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
When Lies Rule
by Eric Alterman
June 21, 2021
This interview with Eric Alterman, CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism and the "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Do you mind giving us a little background on yourself and your work?
Eric | I mean, I'm old, so it's kind of long. I think of it as I've had three careers simultaneously. I've worked in journalism my whole adult life, but it’s been a long time since I thought of myself as a journalist. I was when I was younger, but I haven't been in a long time.
I was the media columnist for The Nation for 25 years. I've worked in liberal think tanks for most of my professional life, starting when I was an intern right out of college, almost 40 years ago. And I'm an academic; I have a master's in international relations and a Ph.D. in U.S. history. I also have a degree in Jewish studies. I've now written 11 books.
I'm quite pessimistic about the future of journalism. Until recently, I was a professor of journalism, and when journalism students would come to me and say, “I want to major in journalism, “ I would say, “I'll advise you, but only if you don't major in journalism.” I did that for two reasons. One is I don't like students majoring in journalism. I want them to major in some liberal arts subject where they'll learn something that they won't have a chance to learn for the rest of their lives. I believe in liberal arts education.
But the second reason is that, for the majority of people who will go into journalism, they're not going to be able to make a living anymore. That economic model has broken down. You have to be both enormously lucky and enormously talented to make a living in such a way that you can have a family. You might be able to make a small living, to get a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, but the old fashion career in journalism where you could have two kids and they would go to college and you could live a comfortable middle-class life, doesn't seem to be available to many future journalists.
Thirteen years ago, I wrote an article in the New Yorker about the death of the American newspaper, and things have accelerated so much more than I could have predicted back then. I'm pessimistic about the profession, but I'm also upset and concerned, which is what I write about more than anything, about what we lose as a society when we lose the kind of journalism that we've depended on in the past. I'm kind of a depressing person to talk to about this topic.
Most people are, to be honest. What do you think we lose most, as a society, as this career dies?
Newspapers are the main place where reporting happens. Television news is notorious for not producing any news, so we are just losing an enormous amount of news and information that people need to know about their lives, their government, and the corporations that affect their lives.
The journalism jobs that have appeared in recent years are concentrated mostly on the coasts. These are jobs at the Washington Post, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and websites in New York and Washington.
They get their news from social media, which has no means of verification. It's like a full-time job for people to get good information because there is so much nonsense that dominates the discourse.
Television news is notorious for not producing news, as you said. But, as local news sources are increasingly squeezed, it seems that this is where most people's news is coming from. How has that affected the way we think about politics?
It's a big question. When I was growing up until I was in my twenties, there were three TV news broadcasts every night that about half the country would watch at the same time: Walter Cronkite, The Huntley–Brinkley Report, Eric Sevareid, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw. Young people never developed that habit. By the 1990s, more people listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio than listened to all three network news combined.
Now, everybody is walking around with a different picture in their head. The advantage of that was for places like Fox News who created false pictures that are consistent with the prejudices of the audiences they seek to reach, and they keep expanding on that. Television news on a national level became about celebrity and scandal because that's what sells.
See, the internet did something very important in this regard. The internet made it possible to specifically target the people you want it to advertise to. It destroyed the idea of a general news program or newspaper. The ads are not well targeted, so why pay for them? The only content that really pays for itself these days is celebrity, sports, and scandal. All the rest of the news is done because the people producing it want to do the right thing as journalists, but it loses money because it brings in no advertising. And fewer and fewer people are willing to lose money to do the right thing.
I want to go back to the loss of critical thinking skills you mentioned earlier. Is that tied to the media environment we live in now? Do we lack critical thinking skills because we tend to hear one narrative, all the time?
Yeah. Again, there used to be a shared reality in this country. There used to be, and this is something young people might find hard to imagine, a class of people who felt a public responsibility to the country.
A lot of them were wealthy lawyers, they had a lot of bad ideas, but they saw themselves as public service. They would go in and out of government trying to do what they thought was the right thing. These are the people who decided that Richard Nixon had to go or the Vietnam War had to end. We don't have that anymore. The idea that there's an establishment that you can depend on that will prevent the country from going off the rails is gone.
And that is how you end up with George Bush's war or Donald Trump's entire presidency; there's nobody out there to act as guard rails. I can go on and on about why they were a problem — they lived with institutionalized racism and sexism for a very long time — but they prevented the country from veering where it is today, where lies rule, and fascism is a serious threat.
When did those guardrails die?
It's a great question. There's one man – do you know the name, Clark Clifford?
No.
Clark Clifford was a banker. But first, he was an advisor to President Harry Truman's campaign that won the election in 1948. He helped put together the postwar world with Truman after Roosevelt died. He then went on to advise almost every single Democratic president. He was one of the so-called “wiseman,” who told Lyndon Johnson that he had to end the Vietnam War in 1968.
