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I find the usual recommendations for grief a little silly, because my experience was that grief was the boss of me and decisions to do any particular thing never went anywhere.  That said, yes, all forms of self-care are a good idea: yoga, meditation, exercise, hygge, journaling, being with your loves, being with animals, going outside.  Sure.  Do what you can manage.

Here is my realistic list of what you can do about grief:

• You don’t have to do anything.  If you are healthy, grief will pass.  Sleep.  Eat what your body wants and sleep some more.  Notice when you start to feel energized again.
• Give yourself permission to go small.  For two years, I was a tiny person, with nothing left over to give to friends, no interest in anything abstract, no capacity to follow any plot beyond my own.  It is OK to be that way for a while, and for healthy people, grief will pass.
• Give yourself permission to be OK sometimes.  Grief comes in waves; between the waves you may feel good.  That is also natural and fine.  So is black humor.  Do not waste energy on guilt for feeling good or for laughing at bleakness.
• If you weren’t healthy going into grief, jesus fuck go get help.  This is time for therapy.  Grief and its depression will find all of the unhealed places and re-open old hurts.  Addicts are at very high risk of relapse during grief.
• Of the standard recommendations, I got the most from going outside and from getting a dog.  I found myself compulsively driven to plant and garden, but I don’t know if that’s a widespread grief response.
• As an overarching guide, I found Ro Randall’s presentation of the tasks of grief much better than the mainstream concept of the stages of grief.

After your grief, this situation will still be astonishingly bad and we will still have to respond. I don’t mean to suggest anything different.  But right now, grief is an additional burden, its own thing.  Respect it; one way or another, grief will take its full toll.  Also know that the part that is grief will pass.  It just does.

Friends, I find this a bit bizarre and further, I dislike talking about myself here.  This week, however, two of my strongest intellectual interests have converged.  During the years this blog was silent, my partner and I were given cause for great grief.  We were essentially obliterated; my absence from the blog I love is evidence of that.  I was too reduced to have abstract interests, including water, but I read everything I found about grief.  (I am also astonished that I didn’t find the work Dr. Kearns pointed me to, which is about the best I’ve read on grief.)

While reading about grief, I was substantially frustrated.  In our state those years, everything was explainable by grief, which is essentially useless.  I did not find the stages of grief useful either, especially when I was told they could intermix.  I wanted to know what was natural to grief and would lift of its own, what was situational, and what was potentially pathological and should be addressed.  This week, as we are back in grief, I’d like to sort it for you in more concrete terms.  These are ways you are likely experiencing grief:

• That stoned numb feeling is grief.  Clumsy, knocking into things, losing words, feeling disembodied –all grief.
• Your exhaustion is from grief.  It isn’t just the time change, nor staying up to see the election results.  Grief is exhausting and you need to sleep.
• Crying during transit.  When you are grieving, you cry when you move between places.  Driving, walking, even cycling all become times to sob.
• Appetite regression.  The stronger the grief, the more the appetite goes back to childish foods.  When we got our bad news, at first we couldn’t eat, then we ate nothing but breakfast cereal for days.  Expect to crave the comfort foods of your childhood.  I didn’t really love Didion’s book on grief, but she pointed to the most useful tip on grief I saw anywhere.  Emily Post wrote:

  • “It is also well to prepare a little hot tea or broth,” Mrs. Post advised, “and it should be brought them upon their return without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it, and something warm to start digestion and stimulate impaired circulation is what they most need.” [Emily Post’s 1922 book of etiquette, Chapter XXIV, “Funerals”]

  • Carbs.  This is a peculiar observation and I don’t know the mechanism, but I can tell you for certain.  Carbs are important right now; they are called comfort foods for a reason.  If you restrict carbs in your diet, the depths of your grief will be deeper.
• Spontaneous crying.  It is OK and appropriate.  Do not be afraid; you will not cry harder than your body can take.
• The feeling of being encased in fog, or moving through a viscous fluid, or greyness or bleakness.  This is grief-related depression.  It should go away, but keep an eye on it.
• Low motivation, difficulty initiating movement and plans, fatigue that makes all functions hard.  This is also grief-related depression.  Frankly, we just submitted to it and did almost nothing.

