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
Do We Want to Be a Nation or Not?
by Amanda Lotz
July 6, 2021
This interview with Amanda Lotz, professor in the Digital Media Research Center at the Queensland University of Technology, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Amanda | I've been a professor of media studies since 2000. I spent 13 years at the University of Michigan before coming to Australia a few years ago. Most of my research has been exploring how digital technologies have changed the business of the television industry, but more recently I've been working on a project that has compared those transitions across multiple media industries.
frank | I’d like to start with the history of cable news and what the business model of cable news looked like before it was disrupted.
Well, I think we can point to some particular moments. Cable news really comes into its own around the Gulf War.
At that time it has a lot of expenses because it has people on the ground. What is significant about cable news at that moment? Functionally, cable becomes a way for people to know what is going on all the time. This was difficult to accomplish before the internet. Cable steps in and starts to serve that role. But, once the war ends, there is less of a need to know what is going on all the time. We gradually slide into a period of time in which the cheapest way to fill those hours is just to have people talking. It becomes a channel people have in the background. It collects decent audiences, especially throughout the day, as a result, but it isn’t mass viewing at any time, so it needs to keep its cost down while attracting attention — that is pretty much the business model. In times of major news events, the broadcast channels also devote hours to news, so even these spikes in attention are somewhat muted.
Even when new wars emerge it seems the latter business model is sustained.
Hurricanes, missing airplanes ... I find it interesting to think about why people still watch cable news. Think about the moments that are part of our cultural history – many pre-cable: the Kennedy assassination, man landing on the moon, 9/11. Think about the way you remember television’s role in those moments and the idea that people are crowded around televisions to find out what is going on. I don't think another one of those moments is going to happen again. I don’t think we have wrestled with that. The Boston Marathon bombings were the first kind of those moments I noticed where people turned to their phones instead of television news.
There are images of people sitting around their TVs in the days following the Kennedy assassination, just waiting for there to be news.
That was the nature of the technology at the time. We were all just waiting and cable thrived on those events. But, now there are these technologies that can shoot that information to us the second it happens. You don't need to sit around and wait and find out what happened because you will get a notification once something does.
In some ways, it's kind of astonishing that cable news has continued to have the presence that it's had over the last five or ten years. Smartphones have become quite ubiquitous and news organizations have figured out strategies to use them. And correspondingly, if we really look at the kind of content that has become central to cable news over the same period, we see how much it has moved away from providing information.
To think of those moments is also to recognize a very shared reality. Now, the alert on my phone is probably different from yours. Do you feel like that’s problematic to our understanding of ‘truth’?
I don't know that the source matters so much in those crisis moments of notification. I think what matters is the telling of the story. One of the challenges, especially for cable and television news generally, is trying to maintain their relevance in these moments. They are trying to keep delivering audience attention to commercials so they need to keep people watching.
It is those narratives of speculation that do differ and they do matter a lot. I was not in the country for the last election, but I was regularly watching the numbers. It was very clear from my Twitter feed that people were being told a story by newscasts they were watching, and it was a story that wasn't apparent to me just by watching the numbers.
That's an example, where, even though everybody was reporting the exact same numbers, there were really different stories being told about what it meant and what was happening: These votes aren't in, and it means this, and so on. The variations in the narratives the different channels used to fill in the blanks of the information clearly do matter.
That’s one of the rare moments when people actually are watching the TV again. Some sort of comradery is happening. Presidential elections, the Superbowl...
Right, they are less common and also unpredictable.
Those sorts of media events still exist. And indeed those are moments through which we make sense of our culture. But it hasn’t been the case that US television has offered information about the world around us not grounded in reality until recently.
In your research of the transition of news from TV to digital – have you found that it’s necessarily good or bad? Or is it just about adapting and understanding?
It depends. It depends a lot on where you are. I would describe the state of things in the United States as a moment of advanced crisis, largely because of the lack of a robust public media system. In other places, digital technologies have expanded choice and access to public service media. Notably, most people in the US report getting their news from television, but it is important to keep in mind that the journalism television offers, especially in recent decades, is quite thin. Most of the investigative reporting, the uncovering of information that affects people’s lives, has been done by newspapers – whether delivered on paper or online.
I've been doing a bit of comparative work and the economic issues are more or less the same everywhere. Advertisers used to make it possible for local newspapers to exist, and those advertisers have found a better place to get attention than newspapers. That is the core financial problem you see in most countries.
The countries that have been subsidizing their papers are doing okay. In parts of Europe local newspapers were still pretty robust and rich in information, so people kept buying them. In other places, like the US and Australia, many of those local papers had been bought up by chains and had cost-cutting to improve them as investments (stocks) during the decades before the internet. That cost-cutting had been sucking the quality of them down over the decades.
