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 Individual and the Institution
by Erica Bornstein
May 24, 2021
This interview with Erica Bornstein, author of Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi and professor, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Erica | I am a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, with expertise in political and legal anthropology, nonprofit institutions, philanthropy, and humanitarianism. I teach classes on humanitarianism, human rights, global justice, and the ethnography of institutions. That's my repertoire.
My research is focused on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in development and humanitarianism, and on giving practices more broadly. I've conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe in Africa, and in New Delhi, India. For sociocultural anthropologists like me, ethnographic fieldwork is an important part of our research. We conduct long-term fieldwork, which offers a different perspective than that of other research methods, like surveys.
frank | As an anthropologist, how do you understand giving? And how do you think about the different ways it has taken shape?
Giving can be an immediate act, an impulsive act, and one that is motivated by feeling. It can be an act of freedom, spontaneous and whimsical. Giving can be effectual, motivated by emotions. It can be traditional, determined by habit. Religious directives to give often fit in this category. All religious traditions have directives to give. It is one of the five pillars of Islam. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Judaism, all consider giving some version of good works. In India, I studied a particular type of giving – “dan” in Hinduism – that doesn’t require a return.
Giving can also be instrumentally rational. That means that as a condition of the gift, there are expectations. Giving can be a means to an end, for example, trying to end poverty.
In my book, Disquieting Gifts, I explored different motivations for giving in New Delhi. And I found that the impulse to give was tempered by its regulation. Charity organizations tend to bring giving under rational control. In some ways, the instrumentally rational world of institutions is both against the freedom of impulsive gifts, and it also tries to harness its momentum. Giving to institutions raises issues of accountability and questions of whether money has been well spent.
What did you find to be the overwhelming motivation for giving in New Delhi?
As an anthropologist and an ethnographer, I am interested in the motivations of why people give. In my research in India in 2004, I studied people who gave informally outside the boundaries of institutional structures. I was interested in what motivated them, why they did what they did and how they thought about what they were doing. Most people didn't consider the work that they were doing humanitarian. They just thought it was dan. The idea behind dan, as I mentioned, is that it is a gift that doesn't require a return. Much of that informed the way people practiced giving.
But at the same time, in contemporary India, new wealth has produced arguments for harnessing charitable efforts into more instrumentally, rational forms. There is a movement to institutionalize Indian philanthropy. This is where the idea of the "worthy recipient" comes in. It can be used to govern philanthropy.
I was interested in the tension between the impulse to give and the regulation of the gift in that project.
What does it mean to regulate giving? What does that look like?
Legal frameworks can have great influence over the regulation of philanthropy. The fact that we have 501c3s in the United States encourages people to give through tax breaks. Some governments outsource their welfare programs to nonprofits. Governments often believe that nonprofits can travel the last mile in places that don't have a reliable infrastructure.
Regulating giving essentially refers to defining what is an acceptable donation practice. Governments can regulate nonprofit giving within their borders and across borders. Some governments feel threatened by the work of NGOs and they enact laws to restrict philanthropy. That can seem like a loss if an NGO is no longer able to operate in a certain place or receive donations.
Are there specific examples of that you’ve looked at?
Well, my current project is on the regulation of philanthropy in India. I'm looking at a decade of legal reform in India, that some civil society groups argue has really hurt human rights organizations, particularly those which have been targeted by the state. Some have had foreign donations restricted, funds frozen, and some foreign NGOs have had to leave the country. Anything considered “anti-national” is suspect.
What is the government's case for restricting aid?
Most cases have to do with what the government considers a threat – politically or to its legitimacy: when the government views the activities of a certain group as interfering with the political sovereignty of the nation-state.
Is there merit to that?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. National laws govern how NGOs operate in specific settings. Some laws restrict philanthropy across national borders, others encourage it. Regulation doesn’t have to be a problem unless certain types of organizations get sanctioned and philanthropic funds restricted. Humanitarianism is a space of critique. NGOs can expose governmental failures, to provide social welfare or care for citizens, for example.
That's what ethnographers and anthropologists, and social scientists like me study. We look at giving and it's regulation in a historical and political context. In the case of India, I am exploring how NGOs advocate for civil society to create an enabling environment for the charitable and nonprofit sector, and how the government restricts certain practices and encourages others.
How does this idea of international aid develop around the world?
In the 1960s, the UN was tasked with preserving peace and security during the decolonization era. In the 1990s, during the early years of globalization, a global associational revolution took place. International aid was given to NGOs during this time instead of state governments. This was partly because states were considered unreliable recipients. Donors were wary of corrupt states and of clientelism internationally. The idea of giving to grassroots groups became very popular.
Since then, there has been a new global trend. There has been a crackdown on NGOs. Some call it a global counter-associational movement. States have cracked down on civil society groups in Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, and India.
In terms of the international legal framework for aid, international humanitarian laws guide when countries and institutions can step in and help others. New forms of international authority have emerged based on these humanitarian principles. For example, in response to NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which was considered the first “humanitarian war,” the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty wrote a report called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The report articulated that every state has a duty to protect its population. The inability to provide care for citizens justifies intervention by the international community. It was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005.
Right. And things continue to change. One major thing seems to be media coverage that brings all of these issues that are so far away right to us.
Absolutely. I completely agree. I mean, the media has brought human suffering into homes through technology. It has made it really easy to garner rapid support in emergencies. It facilitates donations with the click of the mouse. But the media also has the potential to produce what's called compassion fatigue.
I'm particularly interested in the boundaries between institutionally mediated giving and philanthropic practices that fly under the radar or don't fit into the boundaries of institutions. Community social welfare occurs in this framework, which was heightened during the early months of the COVID pandemic. I noticed in my own community, neighborhood groups organized donations of food services like grocery shopping and even check-ins for the elderly.
This was completely outside of any organization or nonprofit, and it was very immediate and powerful. And this sort of giving potentially builds solidarity and is comparable to immediate responders in any emergency. It's usually done by people who are there, rather than institutions from afar.
It seems that increasingly, philanthropy is being critiqued. How do you think philanthropy will continue to evolve to respond to these more recent objections?
You are right. There are growing critiques about the capacity for big philanthropy to solve society's most pressing concerns. Some ask if philanthropy increases social inequality.
They have increasing power in society. States have relinquished many of their responsibilities for social welfare, and this is where nonprofits and philanthropic groups step in to fill the gap.
Personally, I think that increased taxes and broad-based social welfare programs that help everyone instead of the patchwork approach of philanthropy might be a better solution to growing inequality. Nonprofits are a huge category that can include hospitals, schools, as well as foundations and charities. Philanthropy is also a large category. And it's good to distinguish between small-scale informal philanthropic responses and the work of much larger institutions, which is called big philanthropy.
Big philanthropy can influence social policy because of its financial resources. Money talks, so to speak. And it may maintain the status quo in the interests of the elites. Perhaps we need new democratic structures to regulate philanthropy, to ensure it serves the public broadly and not special interests. We should address the issue of how inequality is potentially perpetuated by philanthropy itself. There are some exciting ideas floating around in this arena of new structures. Basic income schemes are really a modern form of an institutionalized free gift that assumes that those in need will do the best to put resources where they see fit. Taxing large corporations for social welfare purposes is another form.
In India, there's a movement to create what's called a social stock exchange to support organizations that would include nonprofits and social enterprises, corporations that pride themselves on prioritizing social and environmental missions over profits. So, this creative thinking is of interest to me. Addressing questions about inequality and redistribution of wealth is essential to any conversation about contemporary philanthropy.