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
Reviving the Obituary
by Kristen Hare
July 20, 2021
This interview with Kristen Hare, a reporter with Poynter and the Tampa Bay Times, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Kristen | My background is in features writing. For the first 10 years of my career, I was at the St. Joseph Missouri News-Press, a daily newspaper, and the St. Louis Beacon, an online nonprofit, and I wrote obits regularly enough that I really grew to love and value the position and the work.
A few years back, there was a job opening at the Tampa Bay Times for an obit reporter. When I saw the position, I was like, “Oh, that's my dream job.” I applied for the role, but then they ended up killing the position. Then I applied for the same position at the Dallas Morning News. I had a few conversations with them and was getting ready to be brought in for an interview, but then they also killed the position.
As someone covering local news, I understood what was happening: these local newsrooms were having to make serious choices about what they could keep, and what they had to get rid of in order to survive. One of the casualties was obituaries. I also knew that one of the things that makes a newsroom successful is finding work that no one else is doing, and nobody else is doing obits on regular people. There's a whole huge market here that people are missing.
At some point I realized, wait, I work for a place that cares about the future of local news, that happens to own one of Florida's best newspapers. Maybe I could test this work myself and see if it works.
So I did it for a year on my own, with an editor whom I love and I've worked with before. It was challenging because I had all the demands of my existing job, so this was the thing that ended up getting pushed away the most. We decided to try it as a fellowship through Reynolds Journalism Institute. I had to write about it monthly for eight or nine months, which was a really good deadline to have because it forced me to think through some of the minutia that I hadn't had time to think through before — the ethics of paid obits, why paid obits are so white, and what newsrooms should be doing to counter that.
I did a piece last month about what we had learned from the process.
I have always heard from other journalists when talking about obits, “Oh, that's how I learned to be a writer, it is such powerful storytelling.” That is great, but what matters more to me is hearing from people who say they are going to start doing this as well – and several newsrooms have reached out to me and want help in starting this back up again for themselves.
frank | How does the process work, start to finish?
I find people often through a paid obit, or somebody shares something on Facebook, or somebody writes in and says my wife died and she was a community environmental activist or something like that. My first step when making the pitch that I want to write about their family member is to explain to them that I'm writing an obituary, which is not something they're going to pay me for, but it is also not something they're going to see before it is published. I tell them that I'm going to do my best to represent their family member and make sure that they feel like they're in the passenger’s seat in the process. That really means that in addition to several interviews, I do a really thorough fact check with a family member before it is published.
There's all kinds of interesting things that have come up in this process. It stirs up messy stuff. That is something that I think I was prepared for, but that I am better prepared for now. It comes down to an understanding of the messiness of families and grief, and that grief enhances the messiness. And it's not my job to fix it — I'm really clear with people about that — but I don't want the obit to cause more harm. I'm not their PR person, but when you're talking about loss and especially recent loss, I think we have to have the empathy to be willing to navigate with people.
Sometimes people don't want to do it. I've done several interviews before with people on a loved one, and then got a call from a family member that said, “Nope, we don't want you to write about this person.” And they're not famous. Nobody knows who they are. They don't have a public life. I am not going to put that on somebody, just because I think that there are some interesting things about them.
I've also made choices about who I write about and who I don't, based on their background checks. I work with a researcher and she always calls it, “Florida Clean”, which is the basis I go off of. That means, you probably have some traffic stops, you may have gotten busted a couple of times for some recreational drugs, but you haven't hurt anybody and you didn't steal anything.
How long does it take to produce an obit?
Well, the hardest part isn’t finding someone, the hardest part is working backward. You find a person, and then you have to find people who knew them. If you are working from a tip, great, that tipster will direct you to other people to talk to. That is the easiest way.
But, if you are off of an obit or a link or a news story, then you're building backward. You look at the names in the “survived by” section. If they don’t have a digital profile or footprint, then we're going to do some search in records to see if we can find them there. Usually, if somebody is like 60 or younger, they're going to at least have a Facebook profile. And they usually say where they work and then I'll cold call where they work. That is a disturbing thing to have somebody do, but people are understanding.
Once that's started, it's just a matter of conducting three to four interviews. The reporting and the writing process is the easiest part, finding people and convincing them to talk to us is the most challenging part of it.
The data you collected as it pertains to local news survival was really interesting. Can you talk more about it? I’m also curious about what obituaries can mean to publications that are not geography-based.
When you test something, you have to really go into it with an open mind, which is a hard thing to do when you care about something and you want it to be successful. Having that approach meant figuring out that we were thinking like newspaper journalists, and that we needed to make some changes.
Originally we were publishing on Thursdays, but by Thursday most people have checked out. They might be googling what they're going to be doing for the weekend, but they're definitely not settling in to read an inspiring story.
We said to the digital team, what day do you think this would do best? They said Mondays. Mondays are light news days because people are coming back to their computers. So we started to put them up at 5:00 AM Monday morning and included them in our morning newsletter. We stopped putting people's names as headlines and we started focusing on things people would care about. We started playing with the levers and pushing the buttons: better headline, better photos, different day.
Once we started paying attention to those analytics then we started really quickly seeing how obituaries can tug on universal threads. For example, we saw how well the story about the drag queen in Orlando was doing. It wasn't because it was about Orlando, it was because people who care about drag wherever they lived, cared about that story. The same thing is true with the piece on this history teacher we recently ran. People who went to this high school and knew this teacher or live in this community might care about the story, but more broadly, everybody had that one teacher who changed their life — he was that teacher.
Do you feel like it says something about what people want from local newsrooms more broadly?
I think this work can be done by anybody. I think it can be done by public radio. I think that it would be fantastic on video.
Journalists and newsrooms have to realize that while we have been shrinking, our communities have not, and the needs of the community have not been shrinking. There are audiences for the kind of work that no one else is doing.
For me, the unmeasurable part of the obits has been realizing that though there are platforms that do a really good job of making us feel divided, when it comes down to the places we live in, there are more things we have in common than there are things that separate us. Whatever your political beliefs are, whatever your religious beliefs are, understanding how someone lives and how it may connect to you is part of being in a community.
I have had experience in other cultures with obituaries. I was in the Peace Corps after college and lived in Guyana, in South America. We would sit in the evenings, and between clips of Friends, which they pirated in, they would basically play toilet paper commercials and then death notices. They would run the sad music with a person's photo and then their obituary on the television. My neighbors and community members, and later on my family, because my husband is from Guyana, would all sit and watch the death notices. That's how you understand what's happening in your community. My sister lived in Italy, and the village that she lived in would nail a list of deaths to a fountain. There's something universal about this that transcends cultures. It is both super-specific and it's super universal at the same time.
Well thank you for the time, the research really jumped out to me.
I mean, it did really resonate, which was exciting to see. It's very replicable.