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
Working the Refs
by Matthew Pressman
June 21, 2021
This interview with Matthew Pressman, author of On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News and professor, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Matthew | I think of myself as a journalism historian. I got a Ph.D. in history from Boston University, but before that, I worked as a journalist for about eight years at Vanity Fair. At Vanity Fair, I did some writing and reporting about the state of the journalism business, and that led me to where I am in my career as a scholar and researcher; I focus on the business of news, journalistic values, and the intersection between journalism and politics.
frank | I am curious as to when we start to see reports of media bias?
Well, I think it's important to give the longer-term context to this question. The expectation that news should be unbiased is an abnormal expectation, both when you compare American journalism to journalism around the world, and when you compare the last 100 years to a longer view of American history.
There were many news sources and people chose the news source that fit their bias. It's not really until you get to the 20th century that American news consumers expect unbiased reporting.
The specific liberal media bias critique does have a specific genesis in the 1950s and 1960s, as most historians will tell you. That is when we see it gain traction as a talking point among many on the right. But it all starts, as I argue in my book, because there is a big change in how news is reported and presented: daily newspaper articles start to include more analysis. As reporters began to analyze the news, it left room for more people to call something biased.
What changed the coverage? Was it because the consumer expected something different?
I don't think it is a response to the audience’s demands as much as it is a response to market pressures. You start to see the professional ideal of objectivity emerging in the 1910s and 1920s, which is also the period where you see the total number of newspapers start to shrink. There are fewer competing newspapers in each city and no national news outlets at all. At this point, everything was local.
If there are fewer competing news outlets, then the papers that remain have a decent chance at attracting readers from all over the political spectrum. There was a rationale for them to try to have news that was considered down the middle. That is a big part of it.
It was also in part a push for professionalization in journalism. Journalists did not want to be seen as partisan hacks, as they had been for most of the 19th century. They embraced this code of not inserting personal opinions into news and remaining impartial. And this had been shown to be a successful commercial strategy.
Very interesting how that came back to bite everyone. This is sort of self-determined. Did TV news differ from print?
By the time TV news came along in the 1950s, the journalistic value of objectivity was really ingrained. I think that the broadcasters were kind of just following suit.
It made sense for them to embrace objectivity for a few different reasons. One is that they absolutely had access to the broadest possible audience, so like newspapers, they wanted to be down the middle so that they’d alienate as few people as possible.
But there was also the matter of The Fairness Doctrine, which was an FCC rule put into place in 1949 that applied to broadcasters who were using the public airwaves. It said that they had to give a reasonably balanced presentation of all sides of an issue. And if someone or some organization was being criticized on the air, they then needed to be given a chance to respond. That was a big inducement for broadcasters to embrace objectivity.
It seems like less than two decades between that FCC rule being embraced in earnest and Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr screaming at each other for sport.
Well, the Buckley-Vidal debate is a good example of how broadcasters tried to be objective in the Fairness Doctrine era: let ideological opponents slug it out and have the journalist sit back and try to be an impartial moderator. But like cable news today, it doesn’t help viewers be better informed. Even though the Fairness Doctrine was rescinded in 1987, I think the big three broadcast news networks are still trying to have an objective approach. In fact maybe one of the last redoubts of objectivity is the nightly national news programs. Maybe you would disagree, but I think a lot of the reports of objectivity's death are greatly exaggerated. There are still plenty of outlets and individual journalists who feel there's something worth preserving about it, even if there are pitfalls that come with it.
That's interesting. We've tried to adopt the Amanpour motto of “truthful, not neutral”, but it's, um, it's hard to do. You write a lot about parallels in the economy and in the market. Obviously digital is what we are faced with now. Do you see a path forward?
I think there are a lot of parallels between newspapers' responses to the economic challenges of the 1970s and the news media’s response to the economic challenges of the 21st century.
In both eras, there was an attempt to respond to the audience's desires much more – to find what people want and give it to them. Today, that results in stories with clickbait headlines, and more opinion content. That stuff tends to get traffic.
There is also this big expansion of what kinds of topics get covered. Digital sites are always expanding. It is no longer just New York Magazine, but also Vulture and The Cut and Grub Street. There was a similar expansion of the coverage areas that worked well for newspapers in the 70s. There are a lot of parallels, but certainly, this era is more challenging.
Viewers, or readers, dictate material. Now that’s sorted out via algorithm. It feels like a race to the bottom. I know how I look on social media to a bot, but I also know what I want that’s better than that.
