abuses of the industry and the living conditions and the worker’s experiences have remained the same. And with the drought and with COVID, California farmworkers were impacted even more. The year before last, the Southern San Joaquin Valley was having water drives, these huge events for farmworker communities to come get water, to drink, and to bathe. Flash forward two years later, and we've got forest fires that have kept most people indoors, but farmworkers are outside working the fields, impacted by fires and smoke. And then we had COVID on top of that.
I don't think that labor organizing is very strong. If we look back to the disinvestment in the welfare state, the disinvestment in immigrant rights, and the reinvestment in policing and ICE, it doesn’t create a very good context for labor organizing. It leaves us with a predominantly undocumented labor force who are already afraid for their health, their wellbeing, their safety, and their jobs.
Labor organizing is not strong, but at the same time, movement organizing around immigrant rights and climate change has increased. So, the United Farm Workers does not have a very high membership in union members, but there are many more grassroots organizations in the Valley that are starting to work together and build a strong coalition for change. I wouldn’t say that there is no organizing, it is just regrouped organizing.
Do you feel hopeful about change, particularly with a new administration?
Biden will only do what he's held accountable to do. The movements that enabled the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the other more radical candidates, are much stronger and much more organized than they have been before, so it remains to be seen.