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 Border as Public Theater
by Leo Chavez
August 31, 2021
This interview with Leo Chavez, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine and author of several books, including Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Can you talk about discovering political advantages to demonizing specifically Latin immigrants? What do you think about the role the border plays in American politics?
In the colonial period, America was 13 colonies pressed against the Atlantic ocean. Through a succession of wars with Native Americans, purchases from France, and a war with Mexico, the United States managed to change its borders over and over until it took over the whole continental United States. And then it created this made-up war with Hawaii to take over Hawaii and extended the borders out to the Pacific. And then to Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico after a war with Spain.
So, borders have always been an important part of American history, particularly in the expansion of our empire. And so our national borders have a lot of interest to politicians and to the public.
It has changed a lot over time, as I just explained. People often think about borders as concrete and fixed as both a physical and a symbolic representation of the nation-state and its people, when, in reality, the borders have changed.
Politicians, over the last 50 years, have weaponized the border. it has become very convenient for politicians to use the border as political theater to motivate their base. And it hasn't just been politicians. Over the past decades we have seen radio pundits and TV pundits who see that ranting against immigration and immigrants was a way to develop their fan base. So immigration becomes one of these very easy ways to get votes and to get an audience.
Is there a place you see this begins? Is there one campaign you look to?
The answer to your question depends on how far back you want to go.
A lot of issues around Mexican immigration really started emerging in the early 20th century, particularly with the revolution in Mexico and the refugee movement of around a million Mexicans to the United States in the early 1900s.
After 1929, there was very little immigration into the United States because of the Depression. The only immigrants coming to the states in the forties were brought from Mexico to work in agriculture. In the fifties, there was an uptick in immigration, but it is only after 1965 that we see a large increase in immigration generally and Mexican immigration in particular. And that was, due in part to the 1965 Immigration Act, which got rid of the racist, national origin quotas that were put in place in the 1920s, and basically give everybody in the world a chance to come to the United States.
In the post-1965 period, there was a change in the total number of immigrants coming to the U.S. and the demographic makeup of those immigrants. Suddenly more people were coming from Asia, the number of Latin Americans continued to grow, and more people came from Africa. Adding to U.S.-bound migration were some major geopolitical events, such as the fall of Vietnam in 1975, the Korean War, civil wars in Central America in the 1980s, and the fall of the Soviet Union. The change in immigration law in 1965 combined with these geopolitical conflicts led to major demographic changes, from fewer Europeans to more Asian and Latin American immigrants, as well as a steady increase in the total number of people coming.
In the early 1980s, there was a lot of discussion in the media about what is happening to America. What do demographic change and increased immigration mean? Is America going downhill? Should we close the border? What I found was that alarmist rhetoric about immigration begins to grow in the late 1970s and surges in the early 1980s and early 1990s, drowning out more positive or affirmative media stories. This trend has continued until today.
In terms of discourse, do you feel like the media reflect a national mood or dictate a national mood?
I think it does both. At some points, it leads public sentiment, and, at some points, it just reflects public sentiment. But typically the media smells a story and if immigration is that story, it's going to go after it. How they frame that story is what I look at.
Demographic change and immigration can be written about in any number of ways, positive or negative, or, what I call, alarmist and affirmative. That just depends on who's writing, the media’s audience, and political and economic climate. I’ve found periods of high unemployment and economic recessions are fertile ground for alarmist rhetoric about immigration in the media.
The media helped generate public interest in the story of demographic change after 1965. The media reported on projections about demographic change, and the fact that the U.S. is going to be more Latino, more Asian, and that whites are going to be a lesser part of that demography. These stories often stoked fears, sometimes intentionally, of what demographic change will mean.
The increase in Mexican immigration in the late seventies, early eighties became a huge topic in the media. U.S. News and World Report published a number of issues headlining the “Mexican Invasion.” So, did they invent that negative view of Mexican immigration? Did they lead on that? Did they follow? I think particularly in this case, they helped create this sense that there's an invasion taking place from Mexico. The story they promoted was that there was this invasion caused by demographic growth in Mexico, which was caused by the fact that Mexicans couldn’t control their fertility. These ideas of population growth built on Paul Ehrlich’s work out of Stanford, The Population Bomb.
The word invasion pops up on the cover of U.S. News and World Report repeatedly, and two and a half decades later, Trump used the word “invasion” hundreds of times in his web pages and speeches. He didn't invent that. The media helped promote the Mexican invasion trope a long time ago.
Similar to the question I just asked, how do you see the media and politicians inform each other?
Politicians are the bread and butter of the media, let's face it. Politicians use the media to express things and get their viewpoint out. To be fair, in a democracy, it is the media’s responsibility to inform us, the public, about our politicians and the government.
Does the media analyze what politicians say? Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. The idea that politicians need to be “fact-checked” is much more common today than in the past, which is a positive trend. For example, the claims of a “Mexican invasion” were not fact-checked. That was taken as fact.
How did you come to magazine covers?
