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 Medium's Power to Persuade
by Claire Potter
June 24, 2021
This interview with Claire Potter, professor of history at the New School for Social Research and the co-executive editor of Public Seminar, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you define alternative media versus mainstream media?
Claire | Sure. Alternative media has taken a little journey from the mid-century to now.
You can look to newsletters like I. F. Stone's Weekly, or the alternative weeklies of the 1960s produced by the New Left or by feminists. Even the Village Voice was seen as an alternative to corporate news. What alternative media does, that the mainstream doesn’t do, is speak directly to you. Alternative media chooses its audience and it speaks directly to the needs of that audience. It makes itself accessible to that body. And by doing that, it works against the larger structures of power, like politics or corporations.
The other thing I would say is that alternative media has a broad range of forms. It is not just the newsletter, but also radio, direct mail or internet blogs. In general, alternative media operates as a counterweight to the stories being told in the mainstream, which is why it is so powerful today, not just on the right, but on the left.
Are the funding models or business models distinctly different from their mainstream counterparts?
That's a great question. Back in 1952, Izzy Stone was the first person to crowdfund a publication. He's been fired from the last progressive newspaper that will employ him. This is the McCarthy era, and he's more or less blacklisted from the mainstream press and he doesn't know what to do.
He decides to take his severance and start his own newsletter. He takes out a little ad in the New York Times that says for $5 a year, I will write a four-page newsletter for you every week. He gets mailing lists from progressive publications and sends out flyers all over the place.
Miraculously, people start writing him back: all of these envelopes with a $5 bill in them come to his house. He gets some from Hungary. He gets some from Japan.
J. Edgar Hoover subscribes, just to keep an eye on Stone. These $5 bills add up so that Izzy and his wife, and eventually an intern, produce a four-page newsletter every week. He actually makes as much money as he's ever made in a regular job, and this sort of funding model carries itself forward to something like Substack, for example. If you haven't found an investor with a hundred thousand dollars, maybe you can get 20,000 people who have $5 to give you.
I'm curious how you see partisanship reveal itself through alternative media. In the description of the origins of alternative media, it sounds like a “left” reaction to the cultural atmosphere in the United States — but the right does alternative media really well. How do you view partisanship here?
Today, we see the far-right and some conservatives saying, “No one will print the truth about us, so we have to have our own outlets.” This has been true since the 1930s. Conservatives have consistently believed that in order to tell the truth, they need to have separate publications.
This is why conservatives like Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich develop and perfect the model of the mailing list. Richard Viguerie starts his mailing list in 1964 by going to the FEC and copying down as many names of people who contributed to Barry Goldwater's political campaign as he can. He gets like 12,000 of those and that's where he starts. As the sixties and seventies progress, and culture war issues begin to emerge, Viguerie comes to understand that if you promote a conservative social issue, you aren’t just promoting conservatism, you can get more people on your mailing list.
So it's a win-win. You can collect money to support the 1977 Briggs amendment in California, which is meant to keep homosexuals out of the public schools, and by collecting money, you will also get addresses so that you can begin to pinpoint where to send more political direct mail. It’s efficient because you send this alternative media to the Republicans who already want to hear from you and you activate them. In the 1960s, we see the move of “direct marketing” from advertising to politics, and partisan alternative media like radio, TV, and newsletters feed that machine.
I read this book called Messengers of the Right a while ago that really leans into him.
I’m not sure this is an important question, but I'm wondering if you think founders and producers of this alt-media are true believers?
I actually think all of these people are true believers. I mean, one of the things that we have seen revealed about MAGA Republicans is they actually do seriously believe things that seem outlandish to many of us. But that has always been true. For example, the idea in the 1950s that America was riddled with communists and that those communists were going to take down the Catholic church, was all ideology and nothing to do with facts on the ground. Now, a lot of it was also promoted by the federal government, which made it seem more real--and that is similar to what happened in the last presidency.
What I think changes over time is the money to be made from alternative media once it goes on the internet. You know, publications like William F. Buckley's National Review always operated in the red. The Buckley family supported that for decades. Similarly, Phyllis Schlafly's book, A Choice, Not an Echo, is not a moneymaker. She writes it because she wants to be a player in the Republican party as Goldwater is on the rise. And, in fact, it makes her into a player.
So these alternative media publications in general, are not really making money until we get to the internet. Then, all of a sudden the capacity to distribute ideas very widely and the ability to collect data that lets you know who's interested and who's not begins to become very profitable.
For example, Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report — he is working in the gift shop at CBS. His father comes out to see him and tells him he has to do something with his life, buys him a computer, and tells him to figure it out. Matt starts doing an email newsletter that begins to be so popular he then builds a website for himself. And by building that website, he can then run ads. That site, which still looks pretty much the way it looked originally, is still probably the most profitable media property of its size in the country.