But then, he got involved in a banking scandal called the BCCI scandal in the 1990s. The bank was involved with breaking a lot of laws including money laundering, bribery, and supporting terrorism, and he was the public face of that bank. Everyone looked at him and said, this was the man we trusted to be the advisor of the establishment. Now, he's gone over to the other side to get rich, lie to people, and abuse their trust. A lot of people took that as a symbol of the collapse of the establishment. So, I would say the collapse of the guardrails happened in the 1990s.
I would also put it on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — both of whom mocked the idea of public responsibility. Margaret Thatcher once said, there's no such thing as society, there is only the individual. Reagan wasn't as smart, he couldn't have thought of that himself, but he believed that too. I would say this is when the idea of a public good died; this is when smart, ambitious kids began to go to Wall Street, rather than the government.
We just did a month on philanthropy and talked a lot about that stark mental shift. The ramifications it has had are quite impressive. Do you think the way news has changed is related to the way politicians act? If the news is getting more sensational, are politicians getting more sensational to get airtime?
Fox News has become the ruler of the Republican Party. The party works for Fox News, not the other way around. If Fox News is going to disapprove of something, the Republican Party won't do it, and in that sense, they define reality and are the most powerful force in right-wing politics. Of course, Facebook is important, but the right-wing media is what defines reality for Republican voters and, and Republican politicians follow the voters.
If you are talking about CNN or the New York Times, they don't want to be seen as being on anybody's side. They want everybody to be able to read them. CNN, which is very interested in making money, will book people on their program to appeal to the far right, even if they know that they're lying. They don't care so much if something's true, so long as everyone feels that they have a voice. So people like Kayleigh McEnany and Jeffrey Lord, and former Trump campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski were all hired during the campaign to lie for Donald Trump.
Now the New York Times is much better than CNN, even though they're often bunched together as the establishment media. The New York Times tries to tell the truth, but because of the ideology of journalistic objectivity, it doesn't tell you what's true and what's false, it gives you both sides.
Very rarely will NYT or CNN call anyone a liar. They are so nervous about being accused of having a liberal bias. There has been this enormous attack on the media for decades about a liberal bias that it allows right-wingers to get away with an enormous amount.
There's an article in the New York Times on the website right now that demonstrates this. There is an article about whether or not democracy is in peril. It basically says that Republicans say it isn’t and Democrats think it is. Well, the threat to democracy is coming from the Republicans. They're shutting down the voting sites. They're passing restrictive voting laws. I mean, there is truth here somewhere.
And all of this is worse on Facebook and Youtube and Twitter, where the websites take no responsibility for what is on the site. They are reluctant to allow things that incite violence — which is why Trump has been kicked off. But, as far as truth goes, they say, “We're not the newspaper. We're not responsible.” The most clicked-on stories, every day, are from extreme right-wing sources.
It seems like kind of a lot of the issues come down to us giving people what they want. Maybe journalism shouldn’t do that.
I published my first article in 1982 when I was still in college. One of the things I'm most proud about in my career is that I never once heard from any of my bosses how many clicks I got. I have no idea how popular any article was. Every once in a while, some editor would say to me, “Could you please write about this instead of that?” I sort of prided myself in not following the news and instead of writing about what people weren’t paying attention to. That sort of career would be unthinkable for someone today. I don't think that's possible anymore; I don't think the institutions have a willingness to support that.
What other trends you have noticed?
Here's what I think. It used to sound a little crazy if you said that fascism was a threat to this country, but not anymore. I mean, first of all, fascism is different wherever it appears. We aren't going to get Nazis running our government. But, what fascism does require, first and foremost, is lies. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, and author of The Origins of Totalitarianism explained that it's not so much the lie itself that you want people to believe, rather, you want them to believe that they can't believe anything.
I think we were getting close to that under Donald Trump. If you don't believe in facts, then you can say the things that Tucker Carlson says every night – and his show is the single most highly rated show on cable television, by the way.
The thing I care most about is trying to get people to pay attention to the source of their news. When they read something or hear something, evaluate whether or not the person speaking to them is someone who can be trusted. I want people to have sources of news that they can trust and to go back to them and to support them. These institutions have lost the ability to support themselves economically. It's up to people who value them to support them. If you believe in being a good citizen and living your life in truth, then you have to pay for these services. And that takes some work. I'm asking people to do that work.
Do you think that's possible? Are there enough people who want to seek out news that's “good for them” – or are our brains broken?
My fear and my feeling and my belief is that it is becoming a very elite enterprise. There's enormous intellectual inequality between people who have the time and the inclination and the resources to do that and people who don't. The institutions that will thrive are those that play to that inequality. I mean, that's why the New Yorker is so healthy. It has the readers who have the most amount of disposable income. The advertisers want to reach that audience, so it becomes a virtuous circle.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you are one of those people who was lucky enough to be part of the informational elite, then you should think of yourself as having a responsibility to all the people who don't have that privilege. You don't want to live in a society that's kind of a gated community between the 10% and everybody else. You don’t want to live in a society where only the top 10% or so of people are getting quality information and everybody else consumes crap. That's a dangerous place to live.