 Hello, I'm Martin LaMonica. I'm the projects editor at the conversation and I'm excited to welcome you to this webinar to mark the publication of our book called the conversation on water. The conversation is a nonprofit online publication written by academic experts and edited by journalists for a general reader. We publish about 10 articles a day on a wide range of topics and our content is republished regularly in other media. Everyone from big media outlets like CNN to small regional newspapers. We just launched a line of books called critical conversations, which is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Each chapter is a previously published article on our website and the articles are organized along different themes to give readers a foundational knowledge of a given subject in a very accessible way. In addition to the conversation on water, which I have to show you, it's a fun book and a really nice read. We also have books on gender diversity, biotechnology, guns, and one on work, which is in development. So with this webinar, we want to share some insights from some of the contributors to the book on water. Water is a subject that's very deeply intertwined with many issues. It's about environment, of course, but it's also about policy and politics, social justice, health and the economy. So, for today's discussion, we've assembled a panel of experts from very different disciplines to help give you a more holistic picture of water issues and potential solutions. We'll have a panel with three contributors to conversational water with moderated by water journalist Brett Walton from Circle of Blue. If you have questions, submit them in the Q&A, not in the chat, and I will send them to Brett during the panel. First, we will hear a short introduction from Andrea Kaye Gerlach, who was the guest editor who I worked with, putting this book together. She's a professor in the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona, where she also directs the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. Andrea, over to you. Wow, thank you so much. Thank you, Martin. Good afternoon. I feel honored to be part of this book, this publication, and then also to be part of this conversation with all of you here today. I begin the preface of the book by saying, we have taken water for granted in the United States. And by that, I really mean that we've come to expect and rely on water to flow freely from our taps, clean and at a low cost. This has been home at least historically to some of the most reliable and safest drinking water in the world. And so it's really easy to get complacent and even out of touch with our water. But the last decade has really been a bit of a wake up call for us in the United States. Starting with the Flint water crisis, we really, really helped to raise national concerns about the management of our water systems and the overall safety of our drinking water. COVID called further attention to issues of access and affordability in many communities in the United States. I've been a student of water how we govern it and the politics around water for more than two decades now as a university researcher and professor. And in doing this, I've had the pleasure of meeting with policymakers in cities across the US and in our nation's capital to understand how we make policies around water and then how they work in practice. I've had the privilege to meet with scientists working to understand the latest pollutants in our water or studying the performance of different practices like green infrastructure. And I've learned from community members about the struggles that they face with access to affordable clean water and how they're working to build sustainable water efficient homes and more resilient neighborhoods. It's heartening to see the significant growth and knowledge of how we manage water. We're coming to better understand the scope of the challenges ahead and what lies in front of us. But the statistics are pretty sobering. One quarter of Americans receive water that violates federal drinking water laws. Two million Americans are without running water and indoor plumbing. Many pipes and cities across the US from Atlanta to Cleveland to Pittsburgh are losing upwards of 30% of their water. 45% almost half of parents with school age children worry about the safety of the tap water in their children's schools. Water is unaffordable for one out of 10 US households. Non-white households in the United States are disproportionately affected by water utility disconnections, water debt, and a lack of indoor water plumbing. These statistics can help us to see that there are many dimensions to water. There are many pathways into seeing and learning about water. Water can be seen as an economic issue, an environmental one or a spiritual one, just as Martin told us at the start of this webinar. And in the stories in this book, the chapters in this book really elucidate how water is deeply interconnected, how our water is intrinsically tied to our food, our energy, our health, and our biodiversity. Given this interconnectedness, we need, of course, innovative solutions and technologies to meet the challenges ahead, but we also need better governance and policy mechanisms that are collaborative, participatory, and equitable, and just. I can see this in action here in the Colorado River Basin where I live. It's been a bit of a living laboratory these days as cities, agriculture communities and tribes face drought and shortage. They're coming to learn how their decisions impact one another, how they're interrelated and how they're linked. Here in the Southwestern United States, like the rest of the US, this interconnectedness of water must really be reflected in our decision making and in our governance. Water is just really too important to be left to the experts. The issues around surrounding water today should not be confined to narrow spaces seen merely as a technical issue and with decisions made by limited participants. I'm really pleased to hand it over to Brett Walton now he is an award winning journalist with circle of blue and nonprofit news agency that reports on water. Brett is really