By Fraser Shilling
Water sustainability is likely to be one of the most important issues of the 21st century, affecting everyone, regardless of race and income. Realizing this makes people start to feel nervous and insecure, scrambling for their share, making sure they’ve “got theirs.”
Ironically, this response is not very adaptive in a complex and interconnected society like ours. Dividing water up fairly among competing needs and interests is the cornerstone of a democratic society. Making sure there is enough for the environment and people with less political power, while being cost-effective and maintaining economic well-being, is the cornerstone of a sustainable society.
In a lot of ways, Measure I would push Davis back toward the feudal system of water rights of yesteryear, setting a poor example for other communities, affecting salmon and native peoples, and not improving our overall sustainability.
The Sacramento River begins its journey in the lands of the Winnemem Wintu nation, a people who have never relinquished their rights to living as the “Middle Water People“, despite the construction of the Shasta Dam that eliminated the salmon runs upon which their society was dependent and flooded much of their riparian lands and cultural spaces.
According to the United Nations, acts that “deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” constitute genocide. Construction of Shasta Dam resulted in the displacement of Winnemem Wintu people and loss of their diet, culture, livelihood and properties upon which they made their living.
The Bureau of Reclamation is proposing to raise the Shasta Dam. This dam-raising not only will flood more of the Winnemem Wintu’s lands and sacred spaces, it will make it more difficult for them to recover what they have already lost, including the most productive salmon run on the West Coast.
The dam is proposed for super-sizing in order to create a “reliable source of water” for people living downstream. That means us in Davis and other cities in our region (link). We will benefit from the raising of Shasta Dam, especially if our water source is the Sacramento River, which will happen under Measure I. Actually, we will come to depend upon it and add our political weight to the strain already being put upon California’s tribes and river systems.
Even smart, progressive, politically conscious people can stick their heads in the sand and complain that regardless of consequence to others, they still need to protect themselves and their kids’ futures. In this case, building a bigger dam and flooding the lands of native people. But is there any alternative to more dam construction in our quest to be sustainable?
Fortunately, people have studied this problem for years, including many of my colleagues at UC Davis and the Pacific Institute, and have concluded that agricultural and urban water conservation can provide at least as much water as the “virtual water” that the Bureau of Reclamation will create with the raising of Shasta Dam.
For example, researchers at the Pacific Institute found that existing urban water demand could be reduced by 320,000 acre-feet per year just by swapping out water-inefficient appliances with readily available efficient devices, and agricultural demand could be reduced by an incredible 1.44 million acre-feet per year by using more efficient irrigation. Either of these savings would offset the liquid benefits from raising Shasta Dam, making clear that we are choosing to the uneconomical option of building dams and flooding native lands when we don’t have to.
What does this mean for Measure I, and can Davis get the water it needs some other way? Well, like any complex problem – and what water problems aren’t? – that depends on what we are willing to do and how sustainable we want to be.
Our current groundwater supply is affected by chemicals used by regional agriculture and we do little in the way of water conservation, both of which seem to necessitate a switch to the Sacramento River water. At a cost of $113 million, the joint Davis-Woodland project would exercise our water grab on the river, contributing to the strain the river and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are suffering from increasing water demands and little conservation. Who knows how long the river will last under this strain, especially given that every single projection of climate change impacts says we will get less river water, not more?
What if we used that money, or even just our share, to implement conservation actions and/or to provide incentives to regional farmers to conserve water and to reduce fertilizer and other inputs that threaten groundwater? Could we achieve the water conservation that would protect the river, the salmon and the Winnemem Wintu from our water demands?
The California Urban Water Conservation Council and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have independently estimated that water-saving toilets, showerheads, appliances and irrigation could easily pay for installation costs within their lifetime, let alone the increased peace of mind that would come from conserving.
If we took half of the proposed $113 million price tag on Measure I, we could subsidize the water conservation activities of every Davis household to the tune of $1,000 per household, and have $25 million left over to provide incentives to local agriculture to save water and reduce chemical intrusion into groundwater.
The question for sustainable societies in the 21st century becomes less about how much more our little group can extract from the environment and other people and more about how we can all thrive together. That is the question for Measure I and why we should vote no.
“Dividing water up fairly among competing needs and interests is the [u]cornerstone of a democratic society. [/u]Making sure there is enough for the environment and people with less political power,[u] while being cost-effective and maintaining economic well-being, is the cornerstone of a sustainable society.[/u]”?
Maxims with which I’m unfamiliar and which seem unlikely to sway the educated reader ! Instead of so many”can”s and “could”s, the surface water project [u][u]will[/u][/u] insure reliable access to better quality water.
