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My objection to the Newsom administration’s “portfolio approach” is that a “portfolio approach” is a method, not a goal.  So in CA water, I can’t tell what goal the administration is trying to accomplish with their eight years*, besides not alienate anyone who might donate to Newsom‘s presidential campaign in 2026.

Dr. Lund endorses the “portfolio approach” here. The way he makes sense of the concept is by going through each issue area, stating a goal, and showing how to use a “portfolio approach” for that goal. Which, fine.  But that reinforces my impression that the “portfolio approach” only means “do all the relevant good things to achieve all the relevant good goals.”  This is not a useful directive! This is just bland good will. In terms Dr. Lund might appreciate, this is a model as expansive as the system it models.

I should stop fussing about this, because we are committed now and it doesn’t exclude any of my own priorities and it is too ambiguous to be wrong.  I look forward to seeing what the interagency group tasked with enforcing this comes up with. I predict a lot of talk about transparency and collaboration and maybe even synergies from the multi-benefitness!

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I’ve been stuck on this section for a long time.  His direct address to the reader floored me the first time I read it, cost me sleep for several nights.  He writes:

Our norms of behaviour, that we call our “civilisation,” may also degrade. When we contemplate this possibility, it can seem abstract. The words I ended the previous paragraph with may seem, subconsciously at least, to be describing a situation to feel sorry about as we witness scenes on TV or online. But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.

I mean, that used to be my favorite fiction. But reading that made it clear that I don’t want it applied to me. And yet, for hundreds of thousands, it is already true. We have discussed climate migrants here before; those are the intentional migrations, moving with some hope. But the wave of refugees from climate crises in Syria and Central America show what desperation driven migration is going to be like. My friend observed that it only took one migration event from a drought-and-war dissolved country to severely test Europe and America, bringing out bigotry that may yet break our countries. But we are going to have dozens of waves of desperation driven migration, from dry places, flooded places, places inundated by the sea. If we can’t handle even one of the early events… .

One reader wrote me that Bendell’s assertions are only that, no more authoritative than Bendell’s understanding.  With that in mind, I noticed another assertion with no support in Gov. Newsom’s Executive Order.  In the Whereases:

Frankly, Bendell’s assertion that we’re all gonna die seems a lot more likely than the EO’s bland assertion that doing it all is necessary and possible.  Where’s the evidence that it is possible?! Our watersheds are not being kept alive on the water rations they have now and the resistance to transferring water from the monetary economy to the physical ecosystem is fierce. The only way I can make sense of that statement is that perhaps the vagueness of the collective nouns disguises a contraction of community, ag and industrial water use.

This is all I’ve got on the Apocalypse Uncertain section, despite its considerable effect on me. I am eagerly looking forward to the next section, because I’ve a lot to say on Systems of Denial and California water.

This interview killed me. My objection isn’t reasonable, because I bet the part I found objectionable was just mindless cliché. The author wrote it because all agendas are ambitious or something and they just let anyone put anything on the internet these days, so no one actually stopped to ask: ‘is or is not our new governor’s water Executive Order actually “ambitious”?’  Because if anyone had thought about it for a second, there is no fucking way to call the EO “ambitious”.  It is the purest representation of political vague fuzziness, designed to mean anything and offend no one.

The strongest parts of the Executive Order are reactions. “One tunnel” is a reaction to Gov. Brown’s overreach.  “Clean drinking water” is a reaction to the Community Water Center’s thirteen years of advocacy. The rest is a mash of all the good ideas in a broth of ‘we can all be friends’. Things that might take an actual stance are muddled by collective nouns, so any advocate can hope that the ‘portfolio’ will support their side.

I keep noticing that ‘portfolio approach’ and ‘multi-benefit’ are converses.  A portfolio approach does a bunch of things to achieve one goal.  (What is the goal of Crowfoot’s portfolio?  Fuck if I can tell.  All the good things!  Why not all of ’em!?) A multi-benefit approaches uses one project to get a bunch of things (all of them good, of course). I can’t decide whether the multi-benefit concept sounds newly desperate (like we need to start hitting some lotteries with our diminishing resources) or whether it is all the most predictable type of chasing water down the entropy slope.  The ‘portfolio’ part is, of course, language that hopes to evoke the parallel of money, standardized and interchangeable, cleanly managed by genius technocrats.