No one has figured out the economics of how to make local information work without advertisers paying for it, but a lot of that is continued effort to save newspapers instead of saving local journalism. The changed competitive environment has diminished newspapers as strong investment-grade stocks from the norms of the latter half of the 20th century. Local news can be profitable, but not like it was, and non-profit approaches are far more likely to succeed and to provide the type of journalism communities need. My critique is that we've been looking in the wrong place. How you fund it has to be the first part of the conversation.
We need to start looking for a solution in terms of how to fund journalism without advertisers.
When you say public media system, what does that mean specifically?
In Western Europe and much of the world, a public media system is mostly related to broadcasting – it is funded sometimes out of tax money. Sometimes public service media is also funded through advertising, but generally public service media systems’ goal is not simply to try to make as much money as possible – as the case of commercial news, but that there is some “public service ethos” — there are higher standards other than just what can make the most money that are part of determining success in that system.
Public service media is highly trusted in many countries and the most reliable source. In Australia for example, our newspapers are probably more like Fox News; many feature sensational and misleading headlines that seem to me more like an American tabloid. But, there is a publicly funded broadcaster, the ABC, that has no commercials, and that entity has continued to exist as the most trusted source of information. Its job is to make sure Australians are informed. The primary focus of commercial news – whether newspapers or television is not to inform us, but to return a profit.
That trust is important. One of the things that political scientists see as they look around at the crisis in disinformation is how it connects to partisanship in different countries and their news sources.
In countries with a robust public system, you don't see that as much. Certainly, everyone has their critique of the national broadcaster, but at the end of the day, there is a sense, by most of the population, that it can be trusted.
Do you think it's like a uniquely American problem because of the first amendment? Our particular hangup on “freedom”.
It's the fact that we don't fund our public media system. NPR and PBS, are funded at an equivalent of $1.40 per person in the U.S. while countries such as the UK, Norway, and Sweden spend more than $100 per person. That makes a difference. The U.S. developed a commercial media system first. Much of the world was first public service-based and then opened itself to commercials. I think that is very evident in our history.
We’ve spoken to a lot of academics who seem hesitant about government funding of local news because of the fear of government influence on the material.
That's silly. Many countries have decades of experience illustrating how you can set things up to run independently. And it's we the people who do let this hesitancy develop.
So I disagree with the notion that an independent public system can't exist. What NPR manages to do is pretty impressive. The audience of many of its shows is several times that of cable news, but it doesn't get amplified in the same way because it isn’t shilling provocative nonsense
The fact the U.S. public media system is underfunded is a big problem, but the way the system is set up is really interesting. The U.S. has this model based in communities. It was set up to not be centralized, but to prioritize communities. I think that is actually a really important feature of how the U.S. public media system could help solve the lack of local journalism now.
When I was in the U.S., I was based in Michigan. Michigan Radio broke a number of major stories, like the Flint water crisis, and the gymnastic sexual abuse scandal, because newspapers were either gone or they were centralized somewhere and weren't doing investigative reporting anymore. So, the public radio station broke it.
Part of the problem is that we continue to think that news has to come from a newspaper. That is not the case. There needs to be a more encompassing view of journalism – journalism is journalism whether you're listening to it, you're reading it, or you're watching it. And now we have a technology that lets you move abundantly across them.
Do you think NPR and PBS are adapting through time? I feel like there’s something stagnant about them, or nostalgic even. Maybe that’s a positive in terms of audience trust. But I wonder about something new in that space to broaden the audience even further, or towards young people?
It is difficult to turn any institution, especially when it doesn't have money. I think the question becomes, how would you pay for that? Do you launch an entirely new public-funded entity? Or do you capitalize on the thing that exists and help it diversify its brand? It comes back to money. Money and leadership. I listen to a lot of U.S. NPR, and I think you are right that I don't see a lot of outreach to youth. I think I have seen NPR try harder on diversity, certainly than what you'd see on CNN or on a broadcast network and that has been more of a focus. But among any age group US public media consumption is fairly niche, but it is also backed by passion that leads to the donations that keep it afloat. So, I think there's evidence of trying to do things in new ways, but it comes down to money and leadership.
Are there people with money or leadership skills you find to look at for a way forward? Are you hopeful at all, or does the future look bleak?
There's an argument that it has to get really bad before it can get better, unfortunately.
We have had a very different 18 months here in Australia, a much greater collective response, and an acceptance of rules and policy for the good of the whole. Watching what happened last year in the U.S., you kind of have to wonder, if things fell apart that badly and there is still this scale of division, can it come back together? I don't know.
Again it comes back to money and leadership. It is hard to come together when people are afraid that they're not going to have a place to live or not going to be able to feed their kids. It's about having leaders who are inspiring images of connection and of continuity, rather than "us versus them." We have had societies for a long time, and we have some new technologies that are allowing us to divide ourselves in new ways, but we're still all pretty smart, so I haven’t given up hope.
Collapse is collapse I guess.