I’ve been avoiding wasting time on the “someone’s wrong on the Internet about California drought” genre – so much is being written that is so bad. But Elijah Wolfson’s Newsweek cover story (I won’t link, find it if you must) is so breathtakingly well-researched-and-written-ly bad that I’ll let it stand in for the genre:

We’re driving in my beat-up Volkswagen through the Central Valley, just south of Sacramento, and even here the effects of the drought are stunning: the hills to the west, usually soft and green, are burnt-crisp and yellowed. The fields spreading for miles in both directions are also toast; they look as if they would crumble under your feet. Here and there, crops still live, but they are hedged in on all sides by death.

Let’s compare that image with the reality of California agriculture, as authoritatively described in U.S. Department of Agriculture crop data. Acreage for almonds, grapes, and strawberries, California’s money crops, have been flat or even trending up during the drought. Yields have been down in some cases, and the struggle for water has been real. Farmers in many cases have been fallowing lower value crops to move water to those money crops (hay is down 114,000 acres, cotton is down 125,000 acres, for example). The drought is real. Land is being fallowed, but the majority of California’s agricultural land remains in production.

Wolfson visits an almond orchard where the farmer has run out of water, and the trees are dying. This is an important, and sad anecdote.

But ethically responsible journalism requires you to match up your anecdotes with data. In the big picture, almond acreage is up. An anecdote that suggests the opposite is bad journalism.

To be fair, Wolfson at one point slips in some data (5 percent of California cropland fallowed) that undercuts his “hedged in on all sides by death” imagery, but when imagery higher in a story overpowers data buried deep within, we can see the rhetorical game being played. And at that, he does it poorly, noting that agriculture “losses of over $2 billion and 17,000 jobs.” There, again, no context. Q: $2 billion of an agricultural economy of what size? A (which he doesn’t give): $33 billion. Ditto the jobs? Again, he doesn’t say, but in the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California jobs in crop production (the key sector Wolfson seems to be laboring to describe) have actually gone up in the last couple of years. What explains that? The answer, as Jeff Michael has explained, is adaptation to the conditions of drought, not fleeing to a wetter part of the country as death presses in on Californians from all sides. There are so many caveats that I’m being as dangerous as Wolfson, but isn’t the point of journalism to help negotiate that dangerous terrain for your readers?

Scattered crops “hedged in on all sides by death” is great rhetoric, and it may describe the subset of the land he saw. Yes, in some places, things are very bad. In others, less so. The differences matter. Real drought in California is important, and serious, but it is a far richer, more complex story than the misleading picture Wolfson sketches from the window of his battered VW.

UCLA’s Jon Christensen* has written a lovely, loving essay remembering the late water historian Norris Hundley, who wrote so well about western water, and (Jon argues) is important now, in California’s time of need:

It’s not for nothing that we often talk of western water wars. What Norris showed is that at times this looked not so much like the imperial, all-knowing conquest of a hydraulic society in the American West, but instead like a chaotic war of all against all, in which, as he wrote, “no bullets were fired,” “yet the life and death of cities and states in an enormous area were at stake.” Or, what we might just call democracy, messy democracy, a theme to which Norris would return, again and again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because one of the central arguments in my work right now is that water is not for fighting over, but I think there is room for a meeting between my own work and the argument that both Christensen and Hundley are making and it lies in part in this central point.

One farm at a time…. A citrus orchard going in, Yuma Mesa Irrigation and Drainage District, Arizona

I, too, have been rereading Hundley. His three great books, Dividing The Waters, Water and the West, and The Great Thirst are within arms reach of my computer as I type this (four, in fact, I have both versions of The Great Thirst). In the prologue to The Great Thirst, Hundley argues against the “grand conspiracy” wing of western water history that argues that the characteristics of large scale irrigation inevitably lead to dominance by large, centralized institutions, and that our problems largely flow from that:

More compelling explanations are found in a compound of interest-group pressures, local and regional considerations, political trade-offs, and the larger context of American political culture  in which the national culture and its reverberations within California help explain actions that may others be incorrectly attributed to a conspiratorial power elite.

