interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
The Goodwill of the Giver
by Katherine Turk
May 19, 2021
This interview with Katherine Turk, Associate Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Katherine | I'm a historian of the 20th century United States, with a focus on women, gender, sexuality, and how they intersect with law, labor, and social movements. I'm generally interested in feminist movements and different ideas of what feminism is and can be. My first book was a history of campaigns around Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how it established gender equality in the workplace as a legal category. I'm just wrapping up my second book, which is on the National Organization for Women, the largest feminist membership organization in American history.
In working on this current book, I kept uncovering evidence of activism around volunteering and volunteerism. I was puzzled by NOW’s investment in an issue that seemed so innocuous. You either volunteer or you don't. In digging deeper, I learned that a lot of Americans were thinking about volunteerism in the 1970s, in part because President Richard M. Nixon had started talking about it in new ways.
frank | Pre-Nixon what was volunteering like in U.S. society?
Volunteering was certainly not new in the 1960s. Men and women, especially women, of all races and classes, had participated in different kinds of community uplift and moral reform for generations. For example, there had been efforts to ban or limit alcohol consumption, efforts against child labor, efforts to share what resources a community had. Women built their own auxiliaries of political parties and helped to build a thriving labor movement. But starting in the 1950s and 1960s, new kinds of social movement organizations began to join longstanding voluntary membership groups as points of leverage for social change.
Corporations were also beginning to act in new ways in these years. If you think of the history of philanthropy, you might think of foundations that were started by wealthy industrialists such as the Andrew Carnegie Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation. In the mid-twentieth century, many corporations began setting up their own foundations and behaving in more overtly philanthropic ways.
Do you see that happening in response to social movements and in response to cultural change?
I think that's definitely part of it, yes.
Corporations claimed to be upholding their part of the social contract. But beyond the personal benevolence of individual businessmen—and they were nearly all men—these efforts were primarily motivated by concern for their bottom line.
In years when many people were challenging capitalism and demanding first-class citizenship in all areas of American life, corporations did not want to be seen as villains -- especially those that needed loyal customers. They wanted to have a good brand name. They wanted their stores to be successful in changing urban areas.
The response is similar to that from corporations after the wave of protests last summer.
Yes, absolutely. And after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other protected identities, corporations started getting sued by workers, and eventually giant classes of workers, to reckon with decades of explicitly racist and sexist treatment.
Corporate leaders felt that if their name was going to be in the news because they were on the losing end of an employment discrimination class-action lawsuit, they'd like to have that story run next to a story that portrayed them in a flattering light, perhaps on how they started a new YMCA in an urban area where their own workers could volunteer. This philanthropy was an effort to shape the narrative about their corporate identities.
Right. What else is true of the 1960s?
Another piece of the picture in the 1960s was the federal government’s new emphasis on volunteering. In response to the uprisings in American cities and the expansion of American poverty amidst economic growth, President John F. Kennedy created VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, and the Peace Corps. Kennedy framed both of these programs as opportunities for citizens to demonstrate their commitment to the nation.
Kennedy made a speech to a group of Peace Corps trainees near the Washington Monument in 1962.
The other thing to mention, of course, is President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. This created a new network of social service agencies that provided federal funding for many community services. It funneled millions of dollars into some of the nation's poorest areas and required that people living there not only benefit from those programs but help to control them.
The 1960s was such an energetic and dynamic moment in American history when expansive visions of citizenship seemed possible.
This works quite nicely in tandem – volunteering supplements the system from the government. Why does Nixon see it as effective to run on breaking down this relationship?
Nixon wanted to trouble longstanding notions about what the government owed to citizens. He campaigned in 1968 on the assertion that volunteering could solve two pressing social problems. One, it could help create new bonds across different communities. And two, volunteers in local communities could simply be more efficient at providing social services than the government. He echoed this idea in his inauguration speech, and in the months after taking office, he proposed a new phalanx of volunteers that could help tutor kids, care for the elderly, provide support in schools and hospitals, and much more. In his vision, volunteers could replace paid workers providing social services.
