WATER REBELS

REFLECTIONS FROM THE PAST, ISSUES FOR THE FUTURE

Water politics in California and in other Western US states where water issues are so prominent are constantly changing. Yet so many of the issues seem to reappear as they had 10, 20, even 50 years earlier. The fight over Colorado River allocations, which I discussed in an earlier post, involves battles that are now more than 100 years old.

To use narrative, to tell stories about a subject like water seems useful. It’s also a challenge, given how the language of water policy and water politics can seem so obscure. I learned this when I first began to do research on water issues in the late 1970s and then joined the Southern California Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) in 1982.

I decided to do this post in a different way, partly so I could draw on some personal unpublished writing about my experiences with the MWD. The use of narrative and personal history may offer an understanding of what’s the same and what has changed in the world of water, and why water politics continues to be so crucial for social and environmental change.

So here goes…

In 1980, Dorothy Green, a middle-class housewife who had been transformed into a self-taught and fierce water activist, approached me about a water-related position. Dorothy was aware of my writing and political work about water issues and knew I lived in Santa Monica and could therefore apply for a position as a MWD board member, representing the City of Santa Monica.

It was an intriguing idea. Becoming a board member of the second largest water district in the country would provide an insider’s perspective on how the MWD operated. The timing worked well. I had been writing with my colleague and co-author Peter Wiley about those issues for a book (Empires in the Sun) about to be published and we had also initiated a weekly column about resource and environmental issues.

The idea was also appealing since a major statewide water battle was looming regarding the construction of a facility, the Peripheral Canal, to bring more Northern California water to the large corporate farms in the western end of the San Joaquin Valley and into urban Southern California.

To get to know the MWD was a way to understand the sources and exercise of power in Southern California. Over the years, it had played a leading role in a water industry consisting of public water agencies, federal entities such as the Bureau of Reclamation, real estate developers, engineering and construction interests, financial players, water lawyers, and other industries that relied on a continuing supply of water to overcome any institutional, environmental, or geographic constraints. The MWD itself controlled a huge budget and made crucial decisions about where and how to import water into the southern California region. It was itself a mini-version of the water industry, with a board then largely consisting of people with ties to many of those private interests.

Becoming a MWD board member offered an opportunity to explore how to re-envision a water-dependent region and its politics. MWD had long operated as a type of de facto land use manager for the larger southern California region through how it allocated the water sources it controlled. By the 1980s, however, the water industry felt it could no longer assure continuing expansion and growth through greater amounts of imported water.

I decided to apply for the MWD board position. A divided Santa Monica City Council voted in my favor, due in part to the support of one of the conservative Council members who considered herself an environmentalist and had clashed with the MWD and with the City’s previous MWD representative for his lack of accountability.

My seven years on the MWD board during the 1980s were an instructive, fascinating, and at times bizarre experience. It was then a 51-member board where I was almost always outvoted 50-1. At the age of 36 when I was appointed, I was the youngest member of a board that consisted of several septuagenarians and octogenarians and a nurse on duty during board meetings.

I quickly became a visible opponent of the Peripheral Canal even as the MWD succeeded in getting every elected official, business executive, and the full might of the water agencies and water industry interests in the region to support the pro-Peripheral Canal campaign. The contrast was striking. Bill Boyarsky, the then Los Angeles Times city editor who covered the MWD, later characterized my role as “this leftie guy with no respect for his ‘distinguished fat head’ old colleagues.”

Campaign rhetoric during the Peripheral Canal campaign was feverish. MWD leaders and their allies asserted that without the additional water Southern California would experience drastic reductions in available supply and unforetold economic consequences. In one debate I had with another board member, he lit after me as a traitor to the region and declared that residents would need to drink water out of their toilet bowl if my position prevailed. By being visible about my opposition to the water industry plans through my writing, through talks, and through challenges I made at Board meetings, I was considered an unwanted water industry intruder. I had become a “water rebel,” as one local news article characterized my role.