Hundley doesn’t say it, but I read this as an “anti-Cadillac Desert” argument, an argument against Marc Reisner’s grand federalist conspiracy, the great centralized something-ocracy that Donald Worster so elegantly offered up in Rivers of Empire. I spent a lot of time in the blind alley those two books sent me down, but the Reisner/Worster narrative kept clashing with the messy reality my journalism encountered daily. Donald Pisani, another of the western water historians, makes a similar critique, explicitly, of Reisner and Worster in “The Irrigation District and the Federal Relationship”, an essay published in the 1989 book The Twentieth century West: Historical interpretations.

I wish I’d read Hundley more carefully, and sooner. If Hundley is right – and I think he is – it has important implications for what we do with water policy today.

I agree here with Christensen that it’s really just “democracy, messy democracy” – well-intentioned people with imperfect information trying to make their best of the situation by muddling along. That suggests that big solutions are not likely to bear fruit – that what we’re doing to end up with is a lot of small solutions, solving problems one municipality and irrigation district at a time. Hundley calls it “an excess of Madisonian democracy with its focus on localism.” This is the best explanation I know for why the kind of strong federal intervention you saw in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin won’t happen here. It runs against our basic nature.

In my Colorado River work, I frequently talk to people looking for grand solutions – basinwide planning that somehow bakes in population or acreage limitations required to make the water math balance. My response is what I describe as “no-one’s-in-chargeness”. These decisions are made one suburban municipal government or irrigation district at a time. That’s our Madisonian democracy.

My disagreement with the “fighting” meme is that, mostly, irrigation districts and municipalities haven’t been fighting. Much of the history of water in the West is a history of banal building of cities and farms that mostly had enough water and mostly got along with their neighbors. But I’m nervous about this assertion, always nervous that I might be wrong.

The key here is that the fighting or the “not fighting” has to happen at this “messy democracy” level. We’ve no alternative.

* Disclosure: When Jon was at Stanford, he provide through the Lane Center some funding and support for early work that is slowly but surely turning into my book. More importantly he encouraged me, in a memorable conversation in his Stanford office, to overcome my fear that I might be wrong about this “not fighting” stuff and stick my neck out. It’s now out.

From yesterday’s landmark California court ruling on the legality of tiered municipal water rates (pdf):

Southern California is a “semi-desert with a desert heart.”1 Visionary engineers and scientists have done a remarkable job of making our home habitable, and too many of us south of the Tehachapis never give a thought to its remarkable reclamation. In his brilliant – if opinionated – classic Cadillac Desert, the late Marc Reisner laments how little appreciation there is of “how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made.”2

In this case we deal with parties who have an acute appreciation of how tenuous the beachhead is, and how desperately we all must fight to protect it. But they disagree about what steps are allowable – or required – to accomplish that task. We are called upon to determine not what is the right – or even the more reasonable – approach to the beachhead’s preservation, but what is the one chosen by the state’s voters.

We hope there are future scientists, engineers, and legislators with the wisdom to envision and enact water plans to keep our beloved Cadillac Desert habitable.

 

Footnotes to Walter Prescott Webb (1) and Marc Reisner (2)

h/t Robert Glennon

Crazy California’s proclivity for “governance by voter initiative” seems to have just undercut one of the major tools in the municipal water conservation kit.

Tiered water rates, in which residents are charged a low rate for basic needs and increasingly higher rates for high usage, violate California law, according to a court ruling handed down today. Matt Stevens in the L.A. Times:

[T]he 4th District Court of Appeal  struck down San Juan Capistrano’s fee plan, saying it violated voter-approved Proposition 218, which prohibits government agencies from charging more for a service than it costs to provide it.

“We do hold that above-cost-of-service pricing for tiers of water service is not allowed by Proposition 218 and in this case, [the city] did not carry its burden of proving its higher tiers reflected its costs of service,” the court said in its ruling.