Water is for Fighting Over

by John Fleck

  For six months, a negotiating team representing state leadership along with the core constituencies—mining, agriculture, and municipalities—met “informally” in an effort to sidestep the glare of Arizona’s open-meetings law, and tried to work out a deal.34 The final agreement placed groundwater-management restrictions on five “Active Management Areas” in the state, most importantly including the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas. There, existing pumping was grandfathered in, with provisions added to restrict future expansion of agriculture and to require municipal growth to demonstrate an “adequate supply” for the next 100 years. Over time, pumping would have to be decreased. Tweaks in ensuing years weakened the law’s provisions, allowing growth with a promise by a state agency to find the water to support it at some future date. But despite that glaring loophole and the future risk it poses, the basic system has largely succeeded.

  In 1978, before the act was passed, there were 452,000 acres of irrigated agriculture in Maricopa County, the central Arizona County that is home to the Phoenix metro area. By 2012, that amount of farmland had been cut by more than half, to 193,000 acres.35 Total water pumped from the state’s aquifers dropped more than 40 percent between 1980 and 2010.36 Municipal groundwater pumping grew, but a two-thirds decline in agricultural groundwater pumping more than offset the difference. By 2010, what had been an enormous groundwater pumping deficit draining Arizona’s aquifers had been largely eliminated in the “Sun Corridor,” the state’s growing urban region stretching from Phoenix to Tucson.37

  Cotton, once king, had by 2015 become a bit player in Arizona’s economy, with the crop planted on less than a quarter of the acreage that it had been grown on during the boom years of the early 1980s when Andrus had demanded a clampdown, and now making up just 5 percent of the state’s agricultural income. Overall groundwater pumping for agriculture dropped by almost half from its 1975 peak of 5 million acre-feet per year to 2.6 million acre-feet per year in 2010.38 From 1980, when the groundwater law was passed, to 2010, Arizona’s population more than doubled to 6.4 million, but its total water use declined by 24 percent. Arizona had demonstrated that those two young economists who, half a century earlier, had questioned the state’s extravagant claims about its need for water, had been right. Arizona’s economic growth did not require it to use more water.

  Still Picking a Fight

  While the Groundwater Management Act was not a perfect law, it did lead to clear reductions in water use and demonstrated that Arizona had the tools to solve its own internal water-management problems. Arizona also has played the role of collaborator in recent years, working with its neighbors in the early 2000s to come up with a modest agreement to begin curtailing water use as the water levels in the Colorado River’s big reservoirs drop.

  But Arizona’s approach to Colorado River Basin politics still shows strong signs of the combative state that called out its “navy” to thwart construction of Parker Dam. In the summer of 2015, as the basin states and federal government grappled with falling water levels in Lake Mead and the threat of looming shortages, Arizona governor Doug Ducey warned the audience at a civic luncheon in Tempe that California and the feds were colluding to snatch away more of the Colorado River’s water. Arizona officials could offer no evidence that such a scheme was actually under way, but the rhetoric was sharp. “California,” Phoenix water manager Kathryn Sorensen warned darkly, “has not shared what they’re doing.”39 As Tucson journalist Tony Davis wrote, “Any threat from giant California has always been a potent Arizona rallying cry.”40

  Within the network of state and water-agency representatives working on Colorado River Basin problems, there is a clear recognition that eventually some sort of “grand bargain” will be needed that finds a way to reduce everyone’s water allocation. To keep the system from crashing, everyone will have to give something up. But each of the participants in that core network also understands the dilemma that follows: each must then go home and sell the deal in a domestic political environment that views the river’s paper water allocations as a God-given right. Arizona’s belligerence in the summer of 2015 was a stark reminder of the way domestic in-state politics stands in the way of real solutions to the basin’s problems. Without a change in attitude, Arizona’s belief that “water’s for fightin’ over” could become, rather than a myth, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  CHAPTER 6

  Averting Tragedy

  THE LAWN AT REDONDO BEACH High School, on the coastal edge of Los Angeles County’s West Basin, began dying in the early 1940s.1 In an arid climate like Southern California’s it would be easy to blame drought, but Redondo Beach’s problem was deeper. The school’s gardeners, drawing on the aquifer beneath the coastal city, had enough water for the grass. The hitch was its quality. As water tables beneath the valley dropped under the stress of groundwater pumping, saltwater from the Pacific Ocean had begun to infiltrate the once-pure aquifer.2

  A few miles inland, the communities of Inglewood and Hawthorne were either oblivious to the problem or, more likely, they willfully ignored it. Farther from the coast, they figured they had plenty of groundwater to meet their needs and (rightly or wrongly) had little fear of saltwater intrusion. They seemed not to care that their pumping might affect their Redondo Beach neighbors or even the entire region. Instead, they continued to pump, lowering the regional water table, depleting the long-term supply, and pulling the saltwater inexorably inland at the risk of contaminating the entire basin’s supply.

  West Basin.

