the price of water

John Henry told his captain
"Lord a man ain't noth' but a man
But before I let that steam drill
beat me down
I'm gonna die with a hammer
in my hand, Lord, Lord
I'll die with a hammer in my hand"
-- John Henry

In my years in politics, one thing I've learned is Americans have little knowledge of the essential elements necessary for modern life. By essential I mean, if you awoke in the morning and they weren't there, you'd know immediately. Of course, the most recent example is the financial system. To understand the depth of ignorance on this issue, I asked a very knowledgeable friend the other day, "What percentage of economists do you think know how the financial system works?" He replied, "Three percent. Well, maybe five." I'd say three is probably right. Energy is another issue no one understands. If tomorrow there was no gasoline, electricity, or natural gas, you'd know immediately, but no one knows how these systems work. And then there is water. No money, no energy, you might get by, but no water, no life.

When I moved to California in 1987, it was the beginning of a five year drought. During the drought's last two years, I did some water politics, and water politics in California, actually in the entire American West, has long been contentious and important. Water politics were once a very public affair, for example, there was a shooting war about water in the Owens Valley at the beginning of the 20th century. Farmers fought to keep Los Angeles from stealing their water(check out Mark Reisner's exceptional history of water in the West, "Cadillac Desert"). However over time, water became the concern of only a very few. Increasingly, these issues of tremendous power and necessity were decided with little public input.

Today, Alternet has a really excellent piece on the last 15 years of water politics in California. It's an important piece not just on water, but on the last three decades politics of financialization. Water, it was advocated and instituted, could best be delivered through the profiteering of private middlemen. Enron played a big role in this, which is important because every act of criminality we've seen in the past couple years in the financial sector, had been exposed in the Enron fiasco six years previously. Wall Street is smack dab in the middle of everything.

In the last three years, California is in another cyclical dry spell, but now there's another seven million people here. The political class, subservient to financial and corporate interests, is pushing the same old solutions. The Governor is pushing more dams and the Peripheral canal, a giant water diversion around the Sacramento Delta to bring water to California's desert south. This is the same-old industrial era thinking, the idea the earth's resources are infinite. It has sown ecological destruction across the planet. For example in California, a century of water policy has destroyed its once bountiful salmon fisheries, decimating a once important food source.

California has enough water, but it needs to use it differently. We need to drip irrigate our agriculture system and recycle our urban "waste" water. But to do this, we need a different mindset and we need to break the power of California's entrenched interests. We don't need more financialization or industrial thinking, we need to revive our politics. In California, this can be started by reviving the state's hundreds of elected local water districts. The first step, getting Californians to know the water districts even exist.

California's water politics are a microcosm of the United States political problems. The only way we will get needed reform is by first breaking-up the power of entrenched interests. The advantage we have is the American republican system. We don't need to recreate it, so much as revive it. But to do that we must change our own thinking and our actions. We can't just be producers and consumers, we must be citizens.