If you are otherwise healthy, your grief will pass.  It just does, lightening for small stretches of time that lengthen into days.  You will know that grief has passed when intellectual interests return, when you find the energy to tackle something big you want to do, when you feel like your old self.  When grief passes, we will all still face this incredibly horrible reality.  But you will be assessing and participating in it with your usual capacities, without the incremental burden of grief.

UPDATE:  I got some commiseration that makes me think that this post isn’t clear.  We had a very bad couple of years, but have gotten much better.  For two years we have been well and happy.  The grief did indeed lift.  This election knocked me down, but not nearly so far.

Noted asshole Buddy Mendes wrote an op-ed for the Fresno Bee.  I was delighted when I saw that, because I love reminding local bigwigs that there are lots of kinds of authority in the world and they lost some of theirs when they indulged in asshole behavior.  How better than writing an anonymous post, tearing apart whatever sophistry he can manage?  Unfortunately, the central thesis of Supervisor Mendes’ op-ed is entirely correct and unassailable.  He is right.  The remainder of California, including our elected officials, neglects the Central Valley and its poor.  As he writes, we are committing a moral failure when we know “these policies are having a harmful impact on the region but choose to ignore the human and social consequences.”  We should be ashamed.

Mr. Mendes’ solution is that in the name of the poor people of the Central Valley, the State should take water away from communities more powerless and vulnerable (fish, Tribes, riparian habitats) and distribute water to landowners who incidentally create jobs in the process of privatizing resource wealth.  So, you know.  Fuck that.

But his problem statement remains true.

Even more cynical is the fact that the activists and government officials calling for further restrictions on water supplies are offering no plan to assist the San Joaquin Valley region with the damage they are creating. They encourage policies that take land out of production, eliminate farm jobs, and strain the resources of local governments.

• Frankly, to my mind, the current water policies are only an excuse to throw money at the Central Valley.  We’ve shamefully neglected it for decades and if there were no drought and climate change, we should still throw money at the poor in the Central Valley.
• Dr. Michael wrote this about the funding for the AroundDeltaWaterGo.  I found it persuasive.

The Valley economy has many, many needs.  It breaks my heart to think that anyone in government would contemplate a $6.5 billion subsidy to Valley agriculture that provides no net benefit to the Valley economy.  If such a subsidy were to happen, it would be a tragic example of ineffective and wasteful government.  If the government feels compelled to spend billions in industry subsidies in the Valley, I would suggest spending a much smaller amount to entice some other industries that would diversify the economy and create good paying jobs.  If a subsidy proposal is ever formalized, every mayor in the Valley should oppose it and offer up an alternative economic development package that is much cheaper and does more for their constituents.

• It gets extremely touchy to talk about this stuff, but one of the mitigation strategies could be to help people leave.  I know they don’t want to, but I also know that those areas don’t generate enough wealth for people to live by first world standards, like not having arsenic or nitrates in their water.  It is a real dilemma.  There are relocation funds in the last water bond, and from what I hear, no one has been interested in them.
• The consequences on farmworkers of decreased farmwork is fairly well described.  There is another set of social consequences that I don’t see in mainstream conversation.  Retiring farmland will create a lot of loss, grief and dislocation for farmowners.  Perhaps we don’t think the State has any role in addressing that.  Fine; that’s an understandable policy position.  But I continue to think that directly working through the emotional side of land retirement (analogous to climate change grief) would open up strategies that we can’t predict (like letting owners have life tenancies on their farms but not farm, or finding ways for them to continue in their roles as stewards by directing the next uses of their land).

From PPIC, California’s Water, October 2016, Section: Water for Farms, page 47

This chart neatly illustrates my continuing gripe about one of the media clichés about California agriculture.  You can justify California ag’s water use, but you cannot justify it based on the ubiquitous quote: ‘California grows half the nation’s fruits and vegetables‘.  California does do that, but in this chart, that’s only 4% of agriculture’s water use.  (I can’t tell from this chart whether “Orchards” includes table fruit, in which case, it would claim some of the 34% in the bar above.) I’ve been especially disappointed to read the Brown administration’s representatives using that cliché to lump all of agriculture’s water use into the most sympathetic sliver of ag water use.