I suppose the ‘portfolio approach’ is an improvement over the last meaningless phrasing.  I mean, co-equal goals are only two things, but a portfolio could have way more than two, so that’s a super improvement.  We wasted fucking years on co-equal goals that still don’t mean anything, although we now know that water users certainly do not think they mean equal shares.  Now we’ll spend a few years pretending that “portfolio approach” means something when, by its very purpose, it can’t mean anything.  It is intended to be neutral enough to avoid conflict, which, in our real-world water system, means that it cannot have enough content to mean anything (besides “everything good”). I mean, as the Executive Order is written, what political interest does it exclude?

So now I have to spend months or years watching us all pretend that a ‘portfolio approach’ is a meaningful thing, and watching advocates jockey to define it so they can get access to the Newsom administration, and hearing that shit from our appointeds at conferences, and I do not mean to have a terrible attitude but when that talk starts, I’m highly likely to go out to the halls where I can at least chat with someone.

Last, I would like to illustrate by contrast what an actual “ambitious agenda” would be:

• Reform CA’s water rights system.  Re-define “reasonable and beneficial” to reflect our existing and predicted scarcity.
• Wrench our agricultural system out of capitalism, prioritizing California’s food security.
• Acquire the CVP, merge with the SWP.  Get the project operators their own agency and merge the bureaucrats into a different unified agency.
• Overhaul the 19th century institutions, especially the 7000 water districts in the state.
• Restoring vigorous salmon runs throughout California. Remove a bunch of dams.
• Expand/replace CIMIS with free open-data remote sensing for the entire state.

I could probably think of others, but I hope this sampling illustrates ambition for those who have forgotten it. I get that politicos are trapped in their realm of interacting through catch-phrases.  But we don’t have to be.

Aw jesus.  I had nearly accomplished some lovely denial.

In her book about the death of her young child, Emily Rapp writes that parents love two things.  They love the child and they love the future of the child.  When they get a terminal diagnosis for their child, even while the child is still present, they suffer the loss of their child’s future.  I have always known that I had a kid for my own enjoyment, but I wasn’t really prepared for Catherine Ingram to be explicit about what ‘no future’ looks like.

Related pieces:

• A profile of the Extinction Rebellion  I love the slogan “Tell the truth and act like it is real.”  It is the ‘acting like it is real’ that I never see done in state government, despite all our “climate leadership”.  I mean, maybe Jerry Brown is building a survival bunker in Colusa, which actually would be ‘acting like it is real’.  But calling small-scale technocratic systems like cap-and-trade a success while not, for example, banning all production of fossil fuels in CA signaled to all of us that climate change isn’t actually urgent.  Until the State is willing to act like it is real,  citizens won’t either.
• Fuck these guys, and these ones too. These guys are fucking themselves, so we don’t have to.

It is really hard to live in two futures, so I will not be able to actually believe in near-term societal collapse and do productive work in Regular Life.  And I myself have been thinking of things that make sense in our current world.  Political pressures, ideas for Water, stuff like that.  I will keep going with Deep Adaptation, but if I myself don’t head for the hills, which is unlikely, I will probably revert to blogging about how Betty Yee should be governor next.  That doesn’t mean I don’t believe.  But I can’t manage to hold both futures in my head and I’m not brave enough to switch over yet.

I re-read World War Z over the weekend, which felt more like a soothing fairy tale about people doing extraordinary things to combat a visible menace that couldn’t be denied or ignored.  So addressable! Such a functional response!

Our Non-Linear World and Looking Ahead

I’m not going to discuss these two sections at length. I do have more to say about later sections.