Not all the board members were conservative water industry types. Several of the board members representing the City of Los Angeles – appointees of then mayor Tom Bradley – considered themselves politically progressive. Yet they tended to go along with the water agency’s consensus about the need for more imported water. “I can’t understand your position,” one of the more liberal L.A. Directors said to me at one point. “Woody Guthrie wrote songs praising the construction of dams,” he remarked wistfully. “But Woody Guthrie,” I replied, “would have identified with the water rebels.”

The fight over the Peripheral Canal, like some other water battles in California and the West, eventually produced a complicated mix of proponents and opponents and laid bare regional tensions. Northern Californians had long resented what they considered a Southern California water grab. Southern Californians countered that Northern Californians had elitist sentiments regarding their uncouth neighbors to the South and furthermore had their own imported water systems with problematic environmental consequences. Northern California had a sizable environmental contingent opposed to the Canal. Southern California’s environmental opponents of the Peripheral Canal were then much smaller in number and could have fit into Dorothy Green’s living room where she hosted periodic campaign gatherings.

Yet our small band of Southern California environmentalists and other Peripheral Canal opponents were able to convince a sizeable number of Southern Californians to oppose the Canal, upwards of 40% of those who voted. The anti-Peripheral Canal forces ultimately prevailed statewide by a nearly 3-2 margin.

It became a pivotal moment at the MWD and within the water industry. Agendas started to change thanks in part to the Peripheral Canal defeat, though ever so slightly at first. Even at MWD, the appointment of several new directors, including Tim Brick, representing the City of Pasadena, shifted some of the Board agenda and politics. Tim, a long-time colleague and friend, led the anti-Peripheral Canal campaign in Southern California and eventually became Chair of the MWD board.

Subsequent board and staff appointments further changed the culture of the MWD. It included Judy Abdo who subsequently represented Santa Monica, and Mark Gold and Paula Daniels, representing the City of Los Angeles, among others.

Mark’s appointment on two different occasions is especially noteworthy. He had headed the Heal the Bay organization that had been started by Dorothy Green and had held several other key water-related posts. He is today considered a major player in the world of water politics.

California and the Western states have continued to grapple with various water problems. These include extended droughts, groundwater contamination, and changing federal policies. Climate change has imposed and substantially extended concerns about water availability. Instead of its near exclusive reliance on imported water, the water agencies and other policymakers have begun to consider ways to manage water differently, although the water industry’s historical urge to build big dams and import waters long distances never went away. Bitter disputes continue to rage between and within states, and even within the MWD board. Yet it is a far cry from my earlier, lonely position on the MWD board.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as agendas began to change, our now expanding Southern California water rebel contingent worked with sustainable agriculture and farm labor advocates to call for a new urban and agricultural alliance based on a new water ethic of use and a politics of care for the sources of water. That vision remains compelling today.

The more I became engaged in water issues, I saw the need – and the difficulties – of building a movement rather than just a cadre of experts, albeit environmentally-oriented experts. Water has often been framed as a technical, not a social issue. I argued then that water had a community rather than commodity value. That’s so true today.

In the years since I left the water board in 1987, many more people have become engaged around water issues. The evocative struggle at Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017 brought many of the participants, including AOC, into progressive politics. The Standing Rock participants, led by indigenous activists and tribal members, identified their role as “water protectors” and put forth the compelling slogan “Water is Life.”

When I connected with action researchers in China, I also saw water as a powerful issue directly connected to the consequences of the development scenarios that China had pursued. In 2015, I met with the head of the water utility union in Thessaloniki, Greece, who had led the fight against privatizing the utility, and the head of an Athens group called “Save Greek Water.” Both made clear that privatization agendas in Greece and the EU were part of an agenda of social restructuring that extended inequality and undermined urban and rural communities and environments. It reinforced for me why I had understood that water was so crucial for building movements to re-envision water as central to a progressive agenda.

Today, the use of water and who controls it has become a major issue in the conflicts around Data Centers and the AI companies’ lack of accountability. And in California and the West and other parts of the U.S. and globally water continues to connect to the questions of who has power and how that power is used.

Yet the good news is that it’s not so unique to be a water rebel these days.

LINKS

Robert Gottlieb, A Life of its Own: The Politics and Power of Water, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988

Kelly Candaele, Beneath the Paving Stones - a River. Documentary, 2015.

Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb. Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982