I definitely don't think that serving up content that’s tailored to the audience’s desires is the best way or the only way forward. There are historical parallels here too. In the 1970s they obviously didn't have algorithms and AI, but they did have lots of reader surveys. And those people with an elevated sense of a journalistic mission would be devastated when the surveys showed what people liked most were the advice column and the crossword puzzle and things like that.
And obituaries!
People want to feel like they're getting something of value and not just empty calories, so to speak.
There should be a way to respond to what audiences want and news outlets I think have become better at communicating with their audiences and engaging in more of a back and forth. But clearly, there's a lot of content that, as you say, people may not know that they're interested in until they encounter it. That kind of enterprise journalism is really valuable from a business perspective as well as a public service perspective. Even if people aren't clicking on it as much, it can build loyalty. Readers might think, all right, I don't have time to read that in-depth investigative piece now, but I see that they did that story and it seems really good and worthy and it makes me feel better about supporting them with my monthly donation or subscription or whatever.
Not only does journalism face market problems. There is also a raging against journalists and media from politicians. Is it politically valuable for politicians to be anti-news?
It is definitely politically beneficial for them, otherwise, they wouldn't be doing it. That has a long history too. Famously Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew gained a lot of attention and stirred up their base by attacking the media for its supposed leftism and liberal bias. That's really been a central plank of Republican orthodoxy ever since. There was a substantial change in the Trump era in that the accusation was no longer simply that journalists are biased, but that they are fully making things up. The rhetoric became a lot more heated and hateful.
It's clearly advantageous for a few reasons. One obvious rationale is the “working the refs” theory — which means by telling journalists that they are being unfair, you are hoping that you can get them to bend over backward to be fair and make questionable calls in your favor to avoid being criticized.
And today, more so than in the 1960s and 1970s, there is this whole separate conservative media ecosystem, where right-wing politicians know they're going to get very favorable treatment. So it’s in their interest to discredit the mainstream outlets that have higher standards of accuracy and accountability and to drive people to ideologically motivated conservative outlets instead.
We interviewed Rick Perlstein a while ago. This quote from him stuck out to me, which is that it is a liberal value to believe in scientific procedural neutrality. Conservatives see that as a threat in itself. So why would you work to prove neutrality to them?
I think it's really hard because, for one thing, the conservative outlets are often playing by a different set of rules.
Whereas traditional media — even many outlets that are openly left-leaning--tends to make more genuine efforts to be fair, and editorial decisions usually aren’t made on the basis of ideological concerns. I think that is what Perlstein was getting at. It is sort of like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
When it comes to engaging with criticism, it is important to differentiate between good faith and bad faith criticism. There is so much kind of bad faith criticism out there that there's a temptation to dismiss it all. But I think that news outlets, even though they are in a diminished state, still have a lot of influence. They have a responsibility, I think, to be open to criticism, from all sides. Even if nine times out of ten the people screaming “liberal bias!” are basically trolling, it’s important to acknowledge when they do make a valid point, and to try to do better in the future.
Can anyone escape the perception of bias?
I hate to sound pessimistic, but probably not. Certainly not in the short term. If anything, it is going to be a generational change. I think improved media literacy will help. Even if news outlets are engaging with good faith critics, it's very unlikely they are going to change anyone's minds, and certainly not on a large scale. The New York Times is not going to be able to convince most conservatives that it's not a liberal newspaper, no matter what they do.
What else is grabbing your attention right now?
There are a couple of things that I feel don't get quite as much attention as they should. One is the issue of ad technology and the difficulty of monetizing certain types of content without advertising.
Many ad buyers in the digital space use software tools that prevent their ads from appearing next to what they consider controversial content. They call it “brand safety,” and there has been some excellent research showing how it works in practice. Often the most newsworthy content is controversial, meaning that the most newsworthy content can't get monetized. Advertisers do not want to be next to political coverage. They do not want to be next to coverage of LGBTq+ issues. They do not want to be next to coverage of violence or warfare or sexual violence.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I saw an ad the other day from E! News that said "pride month brought to you by Postmates."
I guess it's an improvement over the past where it was like, if the word lesbian or gay is on that page, it is blacklisted. Those were words in the past that advertisers did want to be next to.
Yeah, yeah. This is true.
But there are still lots of other categories of political news, including race-related content, that often gets blacklisted.
Wow. Well thank you for your time.