On this one page, Prof. Bendell wrote:

IPCC … has a track record of significantly underestimating the pace of change

On some other page, he writes:

[R]eported impacts today are at the very worst end of predictions being made in the early 1990’s.

And on yet a different page that comes later, he writes:

The politically permissible scientific consensus is that we need to beneath 2 decrees warming. … That figure was agreed by governments that were dealing with … pressures from  vested interests, particularly corporations.

All the while detailing why the predictions we do have likely underestimate the danger.

The thing that strikes me is how the seriousness of climate change, already underestimated, then gets diluted down the chain of governmental layers. Although California’s 4th Climate Change Assessment is willing to predict large sea-level rise, the most the Coastal Commission requires is that local governments “consider” managed retreat from the coast.  The local governments “consider” managed retreat by promptly dismissing it, and go back to planning* for groins and beach replenishment.

For SGMA, DWR offers climate change guidance (presumably backed by the models with the limitations that Bendell describers). The GSA’s will choose a politically expedient middle ground which may or may not survive review by board members who do not value climate change science.

Although the models aren’t dire enough, and our emissions are outpacing the models, I also see dilution as each level of government walks back a little more from what would be required to face climate change.

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Introduction/Locating this Study Within Academia

Prof Bendell doesn’t number his pages, so his analysis is clearly inadequate and civilization will survive after all!  Therefore, I don’t have to wrestle with any implications, which is just as well, since they all suck and I don’t want to. The lack of page numbers is going to make referencing the article difficult.  I’m going to have to approach this by sections.

I have been surprisingly floored by this paper since I read it last week.  More grief and fear than I expected; wakeful nights.  I’ve been glibly cynical and pessimistic for years, but as it turns out, I do not want to do the tasks of grief for societal collapse.  The questions are too hard, and I keep slipping back into denial.  Which is super easy, because we are all doing that together and everything that is ongoing in my life is not about near-term unavertable collapse. But today I’ve read a few more of their papers and agree with them.

In his introduction, Prof. Bendell writes about why he is writing this paper.  He was struck that his review found no academic planning for the most likely outcome.  Rather, everything we see says ‘if humanity doesn’t do this complex and unselfish task on a scale never seen before, it will really be bad’.  Of course, there is no evidence that we will undertake a complex and unselfish task at any scale, so the likely outcome is the really bad one. But even though I thought I had realized it before, seeing that explicitly laid out without the ‘absent a miracle’ step was pretty painful.

I will also say, that none of you brought me any cheer at all.  Nope.  The lot of you, including my mother, were all “yeah, we know.  Gonna be terrible.”   So, I have been in grief and anger this past week, and also switching back the dailiness of our entire surroundings, which make the whole thing easy to ignore.  I’ve thought of a few selfish, white-privilege kind of plans to help my own kid.  But half of the despair is the returning feeling that nothing on a larger scale would work even if I did it.  I would do effective things in a heartbeat, but I cannot imagine what they are. (Do not inform me about green-motivated personal austerity.)

I do want to draw parallels from the failures of world-scale climate change dialogue to the failures of California-scale water dialogue.  Prof. Bendell writes, on some fucking page:

The … field of climate adapation is oriented around ways to maintain our current societies as they face manageable climactic perturbations.

Which looks to me a whole lot like every Californian administration’s water goal of “please, what we have now for just a while longer”.  Which, I am sorry to say, is all I can detect in Crowfoot’s “portfolio approach”.  Portfolio approach TO DO WHAT?  To supply the world with cheap snacks?  To provide clean drinking water to everyone?  To have thriving rivers?  To retire 3 million acres of irrigated ag with equity and dignity?  I can apply a portfolio approach to any of those. But I am worried that the Newsom administration will stick to the default, even as climate change hits us.

We are all doomed.

Everyone knows that when a blogger wishes to resuscitate a moribund blog, the best way to do that is by reading and commenting on a difficult text. I well remember the eager clicks and fervent commenting from our last reading of Unbundling Water Rights. For the next while, as I can bear it, I will be reading and commenting here on Prof. Jem Bendell’s paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.  This paper lays out his thinking that ecologically-induced social collapse is imminent and unavertable.  I cannot find fault with his argument, nor do I see pockets of robustness that he has overlooked.  I have been heartbroken since I read it, as he knew his readers would be.