From the top down:

I view a large portion of this bar as resource extraction and privatization in classic colonial style.  The proceeds from sales of tree nuts abroad go to already wealthy people who don’t live in the regions they farm.  Ironically, the worst of them won’t be in this chart, since they’ve planted their nuts and vines since 2010, the data-year for this chart.  This is the segment of agricultural water use that outrages people, since almonds are not more important than a snack and the profits go to billionnaires.  Wine is also in this bar.  I’m personally no more fond of wine than almonds, but I generally don’t rail against it because I recognize that wine has deep cultural importance.  The only argument for this category of water use is basically ‘the market really likes it’.  Mr. Wenger  expands on that to say that it would be ‘un-American’ to deny resource extractors’ desire to follow the market.

The next line, Truck and specialty, is the part of ag that is easy to support.  It is your salad in winter and provides farmworker jobs like picking and handling.  I too support this segment, possibly with more policy fervor than you might suspect.  If I thought we were ever going to be so water short that this ag sector were in danger, I would be advocating for strong food security measures.  But IT IS NOT VERY MUCH WATER.  Even with climate change, instream flows and SGMA, I believe we will have enough water to provide for this type of agriculture for the foreseeable future.

Four of the next five lines are animal fodder.  (Please, lets skip over rice until next paragraph.  Also, that corn is not table corn.  It is corn grown for animal feed.)  There’s a lot of water in those lines; it adds up to half.  Not much revenue either.  I understand that this category provokes scorn; it looks like a poor use of water.  But this category of water use is the underpinning for cheap meat. The scornful soul is in danger of hypocrisy.  However you feel about eating meat more than once a month is how you feel about this category of water use.

Next is rice.  I see that rice is weighted to the right, a relatively high water user for the revenue.  However, like wine, rice is an important food for humans with deep cultural importance.  Further, rice growing worldwide is endangered.  I’m not opposed to using water for this.

Last is cotton.  Cotton is a pretty useful product.  There isn’t that much of it, a couple hundred thousand acres.  I can’t get riled up about cotton.

My takeaway:

The way I look at ag water use is twofold: does it produce an important food for humans, and do the proceeds from that use do good work in the ag valleys?  I don’t believe tree nuts meet either criteria (because they don’t generate many jobs; the proceeds go to very rich people; they’re just fucking snacks), so I complain about them a lot.

I resent that all of California’s agricultural water use gets defended on the basis of table crops, because THAT ISN’T VERY MUCH WATER (or acreage).  I definitely agree that they’re great; table crops meet my criteria of being important food for humans and supporting farm communities.

I would object to wine/vine plantings and cheap meat, but I’ve been convinced that they’re really important to other people, so I save my strength for taking cheap shots at ACWA.

Since June 2015, growers have planted 77,000 new acres of almonds and 27,000 acres of re-plants.  That’s more than 300,000 af/year of water demand every year for the next couple decades.  Growers made that choice in 2015, in Drought Year 5, in full knowledge of SGMA.

Instream flows for Californian rivers should be State Water Resources Control Board decisions with the force of law rather than voluntary agreements for several reasons.  For this post, let’s posit that voluntary agreements would work as well to bring back salmon.  Even were that true, I list below several reasons the State Water Resources Control Board should still continue with their Draft Flow Objectives process and set instream flows as State law.

My top reasons:

1.  To (eventually) reduce conflict by reducing uncertainty.  As it stands, our cobbled together water rights system contains enough unresolved questions that most parties can put together a plausible argument for continuing to fight.  The earliest water districts can argue that they pre-date the SWRCB so the SWRCB has no regulatory authority over their water use.  There are unused codes and doctrines to protect fish, and we don’t know how strong those are.  Even if the Resources Agency can cobble together voluntary agreements that can do what instream flows would do, those would leave the contradictory and unsolved legal questions about water rights in place.  Answering those questions will take conflict in the short term.  But getting clear answers will reduce conflict in the long term.
2. People who want a water market should support these instream flow requirements. One of the risks of a water market is that it becomes a super-efficient siphon of water out of the environment. With instream flows protected, water markets would only be buying and selling the water that humans would be using as an economic commodity.  Legal instream flows are a foundational part of the structure for a water market.  They would greatly simplify a programmatic EIR for water transfers as well.
3. Enforcement of State Board decisions would be more straightforward for instream flows than for a statewide hodgepodge of voluntary agreements.  Further, I don’t understand what remedies are available for failure to meet “voluntary agreements.”  Fines?  To whom? Targeted how?  Cease and Desist orders?  Personal civil charges?  What happens when a restoration project with every good intention runs five years behind and the species becomes that much more precarious?  How is that resolved, and how should the State agency pursue and enforce it?  How should a State agency follow up on multiple similar situations, with multiple local partners each with slightly different agreements and authorities?  Instream flows would be more readily monitored and enforced.
4. It is their job.  The State Water Resources has a legal duty to regulate the waters of the state and a moral duty to follow the science where it leads.  Anything besides following the best available science on questions that are essentially biological is arbitrary.