  Like competing families sharing a fishing ground, the communities were trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma: if Redondo Beach backed off on its own groundwater pumping in order to preserve the resource, that would just leave more water for the others.

  Los Angeles has always been a water-challenged place. Like most cities, it grew up astride a river. The Los Angeles River (as well as the San Gabriel and the Santa Ana Rivers, also threading their way through what is now the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area) would never be mistaken for the Thames or the Hudson. But you build a city with the rivers you have, and Southern California has never lacked for ambition, water or not. At 12 inches (30 cm) of rain per year in its valleys,3 the region falls just short of qualifying as a “desert,” yet by the mid-1800s, irrigated vineyards flanked the arid region’s rivers. The arrival of railroads and the evolution of refrigerated train cars made irrigated agriculture one of the region’s early economic engines, and by the 1880s farmers in the West Basin were pumping groundwater to make up for shortfalls in surface-water irrigation.4 “The story of the growth in this region,” US Geological Survey scientist Walter C. Mendenhall wrote in 1905, “becomes a story of the utilization and application of its available waters.”5

  Thus it was that the LA basin, one of the first regions in the western United States to make widespread use of groundwater, also became one of the first regions forced to cope with what occurs when groundwater begins to run out.

  By the 1940s, most of the West Basin water pumpers suspected there was a problem. They could see it when the depth to the water table in their wells dropped, and when the water grew salty like Redondo Beach’s as the Pacific Ocean crept silently in to fill the hole left by their overuse. But while each pumper knew about their own particular situation, collectively there was an information vacuum about the condition of the basin as a whole, and how the individual pumpers’ problems might be connected.

  Pumping records were all private, and jealously guarded. “Individuals in one agency viewed individuals in other agencies as competitors,” wrote political scientist Elinor Ostrom, whose pioneering study of the West Basin changed our understanding of the “tragedy of the commons.”6 “Water producers engaged in a quiet, competitive race with each other,” Ostrom wrote in her 1964 doctoral dissertation.

  Few recognized at the time what is clear today: if West Basin pumpers had continued down that path, depleted aquifers and saltwater intrusion would soon have rendered the groundwater basin useless.
But even those who saw the problem also knew that if any one of them voluntarily reduced their withdrawals while the others kept on pumping, all would be for naught.

  The West Basin’s water dilemma was really two separate, if closely related, problems, each of which required its own institutional solution. The first was the need to rein in groundwater pumping. If everyone kept on sucking up water as they had been, the region’s water supply would fail. The second was a need for some sort of imported water supply to replace the groundwater.

  Each proposed solution depended on the other to work. Without imported water, any effort to drastically reduce groundwater pumping would leave the region without a water supply. But imported water—tapping into the region’s newly arrived supply of water from the Colorado River Aqueduct—was expensive. Without an effective groundwater-management scheme, communities had an enormous incentive to just keep pumping cheaper groundwater while their neighbors shouldered the costs of the imported-water fix.

  In hindsight, the need for these paired solutions seems obvious; at the time, it was anything but. Redondo Beach and its coastal neighbors pleaded that collective action was needed, but Inglewood and Hawthorne wouldn’t budge. It looked like the start of a western water war that could leave the West Basin an early casualty.

  The Tragedy of the Commons

  Ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 famously described the collective-action dilemma posed by situations like the West Basin pumping race, dubbing it the “tragedy of the commons.” The commons is a resource to which many different users have access and cannot be excluded. A pasture on which anyone can graze their stock is the classic example, and groundwater basins from which lots of people can pump water share many of the same characteristics. By “tragedy,” Hardin meant not simply a bad outcome but, quoting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” His formulation suggested a sort of inevitability as self-interested consumers trashed their world. A sheepherder grazing on common land has a personal incentive to add one more sheep, Hardin argued, because the benefit of that one sheep accrues to the herder. The overall harm to an increasingly damaged commons, meanwhile, is borne by all.

  Such a situation need not be hopeless. Hardin suggested two possible solutions. The first is to declare the commons to be private property, and let the land’s owner sort out, for a price, who is entitled to graze how many sheep. That provides an incentive to maximize the number of sheep while also minimizing damage so the pasture can support animals in the following year. The second option, Hardin argued, is an overarching government intervention to limit the number of sheep.7

  The idea that humans would inevitably overuse a “common-pool resource” if no one owned or regulated it had been kicking around for years. But Hardin’s argument and the power of his rhetoric elevated “the tragedy of the commons” into a touchstone of late twentieth-century political and policy discourse. At a time of increasing public concern about the devastation of our environment, it resonated.

  With little evident opportunity or desire to turn the groundwater commons into private property, intervention by some state or federal authority to prevent over-pumping was generally seen as the only option. But starting in the 1960s with her study of the problems of the West Basin, Ostrom (who in 2009 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for the answers she found) suggested a third path. She wasn’t working backward from theory, telling people what they ought to do. Her starting point was empirical: What do people actually do when confronted by the sort of problem Hardin described?

