We need to create a #WestWaterSyllabus.

Mark Hertsgaard at the Daily Beast got a lot of traction this weekend with a piece suggesting this: If You Only Read One Book About the Water Crisis: ‘Cadillac Desert’. If we’re going to have a #WestWaterSyllabus, there’s no question Cadillac Desert has to be on it, but making it the only thing we read is problematic. Hertsgaard’s piece demonstrates how it constrains our understanding of the problem in a way that also constrains our understanding of what the solutions might look like.

Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize 2009-Press Conference KVA-30 by © Holger Motzkau 2010, Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons (cc-by-sa-3.0). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

So if you only have time for two books, I’d suggest a second, less well known effort: Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. But whatever you do, I’d really warn against stopping with Cadillac Desert.

Asked some years ago about suggested readings to understand California water, OtPR wrote one of the best explanations I’ve seen of Cadillac Desert’s proper place:

Read Cadillac Desert for an understanding of how things were thirty years ago.  It isn’t accurate now (in fact, the book made itself obsolete), but Cadillac Desert fundamentally shaped the lay view of water in CA.  When a layperson has some outraged simplistic solution to water problems in CA, it’ll be from Cadillac Desert, so it is good to understand where they are coming from.

Cadillac Desert remains so popular because Reisner was a hell of a writer, and he tells a hell of a tale, a story that’s populated with greed and bad guys that makes for an easy-to-grasp narrative structure that has dominated our understanding of western water ever since. So read it, if for no other reason than it’s a great read and everyone you talk to will also likely have read it.

It is, as Hertsgaard suggests, a powerful book with a central message: “The current drought out West only underscores a problem entirely of our own making: for too long we have rigged the price of water to benefit a favored few.”

But the Western water historian Norris Hundley, in his California water history The Great Thirst (oh dear, we’re already up to three? and it’s a really long book!) suggests we need a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of our problems:

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 otherwise be incorrectly attributed to a conspiratorial power elite.

Which means that rather than hunting for bad guys and easy fixes, or maybe in addition to it, we need a nuanced understanding of the efforts made by human communities to engage in this messy task of collective governance of common-pool resources. Enter Ostrom.

Governing the Commons is not primarily a “Western water” book. But its discussion of the evolution of water management institutions in Southern California, and the generalizations that follow about what does and does not work, offers a critical piece that Reisner leaves out. Reisner’s all about our failings. Ostrom points out that people do, in fact, successfully riddle their way through collective management of a shared resource, and how does that happen? I’d been dabbling in water journalism for 20 years, steeped in the Reisner narrative, when I first tumbled to Ostrom’s work. It was a head-smacking “I wish I’d read this sooner” time for me.

In the 30 years since Cadillac Desert, there’s been plenty of bad guy stuff (Hertsgaard is right to call out California’s Westlands Water District, which is a textbook case of what the economists dryly call “rent-seeking behavior“). But there has been a great deal of the sort of collaborative problem solving Ostrom talks about as well in the 30 years since Cadillac Desert, problem solving that has substantially lessened the bite of the current drought and substantially improved the resilience of the communities that depend on the West’s overtaxed rivers and aquifers. It’s problem solving that Reisner’s work did not anticipate and cannot help us understand.

Someone should write another book about that.

I’d like to take issue with some recent comments by Dan Beard and Mike Connor, two former commissioners of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, about the agency’s future. (Audience sees closeup of Fleck crawling out on tree limb. Camera zooms back to show that it is the only tree for miles around, with no buildings and therefore no chance of rescue. Audience hears sound of sawing.)

Deadbeat Dams

Beard

In a weekend New York Times story Beard, who headed the Bureau during the Clinton administration, renews his call for the agency’s elimination:

Daniel P. Beard, a bureau commissioner during the Clinton administration, said the bureau should be abolished, with the authority for water management returned to the states.

“Here we are in the worst drought, climate change is providing a significant impact, and the Obama administration is just studying the problem,” he said. “They should transition to become an environmental agency, and they should just assist local and state agencies to solve water problems in the West.”

It’s an argument Beard lays out in his appropriately titled new book Deadbeat Dams: Why We Should Abolish the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Tear Down Glen Canyon Dam. It’s an important book, raising challenging arguments that you need to wrestle with if you’re thinking about water in the western United States. But I disagree with Beard on this central point.

Water scholar and attorney Sarah Bates and Cadillac Desert author Marc Reisner wrestle with this question in Overtapped Oasis: Reform Or Revolution For Western Water, a book that serves as a sort of odd sequel to Cadillac Desert, helpfully clarifying (walking back?) some of Cadillac Desert’s central themes. Their quick laundry list of the problems posed by abolishing the Bureau makes a central point – the Bureau does a bunch of stuff, and if the agency were to be eliminated, someone would still have to do all that stuff:

[I]ts abolition would create a political, administrative, and water-rights nightmare…. Who would then “own” its canals and dams? What about the rights to more than 30 million acre-feet of water it provides? Who would be responsible for dam maintenance? For emergency decisions regarding drought allocations or fish-flow releases?

Bates and Reisner then raise an important political reality that I think undercuts Beard’s argument:

[A]ny attempt to abolish the Bureau of Reclamation would be fanatically resisted by many politicians and organized constituencies in the western states, precipitating a political battle that may not be justified by the results.

This is the “water nobility” about which Beard writes in much detail, and any attempt to abolish the current Bureau structure would, I believe, disproportionately empower this group in the political processes needed to create a replacement structure to do the stuff now done by the Bureau. These folks have really good lobbyists and lawyers.

Connor

Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor watches water flow through the normally dry Colorado River bed at San Luis, on the U.S.-Mexico border, March 28 2014, photo by John Fleck

I turn my attention now, gingerly, to the comments of Mike Connor, who was the Obama administration’s first Commissioner of Reclamation, now Deputy Secretary of Interior, and (important disclosure) has generously spent some significant amount of time teaching me about the governance of water in the western United States. (Audience hears sawing of the branch cease, replaced by cracking sound.) In the Times, Connor correctly suggests that the West’s water infrastructure needs a massive rethink:

“We have to think differently,” said Michael Connor, the deputy secretary of the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Reclamation. “It’s not enough just to conserve water. We need to rethink these projects. We have a lot of infrastructure, but a lot of it doesn’t work very well anymore. We need to undertake what amounts to a giant replumbing project across the West.”

The way Connor says it supports a central theme of the Times story that I think is wrong: the implication that the Bureau and western water management have been humming along unchanged since the days of Cadillac Desert and have suddenly come to the realization: “Hey, a giant replumbing is needed!”

The whole project of my book challenges that. When I set out to write it some years ago, it was with a post-Cadillac Desert notion that a giant replumbing was needed. What I found again and again, in fact, was that the replumbing has been underway for a while (urban water conservation all over, ag-to-urban transfers galore, re-operation of reservoirs, an environmental flow through the Colorado River Delta for chrissakes). Path dependance and historical contingency make this stuff really hard. People optimized their communities and their lives around the old system. You can’t just kick them off their farms or shut down their city water systems willy nilly. Even if you wanted to (and I think there are important questions of equity and justice that make willy nilly a bad idea), these people fight back, and they’ve got good lawyers. But understanding what replumbing is already underway, what has and has not worked, and what the impediments are as seen through the lens of these replumbing efforts, is the critical piece.

I’m pretty sure Connor would agree with this last bit, the idea that the replumbing is already underway, since’s he’s one of the one of the people who taught me about it.

Let’s just agree to blame the reporter. (Camera zooms back in to see Fleck’s desperate scramble to crawl back before branch breaks.)