Note: in this post, I am not positing that voluntary agreements would be as successful as instream flow requirements.

• I welcome a court fight over instream flow requirements.  It is time to do this.  Why have F&G §5937, the Public Trust doctrine and the Reasonable Use doctrine if we never use them or if we use them after the fish are extinct?  If they are no good, let’s find that out.  They are equally no good if they are never used.

II.  This is exactly the role that the State should play.  Decisions of this sort will necessarily feel ‘unbalanced’ within the regions that have gotten used to using 80% of the flow of the river.  But it is right and proper for the State to balance the preferences of the entire state, including the 38 million people in other regions who want our salmon runs to continue to exist.  No one regional entity can take that perspective, and they are too close to their electorate to make a sacrifice like that even if they wanted to.  It requires authorities at the State level to see the statewide picture.

c.  I hope we are seeing the pendulum swing back from the State’s emphasis on “regional management”.  That always looked more like an abrogation of responsibility than a governing philosophy to me.

4.  I was pretty bummed about this letter from Gov. Brown.  I attribute it to a sense of urgency on advancing the tunnels before his administration ends.  But his single-minded focus on the tunnels has been a real shame.  It made his water policies risk-averse.  I believe he could have advanced water management in the state far more if his agencies hadn’t been absorbed by the tunnels.  Now I have to wonder whether the progress that the State Board made wasn’t because of Gov. Brown, but despite him.  (To my eye, the only thing he really viscerally cared about was turf removal.  We made a great deal of progress on turf removal.)

Anyway, we should hear back about whatever ‘voluntary agreements’ the Resources Agency was able to find in the near term.  That’ll be interesting.

Analogies are the very devil; always more harmful to the conversation than a clear enunciation of the issue itself.   When offered an analogy in an important conversation, I suggest that you refuse to engage with it and ask instead for a direct statement of the issue.  That said, I am seeing a common theme in ag responses to the instream flow requirements that sounds like this:

Adding more flow to the rivers isn’t giving us more fish.  The enviros are pursuing a hackneyed, mindless approach of always wanting more water, more water, when we have been adding more water and there aren’t even any more fish.

I am now seeing a new variant of:

“More water” is old science.  The new science says make sure there’s food and nesting opportunities for the fish.

(I bet the enviros wish they had some sort of word for a landscape with enough food and nesting opportunities for fish, and that they had some way to study this new concept.)

Despite my distaste for analogies, I am going to present one now.  My usual rule of thumb is that a crop takes about 3ft of water to finish a season.  Let’s say we have a very hot year and we care about salt flushing.  For our analogy, lets use a crop water requirement of 40acre-inches/acre-year.

With that as our reference, I would enjoy conversations like this:

GROWER: We are only getting 8 inches of water this summer!  We need more to grow crops!

OTPR:  It probably isn’t a water issue.  Have you thought about the fertilizer your crops need?   It might be that, and your single-minded focus on water has blinded you to the fertilizer issue.

GROWER:  No, seriously.  If you want crops, we’re going to need more than 8 inches of water.

OTPR:  Have you looked into predation?  Maybe rabbits are eating your crop.   That’s probably it.

GROWER:  We are going to need at least 32 inches, and really 40 inches to have healthy crops that do well year after year.

OTPR:  Honestly, this focus on water is all-consuming with you.  We’re going to need an all-of-the-above approach that honors both of the co-equal goals.