Back before 2012, I read a lot of post-apocalypse fiction.  Some were pretty good stories and I thought I had decent odds, post-apocalypse.  You have no reason to know this, but I have some mild actual skills unrelated to blogging.  Then some bad stuff happened, and I lost the western illusion that I was favored by chance and that stories all turn out well.  Then some other stuff happened and I felt horribly vulnerable and in deep need of society and complex economies the way we have them now, thank you.  It was several years before I was willing to return to post-apocalypse fiction. I’ve now read a few more, including the water-related ones.  My current preference is for Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless series, partially because it describes the fall as piecewise and slow, with workable remnants. As I read Professor Bendell’s paper, I hope for that scenario.

I have noticed a theme in other fiction I’ve read in the past year.  I notice a streak of women committing satisfying, righteous but extrajudicial violence against asshole men.  I gotta say, it fills a need.  I just got caught up on a contemporary fantasy series, in which humans live in small enclaves in a world controlled by the usual monsters (werewolves, vampires) and much worse.  It was medium-good, but I kept reading.  In every book, the human wrongdoers ignore environmental rules and want to expand beyond their limits.  When they persist beyond one warning, they are immediately slaughtered and eaten.  Is it possible that I am so starved for accountability that I want to see environmental extractors dismembered and eaten at the onset of the second infraction, left in bloody scraps by extremely literal all-powerful monsters?  Yes!  Yes, it turns out!  I read all seven volumes of accountability porn.  I have not encountered that genre before, but I won’t be surprised to see more of it.

In the days to come, OtPR will go piecewise through Dr. Bendell’s  Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, wishing it weren’t so persuasive.

I assume you all saw the news; Governor Newsom declared that he will change the nature of the AroundDeltaWaterGo from two tunnels to one smaller tunnel. My thoughts:

• It would be lovely if he also abandoned the fucking insipid branding efforts. We are neither children nor consumers to be fooled by CoolNames with internal capitals.  It is tedious to be forced to use them. I hope that era, started by Schwarzenegger and marked by the influx of PR staffers into appointed positions, can come to a quiet end.
• Governor Brown went to quite a bit of effort to insulate his projects from the next administration.  It is administered by a JPA and they just selected the engineering firm for the design.  Governor Newsom may have less power to change the project now than he anticipates.  It isn’t only a state project run by his administration any more.
• Governor Newsom’s interest in the Valley has held strong, even unto the second month of his administration.  He has a good understanding that there is a lot more to the Valley than ag; this may allow new political bargains with Valley residents who have been long neglected.
• Looks to me like Gov. Newsom is leaning heavily on the PPIC’s body of work.  I’d be cool with that if they didn’t substitute economic analysis for moral values.
• If Felicia Marcus is at leisure, it’d be wonderful to see her as DWR Director.

ADDED 2/14:

This morning, I realized why the branding felt so insulting.  I suspect that the concept of branding WaterFix and EcoRestore was pitched to Gov. Brown and while he was personally indifferent, he thought that perhaps we all would fall for it.  If my assumptions are accurate, it would be symptomatic of the contempt he felt for us all.

His contempt for us was evident, not just in the most famous example, but throughout this ACWA speech as well.  I had begun thinking that the reports of his genius were overblown, but whether they were or weren’t, the whole concept of ‘Jerry Brown’s special genius’ allowed what was fairly evident (his clear opinion that he made better decisions than the people of California) to go unremarked on.