  The arc of Ostrom’s life and work is unique. When as a political scientist she won the 2009 economics Nobel, Paul Krugman and Steven Levitt—two of the United States’ best-known economists—admitted they had never heard of her.8 This is in part because of the way her work, while nominally found in academia’s political science silo, spanned disciplines. Political science rightly claimed her, economists honored her with a Nobel, and much of her research was grounded in the labor of a generation of anthropologists working around the world.

  Traditional histories of California water generally treat what happened in the West Basin and the adjoining groundwater basins with a wave of the hand, as if what the communities did was straightforward—they were over-pumping, so they all got together and came up with a plan to pump less groundwater and bring in Colorado River water to replace it.9 Ostrom’s genius was in not taking that for granted, in realizing that the central question was how they came together to do that. Questions that to others seemed trivial to Ostrom were not. What she showed is that creating institutions capable of collectively managing the West Basin’s groundwater was not as simple as slapping down a new government agency and then flipping a switch to turn it on.

  Ostrom’s research began as a seminar assignment while she was a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Each student was told to pick a groundwater basin and figure out how its community dealt with rising population and dwindling groundwater. It was a thorny problem, given that the boundaries of the basins and the government agencies charged with managing them did not match up.10

  For the fledgling political scientist, the West Basin was the perfect laboratory. “It was great,” Ostrom wrote years later, “that I could drive half an hour and be in ‘my research site.’” Young and, by her own admission, naive about the problem she was trying to solve, Ostrom later acknowledged that “tragedy of the commons” wasn’t even in her vocabulary. “I had not realized I was studying a common-pool resource problem, nor that it was widely considered insoluble,” she said.11

  It took many years, and the analyses of many more West Basin–like communities wrestling with similar problems, for Ostrom to identify a set of characteristics that successful efforts have in common. Any such governance system, she concluded, must

  •define the boundaries of the area where the resource will be managed;

  •determine who gets to extract the resource, and when, and how much;

  •establish who pays to maintain the health of the resource so that extraction can continue into the future;

  •create a process for monitoring the resource and how it is used, enforcing restrictions, and resolving conflicts;

  •determine how problems across larger scales—between the resource unit itself and the larger environment in which it exists—will be resolved;

  •create a framework for the evolution of rules over time as understanding of the resource and the demands being placed on it change.12

  An Informal Start

  One of Ostrom’s most striking findings was the importance of informality as a tool in common-pool resource management. Ultimately, you often need to develop formal governmental and legal institutions, but at the beginning, non-binding communication—just finding a way to get together and chat—can play a critical role. Ostrom called it “cheap talk.” In lab experiments, Ostrom and others found that “cheap talk” made people more likely to cooperate successfully. In the field, they found again and again, it worked.

  In coastal Southern California, the West Basin Water Association provided the “cheap talk” scaffolding upon which the institutions needed to solve the groundwater problem could be built. In the 1940s, basin water management was in turmoil. Inglewood mayor E. S. Dixon was adamant: his city had plenty of groundwater, and he saw no need to join with Inglewood’s neighbors in the creation of a municipal water district to solve the region’s water problems. “I have consulted with geologists and other water authorities,” he wrote the local newspaper in January 1947, “and all of the data convinces me that there is sufficient underground water available to the city of Inglewood to supply all of its present and future needs.”13 His neighbors in Hawthorne felt the same way. They saw only cost and risk in collaborating with their neighbors to the west.

  Others had tried to convince Inglewood and other cities on the inland side of the basin that they, too, were at risk. “There is no known barrier in the West Basin to
prevent saltwater encroachment,” F. N. Van Norman, one of the leaders of the community fact-finding committee formed to study the problem, told the Los Angeles Times during the summer of 1946. “This nullifies the theory that the ultimate water problem of one West Basin city is different than any other in the area.”14

  Inglewood and Hawthorne weren’t buying. The cost of joining a regional municipal water district would be high for the inland communities, Dixon said during a speech before the Southwest Inglewood Improvement Association, while the benefits of avoiding saltwater intrusion were relatively small.15

  Inglewood and Hawthorne were gambling that the other communities would shoulder the costs of bringing in the Colorado River water and hence would reduce their pumping, leaving those who didn’t join in the collective with an abundant supply of cheaper groundwater. They also were gambling that, if legal push came to shove, their water rights would win out in a court fight. That might leave the losers with no water, but Inglewood and Hawthorne didn’t seem to care.

  In 1945, that “I’ve got mine and the heck with everyone else” attitude was widespread when a group of forward-thinking individuals representing some of the most at-risk water agencies came together to form a group calling itself the West Basin Water Association. At the time, Ostrom wrote in her doctoral dissertation, West Basin water management (if you could call it that) amounted to a “competitive race among the large number of poorly informed and, in some cases, deceptively competitive water producers.”16 Initially twenty organizations joined, including the coastal cities at greatest risk from saltwater intrusion and some of the private water companies. The region’s oil companies, with big economic stakes in the health of the aquifer, were active as well.17 Ostrom chose an interesting phrase to describe them: “public entrepreneurs.”