When Peter Gleick moved to California in the 1970s, the state had more than a million acres of cotton in production and little control over the use of its rapidly depleting groundwater. Today, California grows a tenth the amount of cotton and groundwater use has been brought under control. For Gleick, an author and cofounder of the water-focused Pacific Institute, these are signs that change can happen. But there’s much more to be done, and quickly, especially in the arid western United States, where water use is extremely high—and climate change and drought are increasing pressure on a region that already uses a tremendous amount of water.
“We have to fundamentally rethink agriculture. How much agriculture do we want? What kind of crops are we going to grow?”
In his latest book, The Three Ages of Water, Gleick describes what he calls a “soft path” for water conservation, moving beyond the hard infrastructure and rigid policies we’ve relied on in the past. This means rethinking attitudes toward growth, while recognizing water as a fundamental human right and a source of broader ecological health. In the West, that also means reconsidering our approach to agriculture. Civil Eats caught up with Gleick to understand what that means and how we should think about water in the near future.
When it comes to water, agriculture, and the arid West, how should we be framing the challenges ahead?
There’s a mismatch between how much water there is and what humans want to do with it. It used to be mining. Mining was the dominant user of water. But really, for our lifetime and certainly our immediate predecessors, agriculture has been the dominant user of water. So, how can we continue in the West to do the things that we want to do within the constraints of nature, the constraints of how much water is available, and the growing constraint of the realization that even the limited amount of water that’s available has to serve multiple purposes?
We built a whole series of systems, both physical and institutional, that brought enormous benefits to us—hydropower, irrigated agriculture, water for cities. It was at a cost we didn’t fully understand at the time—in particular, the devastation of natural ecosystems that were also very dependent on limited water.
How do we need to think about agriculture differently in the West if we’re going to have enough water in the future?
We have to fundamentally rethink agriculture, very broadly. How much agriculture do we want? What kind of crops are we going to grow? How are we going to water those crops, and how are we going to manage the institutions that give the signals to farmers about what to grow, that determine how markets develop, that subsidize good or bad things, that allocate water from one user to another? Those are all things we designed 100 years ago or more, and they no longer serve their purpose.
“Everywhere I look there are smart farmers and smart cities doing innovative things. There are people nibbling around the edges of the water rights discussion.”
The arid West is a great place to grow alfalfa. Some farmers can get three or four or five crops a year of alfalfa. It’s easy to grow. The problem is it takes a lot of water, and farmers grow it because they have available water, because of the institutions or the laws or the economics that give that water to them. And subsidies for certain kinds of things, like transportation, make it economical to grow. We’re now in a world, I believe, where the water laws and the markets that encourage farmers to do certain kinds of things are no longer appropriate.
The challenge is, how do we redesign those things? How do we change those things? You can change it by limiting water availability to certain farmers. You can change it by changing the price of water or subsidies for alfalfa. You can change it by regulatory changes. You can change it by economic changes. But we haven’t figured that out yet.
What are the strongest levers we have right now to move things quickly?
Changing water rights, which is a legal issue, and policy, in the broad sense: subsidies, economic strategies, assistance to farmers, information about extreme events from the climatic point of view. We can make improvements in technology to some degree, and I think that’s really important, but the really big changes will come about on the legal and institutional side.
Prior appropriation, where water rights were given out 100 years ago or more based on first come, first served, those water rights are badly monitored and enforced. They also don’t lead to efficient use of water. If you have a senior water right and there’s water scarcity, you get your water first—it doesn’t matter how efficient you are, and you have to use it or you lose it.
The prior appropriations doctrine made sense 100 years ago, but it no longer makes sense. But it’s so heavily ensconced in law and culture that changing that is probably the biggest barrier to moving agriculture in the West into the 21st century.
Where can we look to find solutions to these challenges?
I think there are solutions to every one of these problems. We’re already seeing the elements of it in what I call the “soft path” for water. The hard path is what we did in the 20th century, the hard institutions, infrastructure, and economics that brought us the benefits of the 20th century, but also the problems we see. The soft path says we have to rethink the supply of water.
We have to stop thinking that finding a new source of supply is always the solution. There are no new sources of water, in the traditional sense, but there are non-traditional new sources of water: recycled water, reclaimed water, desalinated water. Most of those are expensive, and urban. But they are new sources in the sense that they don’t require tapping another river over, tapping groundwater, or building a pipeline from the Great Lakes or from Canada. Those days are over, although some people haven’t realized that yet.
The soft path also says rethink demand, and that’s this question of efficiency and conservation. Do what we want with less water, and rethink what we really want to use our water for. What’s our demand really about? Do we really want to grow as much alfalfa in the West as we’re growing today? I think that’s a question we’re starting to ask, and we need to ask more questions like that.
And the soft path says we have to rethink our institutions, economics, management, politics, and laws. Everywhere I look there are smart farmers and smart cities doing innovative things. There are people nibbling around the edges of the water rights discussion. So, the challenge is to find the success stories. Figure out why they’re successes and implement them to scale.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
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