GROWER:  Yes!  We can look at the nutrients and we can control predation.  Yes, we will do that.  But fundamentally, crops require 36-40 inches water if you want to get something to eat when you’re done.

OTPR:  You keep bringing up the water, water, water.  This unhealthy focus has got to be hiding some ulterior motive, probably because you are hiding a huge water grab.  If you understood that we’re really nice, you wouldn’t want to take all our water.

GROWER:  What if you gave us 16 inches, but maybe 20 inches, and we do our best to grow the minimum crops that are most important to everyone?

OTPR:  SIXTEEN INCHES!  That’ll destroy civilization itself!  Holding out the possibility of 20 inches is extortion!  You need to go back to the drawing board and look at the fertilizer and rabbits again.  What is it going to take to get over this one-size-fits-all approach?

I am being petty, but not actually more petty than the op-eds and comments I read.  Biological systems require the water that they require.  Up until that threshold, the yields are small and unsustainable.

I am thrilled that the State Board is starting the public process of setting instream flows.  Those are the basis for healthy rivers and fisheries, possibly a backstop for water markets, and the start of a water rights regime that reflects the actual amount of water in California.  They are long overdue.  Great work, State Board.

You guys know I’m not really going to return to that last post and write it up elegantly, right?

Honestly, the only decent use I can see for water markets is in-basin cap-and-trade systems for getting to sustainable groundwater use.  The locals will put cap-and-trade in place themselves in their Groundwater Sustainability Plans, because it will feel all “free-market” manly to them and obscures the real outcomes.  If it sucks after that, and growers realize that it forces the less-rich out of farming no less than power politics would have, I’ll have no sympathy, because self-inflicted. I’ve warned them as clearly as I can.

To be clear: the land retirement that is necessary to bring basins into sustainability will happen no matter what.  Growers in severely overdrafted basins should be thinking about their exit terms.  It may be that money from a cap-and-trade system is good enough, although these farmers didn’t think so afterward.  But if there are other, non-monetary exit terms that would make the transition feel better (possibly in addition to money), a water market of any kind won’t provide those.

Good morning.  I finally figured out the full chain of my objection to enviro support for water markets this morning.  (Thanks to Faith Kearns for giving me the final piece I needed.)  I should write this up fully, but want to preview my chain of reasoning with you.  The outline gives a pretty decent look at my belief chain.  This and my three questions of water markets are among my better thought on the topic.  Here we go:

Based on the myth that ag water use is inefficient, therefore conserve and market.

• It isn’t globally inefficient (basin efficiencies, there are other good reasons for good ag water management)
• Ag doesn’t sell conserved water, it conserves and irrigates more land.
  • Buyers may not want the small intermittent increment from conserved water.
  • Buyers want constant predictable large volumes.
• Growers sell their water or water rights when they are retiring land.
  • “Debt, death, and divorce” has become a sort of motto, Deane said, because those circumstances drive people to sell.

Water markets that aren’t carefully and intentionally designed to accomplish a purpose instead become siphons of water out of the environment or farm retirement programs.

However, water markets are a crappy way to retire land.

• They leave a patchwork of stranded infrastructure behind, based on the arbitrary distribution of wealth at the beginning, not on what else the land could do nor the quality of the water delivery infrastructure.
• don’t necessarily retire lands in a way that can lead to other good outcomes.
• No less coercive than government planning and zoning, for the would-be holdouts.
• In water market, only potential reimbursement for water sale (which = retired land) is money (which is nicely flexible).  But people might be more satisfied with other things, like the ability to stay on the land without farming, or keeping their community together, or taking care of their laborers.

If enviros really want to retire land, they should own that.  Should intentionally choose among a range of tools to retire land, of which water markets might be one, but so might zoning decisions, state-level decisions about water use, or large scale voluntary agreements.

• It is cleaner and more honorable to be forthright about land retirement.
• Farmers know that water markets retire lands anyway.
• It allows for negotiations that are larger than money.  Water users who will not get irrigation water in the future can think about what retirement terms would work for them.  Doesn’t preclude buying people out.
• It signals to growers to start the emotional work of grieving.  Without doing that, they’ll never be full participants in any transition.  Pretending that markets might not mean land retirement fudges that truth, allow both sides to pretend that grieving isn’t necessary.