My first research on immigration involved interviewing immigrants directly. Such interviews provide rich information about the lives of families and individuals. After my first book, Shadowed Lives, I became interested in learning about the place of immigrants in American society and American culture. Where am I going to get that higher-level sense of how the nation more broadly thinks about immigrants? Well, I can't interview the nation, but I can interview who represents the nation, which is the media. The media tells us what people are saying and thinking, and provides me with an entry into American popular opinion.
My problem was finding a way of selecting out key moments in American history that surfaced in the media. I thought that magazine covers crystallized key moments. Editors chose important topics of the day to feature on the magazine’s cover,
So I reasoned I’d use these moments in history when immigration seemed to surface as noteworthy topics for the cover of a magazine. And that's how I decided to find a sample of magazine covers which dealt in some way with the topic of migration to the United States. And I became interested in analyzing not just the cover’s text and magazine articles but the images on those covers. I asked what were the visual metaphors and visual lexicon the magazines used to convey ideas about immigration.
As a first-year student in college, I remember reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. She analyzed how women were represented in advertising images in magazines. She came to some eye-opening conclusions about the role of women in American society in the 1950s and 1960s. I was only 18 years old, but I never forgot the idea that our way of understanding the world is shaped through the way the media represents these topics.
The way I thought about gender and women, wasn't something that I invented or my family invented, it is something that I was told from the time I was born. It is the same for immigration. Most people in America will not ever meet an immigrant, and yet, they think they know everything about immigrants. Where did they get that information? How did they internalize these views? Like Friedan, I believed looking at how the media represents immigrants would give me insight into those questions.
And how has the coverage changed?
The internet made a huge difference. In my book Covering Immigration, I examined a sample of magazines. But since then, the internet has changed our world dramatically. Magazines still exist, but online media have become key to the way we find information. In my book The Latino Threat, I didn't restrict myself to magazines covers. I still used magazines and newspapers, but then I also collected all kinds of stuff from the internet, including news reports, videos, TV shows, blogs, political cartoons, all kinds of stuff people were saying and reported on the internet, My sources for information I expanded tremendously.
I used a lot of quotes directly from politicians and TV pundits. I didn't have to wait and come out in a magazine because it appears so fast online. In terms of methodology, this was more diffused, but in some ways it allowed me to see a lot more different things. You start seeing the debates that are taking place in different places, in different ways.
Do you see any sort of larger narrative changes as the news begins to change?
I think in a sense, the question really is where are people getting their information? People have become narrower in where they get their information. In the old days, everyone watched three channels, CBS, NBC, and ABC, and Walter Cronkite was like the word of God. People would listen and it was fascinating. Now, there are so many sources for information, especially on the internet. Most of my students rarely watch the news on TV. Rather, they get their news on the internet.
People are no longer seeking enlightenment, which is what hopefully the news would do, but rather people seek to enforce the beliefs that they already hold. They look for sources that reinforce their worldview. And I think that's why it has been really difficult to have informed conversations across groups of people.
The promise of the internet was democratization in the sense that everyone would have great information and exist in a sort of Socratic state. It has gone the other direction. The media has allowed us to become segregated and it's just really too bad. And, in terms of immigration, if you think immigrants are bad there are so many sources out there to reaffirm that belief. Unfortunately, there are fewer sources of information that have tried to provide a more objective look at immigration. You have to hunt that down.
The polls do show that most Americans, thank goodness, tend to think that immigration is good for the country, that undocumented immigrants should be given a path to citizenship, and that the DREAMers, in particular, should be given a path to citizenship.
Even under Trump, most Americans were still holding onto the idea that America should have a positive relationship to immigration, which I think is really a good testament to what we still hold onto as a part of our identity.
How do you feel like reporters could cover migration better?
You see politicians going down there, having their picture taken with the border behind them, talking about how bad things are. Well, what about the good things?
What about the fact that with our low fertility rates, aging populations, and capitalist economic system, which depends on economic growth, we need immigrants at a certain point. Instead of seeing the border as a place for viruses and parasites and criminals, what about these people who are coming to save our economy — making sure people have food to eat, and that people's parents will be cared for. These are what immigrants are coming to do. How can you blame the very people who are coming to help salvage our lives? How can you blame the very people who help to make our lives better in many ways?
These stories often get washed away in favor of the sensational, scapegoating, blaming immigrants. It’s hypocritical to only relate negative stories and not the positive stories of how immigrants contribute to the nation. I always ask, why aren't there more stories about thanking immigrants during Thanksgiving for making this feast possible. A national “thank you” to immigrants.
Instead, we hear the border as a violent place. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the country. The whole idea that the border is this physical barrier that people run up against is a false one. For most people, the border is not a fence, it's a way of thinking about the world. It's a place where people have relatives on both sides. It is a place with a shared economy and a common future. People on this side go down to eat on the other side, people on that side come up here and work. There is so much interdependence that doesn't seem to ever get reflected in the media coverage.
I think the media needs to figure out how to develop more objective stories about the positive relationships that exist among people from different places in the world, instead of letting the narrative be hijacked by those who never seem to see the positive aspects of being a nation of immigrants.