I had been feeling unhappy about Gov. Brown for the last couple years of his term, but hadn’t teased this out yet.  But with him a month gone, I strongly notice the contrast.  It is a relief to have a governor who doesn’t feel open contempt for his own people (and, you know. Anyone he talks to.).  Gov. Brown seemed to have gotten the “known asshole” exemption.  That’s the one where everyone knows someone is an asshole (or, “irascible” or “blunt”, or “doesn’t like small talk”, or “genius”), so grants that person much more leeway to be an asshole.  But I think the world would be better off without that exemption, if we held known assholes to even stricter standards of behavior.  Besides which, only powerful men seem to get the known asshole exemption, and I am so fucking over powerful men taking license.

They did it! I am so relieved and pleased. I really worried that there would be political considerations that forced the bullshit voluntary settlements on them and once again, I would have to be giving my own allies the benefit of the doubt as they punt on something that very clearly needs doing. But they did it! They made a choice for living rivers, against turning public rivers into private money for the few. I wish it were more; I wish it were stronger. But it is such a wonderful step in the right direction that I am inspired again.

It has been hard to write when it is hard to believe that the side of the very basics, the obvious fundamentals will win out. Without optimism, I have not believed that we are capable of choosing anything over capitalism, even the very ecosystems we need to live. I am in a fair amount of despair over what we are leaving to our children. Frankly, I do not give western modernity good odds in the next couple decades. Part of why I haven’t written has been that I could only add bile and gloom; when I can’t add value, I try not to say anything.

But today I am delighted and inspired! In the face of an actual hard choice (as compared to some win-win bullshit), the State Board got it right. You know, it is time for the infinite number of Governor Brown retrospectives and of course, the discourse would be incomplete without mine on his water efforts.  He didn’t entirely align with my preferences, so naturally I’m tempted to think that little got done. But that isn’t the case. Far as I can tell, the State Board got revitalized and became wonderful. DWR got sucked into the vortex of Gov. Brown’s obsession with the Delta Tunnels and languished.

It wasn’t that long ago that I called the State Board a bunch of fearful twitchy wretches. And they were! But it has been a couple years since I’ve noticed that they are all hoppity now. They bound into meetings with a ton of ideas and energy and they look young. Honestly, in the Brown administration, the State Board has been like the American in Paris. They’ve gone from overwhelmed and scared in traffic to a fabulous jazzy finale. Felicia Marcus has been the face of that, but I imagine that she would share credit. Anyway, the State Board has a whole lot to be proud of. Not just last night’s work, but the internal transformation. (Re-listening, I can even hear the drought years in the American in Paris.)

Congratulations State Water Resources Control Board. Thank you. In addition to helping our rivers, you’ve revitalized at least me, and I suspect many more.

Members of the State Board, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of arguments for and against the flow objectives.  I’ll add a couple more arguments in favor, hoping that I am not repeating the comments you’ve already heard.

• I saw the rally outside the capital today.  There were a lot of people holding signs, saying that they depend on the status quo.  I point out that the rivers would have had a similar constituency had they not been destroyed and blocked off from the public.  If the Merced, Stanislaus and Tuolumne were still living public rivers, there would be people who love them to rallying at the capital to urge you to protect them.  If the situation were reversed, if you were deciding whether to let the flow of the Russian River dwindle to 11 percent, or dry to muddy flats in the summer, you’d have everyone in Sonoma and Mendocino counties at rallies at the capital, telling you that their river is crucial to them.  Yes, there was a crowd at the capital today, speaking for diverting water to ag.  The other side is missing because their rivers are missing.  The people who remember those rivers still yearn for them.
• If you believe that systemically returning flows to rivers for the sake of California’s ecosystems should be done, then I hope you also realize that this is your best chance to do it.  It is a weighty responsibility, and I know you take the opposing perspectives seriously.  (A lot more seriously than I would prefer, honestly.)  But this moment won’t necessarily come again if postponed.  After the administration changes, you could be just like the rest of us, sitting at a screen, wishing we could make things right, trying to find the right words to convince people with the authority you have right now to bring back our rivers.  Affirming the Lower San Joaquin River flows will earn you a longlasting reputation on both sides.  In the long run, I think you will be proud of wrenching Californian water onto a parallel track, where rivers live and private economic uses of water are checked.