But his administration ran into a wall of opposition. White House officials peddled this idea in meetings with the people who oversaw volunteer agencies, provided welfare in their local communities, and ran charities. Those advocates were skeptical and even resistant. The public support for his vision was just not yet there. Nixon soon shelved his most ambitious ideas and pivoted instead to promoting volunteering and strengthening existing volunteer efforts. He continued to champion the vague agenda that volunteers could and should do more in society.
But Nixon’s efforts are important because they started to try to change the conversation.
In doing so, Nixon began to lay the groundwork for what Ronald Reagan was able to do when he comes into the presidency in 1980, in a much more conservative social climate.
Kiecke, Albert. [League City Lions Club Parade Float], photograph, May 1989; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth279422/m1/1/?q=nonprofit: accessed May 18, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting League City Helen Hall Library.
Can you speak about the public's perception?
The 1970s were a volatile era, as Americans contested the nature of equality and citizenship against the backdrop of a newly turbulent economy. The public response was mixed. Some loved it. Who could object to someone volunteering and giving their time? Others opposed it.
Feminists, in particular, saw Nixon's emphasis on volunteerism as a way to further devalue feminized labors of all kinds. A Wages for Housework movement argued that domestic labor was work that deserved fair remuneration. Workers in female-dominated industries, like teaching, seized upon this moment to demand more funding. They argued that volunteers’ essential contributions to schools should instead be made by wage earners.
I think the feminist critique, in particular, is really interesting. It is not something that I have heard a lot about, but it seems to tie directly into Biden setting aside money for care workers in the infrastructure bill.
Does the feminist critique change anything under the Nixon administration?
Feminists pointed to a long history of women’s volunteering and claimed that those efforts were valuable and should be paid. The Nixon administration responded to this feminist critique by claiming that men should volunteer, too. The NCVA launched an ad campaign that featured professional football players describing their own volunteering in their communities. These ads, which were targeted to men, asserted that it could be manly to help somebody else.
I think this effort to de-gender volunteering took some of the steam out of what feminists were trying to do. Women have all different relationships to power and to money and to time. Plenty of women responded to feminist critics of Nixon’s campaign that volunteering was for them a way to be involved in politics or a pathway to a paid job. If volunteering was a choice a woman made freely, and anyone could do it, why should other women object to it?
Eventually, internal debates don't matter and this just becomes the norm. How does that happen? What does Reagan change?
Recovering these debates about volunteering in the 1970s is important because they laid the groundwork for what was to come. Nixon could not change the conversation outright, but he started the process. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the political climate had changed to permit dramatic cuts to social programs. Reagan and the Republican Congress made those cuts, reducing the help that people could get from the government, especially if they had kids.
US National Archives. President Ronald Reagan During The Ceremony for Departing Peace Corps Volunteers Going to Africa with George Bush in The Rose Garden.
US National Archives. President Ronald Reagan Greeting Recipient Gloria Allred at 1986 President'S Volunteer Action Award Luncheon in The East Room.
Rather than dwell on the people these cuts harmed, Reagan spotlighted the volunteers who helped those people. He held award ceremonies at the White House that celebrated those who helped formerly incarcerated people, ran food banks or tutored kids, for example. Of course, all of those things could have been more effectively and consistently provisioned by the government.
That giver exercises the choice to help and in return receives elevated status and self-esteem. The person on the receiving end is suddenly no longer an equal citizen entitled to a basic level of subsistence and dignity.
This rhetorical move so infected the nation’s political discourse that by the mid-1990s, even Democrats agreed that the government had to get out of the way of social problems rather than help to solve them.
Do you think things are starting to change?
I hope so. The pandemic really exposed the devastating impact of decades of cuts to social programs. There's something about seeing so much suffering out in the open. So many Americans have always been vulnerable, but even the most secure among us are vulnerable in new ways right now.
Over the past four decades, Republicans were successful at redefining aid from the government as a handout instead of a right. But the pandemic has shown us that are certain problems only the government can solve. The government is not something that's separate from all of us, it is all of us, and we should be able to expect that there is a baseline under which no one should be allowed to fall.
In this moment of such immense suffering, we should honor and celebrate all the ways that people have volunteered and donated their time and money. But we should also begin a new conversation around our basic rights as human beings and the inherent value of labors of all different kinds.