the go to person for all things water I start my day with a cup of coffee and reading the latest news. He's going to facilitate a conversation now with three panelists who are authors of different chapters in the book, and hopefully it will help us to start to further unravel these notions of interconnectedness and the different dimensions of water, and also help us to look for opportunities and solution spaces ahead so turning it over to you Brett. Thank you Andrea and thanks to the conversation for hosting this rather timely and important events on water in the US with the launch of the conversations book on water. I would do have three of the authors of pieces in the book here with us today knowledgeable guides that will help us understand some of the answers solutions implications of these big questions around water in the US. I do want to say that you know Andrea started her her talk with 2014 and Flint and this growing awareness of water in the US and I can attest in my career I have definitely seen more attention and more focus on water and part of that is from scholarly work and part of that is attention in the media, but also it's a factor of these things are affecting people's lives and really dramatic ways. So we'll get into some of that today with our panelists. We'll get into some of the technical work you're probably familiar with this sort of setup. I will introduce each of the panelists and they will have a few minutes to give an overview of the piece that they wrote for the conversation there their topic of interest and these topics span a broad range. We have indigenous water rights, farming and law health and climate change. And then in the conversation we will mix and match and have a nice discussion where all of these issues will be intertwined. We'll have listener questions at the end, and like Martin said you can submit those through the Q&A, and I will pose those at the end of our discussion. To lead us off we have Rosalind Lapierre. She's an award winning indigenous writer environmental historian and ethno botanist. She's also a professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana champagne. And Rosalind is a question to prompt you in the recent years we have seen photos of water protectors holding signs. Water is life water is sacred. And besides being a very nice placeholder on a sign. I hope you could tell us a bit more what that means those concepts mean from an indigenous perspective. Yeah, thanks for well first of all thanks for the conversation for having this webinar and thanks for them for creating the book series which is really excellent. And I've already read several chapters that are in the book that one of my pieces is in. And yes, I one of the reasons why I was interested in even writing a piece. Initially, on why water is sacred to indigenous people was to help sort of explain that question of the placards that people were seeing especially after I mean during and then after the standing rock standing rock protests in 2016 2017. And I was initially contacted by journalists who are, you know, calling me up and saying hey Roz can you explain some of this and then luckily I was contacted by an editor from the conversations like hey Roz why don't you write something to help explain some of this. One of the things I've tried to do in several of the pieces that I've written for the conversation is to help explain just ideas about religion religious practice religious expression of indigenous peoples and the natural world. It's not just with water but with other things as well. And I think that it's important to recognize from the beginning that many indigenous communities in the United States and elsewhere around the world are religious people. They're sometimes very religious people. And so religion is a lens through which they see and operate within their daily lives, and every indigenous community is different. And so, in the piece, and pieces that I've written for the conversation I've tried to give examples from different tribes and tribal communities to say kind of express some of that difference. And for myself, you know I grew up on the black feet reservation I was raised primarily black feet which is my mother's tribe. I'm also Metis which is my father's indigenous community. And the pieces that I've written I've also tried to share what I have learned myself from my own family from my own community about that idea of why water is sacred to indigenous people. That didn't doesn't exactly answer your question but that's a starting point to just say that there is a wide diversity kind of understanding about water as viewed through a religious lens by indigenous people. And I guess the other thing I would just add at the very end here is just to for folks to remember when we were talking about, not just water but just sort of cultural life in general that, you know, one of the places that does a lot of research on kind of religion and religious practice is the Pew Charitable Trust. And one of the things that they've found kind of year after year with their research is that in the United States at least most people say that they are religious, right. It's all manner of religions. And so we often have to, we often, I will just say this we in the scholarly world. And in the Academy, we often forget that people are religious, they view things through a religious lens, and that is definitely true for indigenous communities and tribal communities here in the United States. Thanks, Ross, we will get into some of the implications of that different perspective on water here and we get to the discussion. Next, we have Burke Griggs, he's a professor of law at Washburn University, and his scholarship explores the historical technical and cultural aspects of natural resources law, especially water law. Burke, here we have one of the fundamental bedrock issues in the US and that's law, particularly around water law, who gets to use and control and have access to water. I think you wrote about this in the context of farming in the Midwest so how do those access rights and legal obligations affect water use there. Thank you, Brett, and I want to acknowledge my co-authors Matt