When somebody like Drudge, for example, transitions from newsletter to site to show or, whatever that path might look like, does it stop being alternative news at some point? When you start running as many ads CNN, does it change?
That's another important shift: alternative media becomes corporate too. What preserves its identity as the “alternative” is its opposition to the majority view and its ability to sell itself as made especially for you, rather than a mass audience.
Opposition to the status quo is really the common thread over time. You see that right now in something like One America News or Newsmax or Fox, which actually going after their own people if they deviate from the far-right line. If somebody has become the establishment within conservatism, then they're not reliable anymore and you have to go after them because that's what demonstrates loyalty to the audience.
Do you find that sort of aggressive behavior on the left?
Yes, you do. Nowadays it's hard to know where the left ends and the right begins. I mean, Glenn Greenwald seems to have completely and totally lost his mind and he used to be thought of as the ultimate progressive journalist, certainly in his Snowden years and in the years in which he was co-founder of the Intercept.
But, although you find it on the left, the left alternative media has a broader ecosystem. Five-Thirty-Eight relies on research and data and getting smart people to crunch numbers. That is not sensational at all, but it's written for political junkies. It's written for people who care more about how politics happen than the average Joe. They want to be in the know. But you also have the growth of the "dirtbag left:" mostly male populists who go after people who aren’t left enough, and who seem to have a particularly tough time dealing with women.
I was waiting for the dirtbag left mention.
I mean, I would count podcasts, which the dirtbag left specializes in, as alternative media. A lot of that style comes out of talk radio and sports radio. There's a kind of edgy, nasty, dark humor that draws an audience in because they are projecting a lot of the hostility that their audience is feeling. The dirt-bag left uses the same techniques — which is to incite paranoia, to attack people groundlessly
People can tune in and say, "I'm right to be this angry because Joe Rogan is angry too. He thinks I ought to be angry." You see the same style with Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon.
The link between right-wing alternative media and politicians themselves is now so tight that they share a similar style, and I think that isn’t true on the left. It has become a matter of pride among right-wing politicians to say, "I'm not respectable like those other people in government. I don't want to be. I want to be like ordinary people." Which is how you get Ivy League guys like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz pretending that they have just stepped off a ranch somewhere.
Do you feel like success requires a star? A lot of these examples are centered around a personality or a persona — that obviously makes audience building easier, but is it necessary?
Absolutely. I think charismatic individuals are at the heart of alternative media. If you're not going to get an audience by getting investors and advertisers and shilling yourself out, what you have to be able to do is put forward a convincing point of view that creates audience support--and that requires a persona. I think we could go back as early as the 1930s, and Father Coughlin on the radio. He was an anti-Semite, an America Firster, and he positioned himself as one of the chief defenders of the Catholic church against the New Deal, which he increasingly saw as a form of communism. Father Coughlin was so popular that people used to say that you could walk through a working-class neighborhood while he was broadcasting and never miss a single word because every radio in every house was tuned to him. And he had a magnetic personality, so yes I think personalities are important.
Then, sometimes you get a personality who stays in the background. I think about someone like Paul Weyrich. He doesn't actually put himself out there as some kind of immediate, conservative star: he works behind the scenes to create other stars. It is Paul Weyrich who persuades Jerry Falwell, that the Christian broadcasting he's doing should be a national network and that it should be tied to a political project. And so Falwell becomes the national figure identified with the Moral Majority, not Weyrich. By the 1980s, there is this whole range of political consultants whose job is to make someone else the star — Lee Atwater is one on the right, Joe Trippi on the left.
When you bring up someone like Greenwald, it’s a bit hard to separate his reporting from what he thinks. Is this problematic for journalism?
I think that's always been a characteristic of alternative media: much of it has always been opinion writing. But it’s also part of the decline of objectivity as an intellectual ideal. For decades, mainstream newspapers were clinging to objectivity, even though many of their reporters and editors didn't believe in it after the 1960s. Nevertheless, it remained a style that distinguished mainstream, trustworthy news from alternative news or propaganda. Alternative media has never pretended to be objective: it always has a political or social task to perform.
Alternative media is defined by the fact that it actively takes a point of view and it calls to others with that same point of view. Now, I think we're seeing a new phase of that because of social media where alternative media outlets can get to you whether you want them or not through channels that you've already got open. You don't have to choose it. It chooses you.
So there's one whole audience for alternative media outlets that are already persuaded, and then there are the others they are actively trying to draw in. I think this dynamic really came to a head in the January 6th insurrection. It wasn't just those who committed the insurrection who were culpable for the lies that drove that disaster. It was the layers and layers and layers of people around them who would never dream of doing anything like that, who nevertheless falsely believed that Joe Biden had not won the 2020 election. And that's actually a pretty scary inflection point.