[quote]The Bureau of Reclamation is proposing to raise the Shasta Dam. This dam-raising not only will flood more of the Winnemem Wintu’s lands and sacred spaces, it will make it more difficult for them to recover what they have already lost, including the most productive salmon run on the West Coast.[/quote]
In your article, you rightly make the claim that there are many complexities involved in water issues. You then proceed to make a presentation that seems to pit the “good guys” against the ” bad guys” in the most simplistic terms. Your statement above implies that those who favor Measure I also favor raising the Shasta
Dam. This is certainly not the case. I personally favor Measure I and oppose raising the dam.
To me there are more issues involved in Measure I than simply securing enough water for our current selfish desires. Conservation is important to me and I do not see that favoring Measure I means that I will be profligate in my water use. I favor Measure I because I believe that it will secure an additional water source for future generations, will be overall environmentally friendly, will help to preserve ( not deplete) our deep aquifer, and will actually encourage people to be more proactive in their conservation of water.
While I agree that money spent encouraging the conservation of water and less use of pesticides, I do not see that this is an either or proposition. I think that a vote for Measure I in no way prohibits us from enacting other positive steps with regard to the environment. I see your arguments as far too “black and white” for a nuanced discussion of water policy in all its complexity.
Sorry for the garbled statement above.
Should have read :
” While I agree that money is well spent ….”
Memo to self, don’t post while trying to get ready for work.
Frasier needs to explain how continuing to rely on well water is sustainable.
[quote]
If we took half of the proposed $113 million price tag on Measure I, we could subsidize the water conservation activities of every Davis household to the tune of $1,000 per household, and have $25 million left over to provide incentives to local agriculture to save water and reduce chemical intrusion into groundwater.[/quote]
Now this is just silly. Is he really proposing that we raise our rates in order to give people $1000 each for “water conservation activities” and provide $25 million in subsidies to local agriculture? Since this is not likely going to happen, why suggest it?
Nothing in the Measure I project prevents conservation or more sustainable ag practices. Voting No on I does nothing to encourage these practices.
It is nice to hear from other people on the No side than Mike Harrington. The stream of articles coming from the No on I Campaign is helpful, but this one was a waste of time.
…Fraser
What is not sustainable is the continuation of our policies of over pumping ground water and polluting the Delta. Both of those will be directly impacted by the results of Measure I.
Linking Measure I with the proposal to raise Shasta Dam is a mighty stretch in logic. Too bad the no on everything folks can’t come up with a reasonable argument on their side so that they could stop wasting our stocks of wild red herring.
There is a link between making our town dependent on Sacramento River water and proposed changes to Shasta dam. As more and more communities become dependent on river water and as river flows increasingly fluctuate due to our warming climate support for projects like raising Shasta dam will only increase.
Dear Fraser,
I admire you for trying to pry loose the tightest bolt around. The reason we are at this point is no one would listen to such ideas before (they were barely even spoken of ever in modern times by the masses) and they are not going to care about them now either. They can’t even fathom how entrenched they are in their ways of WASTE and show what they believe with their actions, if not with their thoughts or words. If we can pay for something, we deserve to have it as a convenience, that is the pervading attitude. The complex web of repercussions of the things we do, to have the water we need to continue essentially the same life style to which we have become accustomed, are hard to access. Some of them are probably even unknown, but the ones that are, well there is always some excuse why it’s considered far fetched or not possible or too much trouble. The need to not change is a thing of great inertia. The idea of lawns in CA, ridiculous, even I bought into it for a while. One of the things that $1000 you suggest would be best spent on, if that ever came to pass, is change in landscaping as well as toilets and other appliances. I don’t mean gravel, I mean climate appropriate plants, self sustaining plants. But collectively we just won’t change to that degree. We prefer to work to solve crisis after crisis than to avert it. The next change I am going to make is that even my shower water (as does currently my kitchen water) is going to go to the yard, I will find a way (of course I already collect what I have to run to displace the water in the pipe to get hot water the entire length of the house). The story is always the same, we can buy what should not be for sale, because someone managed to find a way to own it so they could sell it. This would all be considered radical by many. I consider it necessary and still not enough.
[quote]Our current groundwater supply is affected by chemicals used by regional agriculture and we do little in the way of water conservation, both of which seem to necessitate a switch to the Sacramento River water. [/quote]
Is this confirmed? I thought the main contaminate that necessitates a switch from groundwater is selenium, which the groundwater acquires naturally, not caused by agriculture. What chemicals are we talking about in this statement?
[quote]If we took half of the proposed $113 million price tag on Measure I, we could subsidize the water conservation activities of every Davis household to the tune of $1,000 per household, and have $25 million left over to provide incentives to local agriculture to save water and reduce chemical intrusion into groundwater.[/quote]
For the sake of stopping chemical intrusion into groundwater, I think we only need to tax it or ban it. If we want Davis to have no plastic grocery shopping bags, we just need to ban it. We don’t need to take everyone’s money and fund a city-wide program to give grocery shops alternatives.
DL, well put.