Sanderson and Jacob Kluge shirts because they're sociologists, and I think one of the strengths of the conversation series is its interdisciplinarity. What I do in this piece is combine a legal and a sociological approach to the largely invisible and very worrisome crisis of the depletion of our country's groundwater systems. Every year across the O'gall aquifer we pump out about 8 million acre feet that never comes back and to put that in reference that's more than half of the annual flow of the Colorado River. We're pumping so much groundwater out of the planet right now that there's an article yesterday in geophysical research letters that showed how that groundwater pumping has changed the way the earth is rotating. So it is a massive problem that is not as visible but is extremely worrisome. Agriculture uses anywhere between 80 and 95% of the water that exists in the West. Rivers are just the icing on the cake of groundwater aquifers and of snow storage and reservoir storage. And our articles thesis is in the title. We're pumping too much groundwater because so much of government policy pays farmers to do that. Farmers are not breaking the law. They have property rights to pump this water. The fundamental problem Brett alluded to is since the 1850s and especially since the 1950s we've granted more water rights to pump and to divert than the water systems can support. So that's the sort of bureaucratic problems called over appropriation. There's also a problem in farm policy. Ever since the 1970s when agricultural secretaries famously said go big or go home when the Cold War on agriculture for agriculture. We've seen the size of farms increase and get bigger and bigger. And Matt Sanderson has identified what he calls the production treadmill. That in order to make money and keep property farmers have to continually borrow to add acreage either as owners or as tenants. And that in turn encourages them to pump more water to meet their bank loans and to meet their other financial commitments. So, if we are not breaking the law, farmers are not stealing water. If these subsidy systems promote overproduction and over pumping. What are we supposed to do. Well, a common thing you may know if you're interested enough water to tune into this podcast this webinar is I think that subsidies are just a terrible thing. You may be an environmentalist who sees how subsidies distort and destroy ecosystems you may be a more libertarian person who does not like government support and see subsidies is distorting economic system. But the fact that life as subsidies are an important part of production agriculture. So our position at the federal and state level is to try and reform. Two things, the subsidy system. And the property rights system for water. And we think both of these are possible. First thing is to reform the water system by instead of rewarding overproduction, instead of making a fetish out of grain yields, we should focus on conservation. We should pay farmers to not irrigate in sensitive areas to not irrigate during years they don't need to. I don't think farmers are necessarily concerned about where these subsidy supports come from, as long as they've got a secure supply of them, upon which they can plan their businesses. But that's federal. The state law system is critical because most water rights are state rights. And here we propose to make water rights more flexible that farmers going to be willing to trade less water use over the long term for more flexible water use year to year. Most water rights have an annual limit. And if you allow more variability there, then I think that gets us a long way. Water conservation can happen. But as the bad guy here is the lawyer who somewhat punctures a lot of dreams. I want to conclude by saying you've got to understand water reform within the context of property rights. And that's not bad news because property is a very creative tool markets can be very creative tools. And I think there are a lot of ways we can go here. Thank you. Thanks Burke and we'll get into that the details of those sorts of changes in legal systems here in a bit. But first we want to turn to Gabriel Philippelli, our third panelist today, he's a biogeochemist with training and climate change exposure science and environmental health. He's a professor of earth sciences and the executive director of Indiana University's Environmental Resilience Institute. And here we are at the beginning of summer weekend from the solstice more or less. And this is the time of year when people are out in the water. Usually those are fun times but in some places that have harmful algal blooms it can be quite dangerous. So I think you're writing about some of the dangers of harmful algal blooms and things people should be aware of when it comes to water and heat and climate change and health. Well thank you for that and you know it's interesting you referred earlier to 2014 2014 was a wake up call for water security in the US. Two things happened, which sort of shook our foundations our sense of security about water and they occurred within 300 miles of each So first there's a Flint water crisis, which was caused by a change in water chemistry supply, and the impact of that was obviously a generation of lead poison kids from that. And the second one was massive Toledo, a massive harmful algal bloom that shut down the entire water system in Toledo, Ohio for for several days now. The Flint water crisis is a remnant of the fact that we have a lot of aging infrastructure in the United States, including about 10 million households which get their water delivered in in lead service lines. That affects something also like 400,000 schools and childcare centers. So I wrote, one of the pieces was about the infrastructure, the infrastructure bill legislation the bipartisan infrastructure legislation which included funds to find where these lead service lines are and replace them. And the challenge is we don't actually know where they are. So it's it's taking some some significant modeling to figure that out we know how to replace them but we don't necessarily know how they where they are. But that speaks to a lurking hazard in