What do you think that turns into?
Well, I think it turns into a situation in which there is a potential for fascism.
It doesn't actually even matter what information is being conveyed. It's the warmth of the medium and the sense of connection that draws people in. I think unless we are able to make decisions as a society about what we want our media world to look like, we're in danger of this country fragmenting, not over reasonable differences of opinion, but between people who believe things that are true and people who believe things that are false. We may already be there.
Our shared reality has disappeared. Do you have a long view of what you would like to see, how you think this should function?
I'm one of the people who think that Section 230 needs to be revised. Right now, platforms cannot be held accountable for what's on them. If Facebook spreads a defamatory or dangerously false story it is not responsible at all. Furthermore, Facebook is making a lot of money doing that. I think one of the things we have to remember about alternative media that spreads disinformation is that it's highly, highly profitable. There are all kinds of people who spread disinformation, not because they are partisan, but because they know that they can make money from the clicks.
Section 230 imagined the internet as this neutral place where experimentation would produce great things, and that people should be free to do that without censorship from anyone. That world is gone: we need to reckon with the world that we're in, which is one in which people are using the protections of Section 230 to make a ton of money by doing profoundly destructive things.
I am on the side of people who believe that the internet needs to be much more highly regulated, as it is in Europe and Australia. I think the other thing we're seeing is that by allowing big tech companies, particularly Facebook, to make their own rules and find their own solutions we are not getting ourselves to a better world. For example, Facebook has put severe limits on distributing political stories. That's their solution. Well, that means that somebody like me can't actually distribute her own writing on Facebook, even though what I am writing is as true as I can make it, even though it's not politically or socially irresponsible. Because it's "political", Facebook won't distribute it. I can't even pay Facebook to distribute it. So, Facebook is not taking responsibility for circulating good information either.
They are sticking with no information.
Yes. One of the things that's interesting is we saw Twitter and Facebook finally throwing Donald Trump off after the January 6th insurrection. It has been very difficult for Donald Trump to get back on the air in any way. Okay. So what does this teach us? That alternative media is actually now in the driver's seat in terms of regulating itself. And I don't think that's a good thing. I don't think we should expect people who are making billions of dollars from fake news to even want to know what is right and what is wrong.
Rather we need to make some hard decisions about requiring people to tell the truth. The fact that Donald Trump and his allies lied and lied and lied and lied about the election and that the internet just spit it out is just horrifying. I think this is a sphere for government action because it is producing severe threats to public safety. And the FCC has been largely toothless since the 1990s. I think we need a revived FCC to begin to promote ethical guidelines and rules to ensure that what is actually being spread over alternative media is responsible.
Our physical reality and our online reality are so blended now. The way Trump feels absent because he doesn’t have a Twitter account is actually jarring to me. It’s also scary, as you mentioned, that some guy in Palo Alto can turn off a President.
I think that's right, but this is also not a situation that we had, for example, in the early years of blogging. Blogging starts around 1998 and begins to peter out by about 2012. In that interim period, you had these very lively, mixed communities of people talking to, and fact-checking, each other. When I had a blog and I published something that was controversial, it would get linked to by a conservative blogger, his followers would come over and read my blog and they would leave comments, and then my commenters would respond to them. And then they'd go over to the other guy's blog. Politically, there was a lot of intermingling.
People don't really talk on the telephone anymore either. A lot of our political campaigning was not done in person anymore, even before the pandemic. So much of it is telephoning, postcard writing, texting, and phone banking, using lists that exclude most people who are not known to be supporters already It separates us.
I have often thought that when somebody says, I don't know anybody who thinks the vaccine is safe, it's probably true. And for that, we can thank the expert segmentation of audiences by alternative media. For that, we can thank these "filter bubbles” we live in. From that perspective, it's not difficult for people to say, "Of course the election was stolen, nobody believes Joe Biden is president."
It's also another example of these corporations having such tremendous power. They decide what we see in our feeds.
I think that's true, and we didn't just get here in the last five years. There has been this moment of, "Oh my god, how did this happen?" But in fact, we got here over a period of 75 years in which audiences gradually moved to accept alternative media as a truth-telling instrument.
And in some cases, alternative media does have a history of telling truer stories than the mainstream media. But there has been a cost across the board. The acceptance of the idea that the establishment is always lying and that alternative media will tell us what we really need to know has been decades in the making. That’s why writing history matters: people need to understand that if they're going to undo this, there are specific lessons in what worked and what didn't work that can help us take a look at where we are today and change it.