many cities throughout the US, especially older cities. The Toledo crisis was of a different character, and it shows the fact that that we are water systems are not particularly resilient in Toledo Ohio in 2014. A massive harmful algal bloom, likely triggered by climate change and and related runoff in that area occurred right over the only water intake line for the Toledo, Ohio water system. And so that meant that they had to issue a rare warning, not only I do not drink, but I do not drink do not boil warning because these harmful algal blooms produce a toxin which gets even worse if they're boiled. So it, it showed that a lot of our water systems are not particularly resilient and why aren't they resilient well, we built them for 1920 largely we haven't built them for today or tomorrow. So, I explore a little bit and a lot of scholars are thinking through, what are the challenges in in water security and a lot of parts of the US in the Midwestern part around the Great Lakes is largely these prolonged episodes of flooding and drought. So flooding causes the, the redistribution of harmful algal blooms as well as redistribution of pathogens and waterways, like E coli, which are very harmful for contacting. But of course drought also causes own stress on water supplies. So, it's key that both of these issues, Flint, Michigan and Toledo Ohio revolve around this issue of infrastructure. We need to actually take it very seriously. It, unfortunately is still the case that a lot of infrastructure to handle water is is built based on our understanding of water today. So these massive sewer stormwater upgrades that we see in a lot of cities are are built to hold the capacity of rainfall today. And in fact in the Midwest, our extreme precipitation events are coming fast and furious. An example here in Indianapolis we're mostly through a $2 billion upgrade. But unfortunately that's even worse we built it for the extreme rainfall events that we had in the year 2000. Here we are in 2023 and we already have about 15% more extreme rainfall events and we'll have another 15% more by 2050. And we're relying only on gray infrastructure, you know tubes and tunnels of pipes to protect and secure our water systems and our safety actually. We have to also think about the role that green infrastructure can play so nature based solutions complain augmenting some of those solutions and we also have to think. How do we build to the capacity today, but how do we manage our, our, our life out of water in the year 2050 or beyond because a lot of these very large infrastructure projects will and should last until then. So it's almost a call to believe them climate models, when it comes to water they're they're true they're real they've actually borne out in real life. And so we can start making some of our decisions are more informed by the science and less informed by simply a blind look at today's world and assuming that our climate change future will be the same. Thanks Gabe. Someone who's spoken so far has mentioned that today's world is different regarding water than it was 10 years ago, there's been change in perspectives, there's been changing climate conditions are different than they were in 2013. So I'm wondering from each of your different views on this. So how you have seen those changes play out and say management or law or infrastructure health. I'll start with Rosalind. We discussed earlier that there is more attention being paid to tribal management and tribal participation, not just in being at the table but actually being able to make the decisions around water. So it might be a little more complicated than it seems on the surface so can you discuss a bit this movement towards more tribal involvement in water management. Yeah, so as I said, I think the lawyer should be answering this question but I'll try my best. No, I think it's something that because we have a new administration in the White House, not not so new at this point but new in terms of that there is Indigenous leadership. So for example, Deb Holland who's the Secretary of the Interior. I know has been working with tribes across the United States to strengthen where they can. Those issues around water water management and also clean water, and then also kind of connected is. We also have a Indigenous person who is now the head of the National Park Service, and I know that's going to sound a little bit like why the National Park Service, but at least out here in the West. There are several national parks that are at the headwaters of many of the water that we use throughout the Western water system so even here I'm in the state of Montana right now I'm originally from Montana, even though I work in Illinois. And so we have two major national parks Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park, both are headwaters parks. And so they're, they are places where the water starts and then it you know heads out to these agricultural areas that have been mentioned already. And again, I, I, I'm from an area where definitely agriculture is the major economic force in in the region and so water. It is definitely extremely important to to agriculture here, not just in Montana but across the West. So, there is kind of this connection between tribes, these headwater that water in the mountains and headwater places like again national parks, and leadership at the national level. And so, over at least the past few years, there's been definitely a much more conversation about strengthening the strengthening the kind of in a different kind of infrastructure, jurisdictional infrastructure of tribal communities and water. I don't get too much into the nitty gritty but out here in Montana there have been so and out in the West. There have been several what are called water compacts. And again, I'll have the attorney explain what that means, but there have been several compacts that have been signed between tribes, the state and the federal government over how to how, how to collaborate with each other. How to use water out here in the West, because for the most part tribes have kind of more jurisdiction over water, but states use more water than tribes do. I think I'm going to end there it gets it gets very complicated. But I'll just say that because there is a new administration in the White House new leadership, there's definitely much more of an understanding and a focus thinking about how to strengthen again infrastructure different kind of kind of jurisdictional infrastructure with tribes and tribal communities, when it comes to water and water rights. Part of that I'll end by saying this part of that occurred in this last 10 years because there has been much more of what we've seen in the media but a lot more activism by tribal communities. People kind of, you know your everyday people out in the streets but then also tribal governments to try and strengthen tribal rights when it comes to water, especially out here in the West. And this is front page news recently there was a Supreme Court decision last week, ruling against the Navajo Nation, and I'll bring Berk Griggs in here to maybe explain it just a bit about that and what it means in the broader context of changing how the Colorado River is managed in the coming decades. Well, I'm glad we have five hours to describe and explain the Colorado River basin. And I wanted to keep the, the, the addendums and the nuance. I will. I think it boils down to one word and that sovereignty. When we negotiated the Colorado River compact in 1922. We completely left the tribes out of it. There are 39 tribes recognized tribes in the basin there are more tribal communities than that. The tribes get their allocations of water from the state allocations that were agreed to either in 1922, or a subsequent compact for the upper basin. They were brought to Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, or through a Supreme Court decision in 1963 between Arizona and California. Trapped in this morass is the Navajo Nation, one of the most powerful, sophisticated, and most organized tribes in the United States. They have been repeatedly and for decades trying to get their water. Now, tribes hold their water rights under federal law. Most water rights are issued under state law. So there are complicated jurisdictional problems about how a federal tribe, which owns its reservation and a trust relationship with the United States obtains water rights that are recognized under state law. So one of the ways that Rosalind just referred to to deal with this is through the mechanism of an interstate compact in Montana has done this beautifully. They have signed interstate treaties or compacts involving the United States, the state of Montana and the tribe. And then those compacts become federal law through the compact clause, once the once Congress votes it in as a statute. The Navajo have not been so lucky. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the treaty obligations that United States owed to the Navajo were not specific enough to require the United States to develop and identify the water supplies for the tribe. This is very disappointing for two reasons. One, the chronic racism and subordination of tribal interests to state interests. Secondly, we have a Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Interior that's led by the first Native American woman to lead the agency, but the United States was against the tribe here. And that speaks to some of the structural disincentives that prevent the tribe from accessing waters. It has been legally entitled to access since at least 1908. I would encourage you to read just as Gorsuch's dissent in that case you can find it online at supreme court.gov. And he emphasizes that the whole point of putting someone and putting a tribe on a permanent homeland implied in that is the obligation to provide water. The Navajo tribe as he famously wrote well it's already famous among water law circles. The tribe has been trying to do this since Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. So, the silver lining probably is that this case is going to make it very hard for state courts to keep the Navajo and other tribes from stronger assertions of water rights. Again, the jurisdictional issue here is quite tricky because under federal law, the United States can be brought in through a state court water rights proceeding it's called an adjudication where all of these rights are recognized. But some of these can be quite long. For example, there's one in Andrea's backyard in the Gila River adjudication that's been going on for 40 years and they think it's about halfway done. There's no way to run any sort of quiet title operation. So the Navajo are justifiably very frustrated. One final thing though is under federal law, tribal water rights do not expire. They do they're not subject to the use it or lose it rule. So what this is tribes are developing and asserting their power to market their water rights to non Indian communities that need them. And a tribe in Arizona recently executed a $100 million contract to supply water to non Indian communities. And the emergence and the exercise of tribal sovereign power within the context of the other two sovereigns, the United States and the states. While I have you here one follow up you spoke about the need for reform in the property rights water rights arena. I think it's made that the current water rights system developed in Western expansion is cloning list and racist. What would a more fair modernization of water rights look like. Is that even possible under without throwing the whole thing out. It's very difficult Brett for a couple reasons. Most Western states for both surface and groundwater follow what's called the prior appropriation doctrine. Which means that first in time is first in right. Brett's 1930 water right trumps my 1990 water right. And if Rosalind's there on the Blackfeet reservation that's a 19th century water right that would be older than either of ours. That is not a bad system and let me explain why you can buy and sell and move water rights. And when you buy an old water right that priority moves with the right. So if the city of Las Vegas needs more water. It can purchase in 1890 or 1880 water right and then move that water right move that place of use to the city of Las Vegas. If you get rid of the priority system bread. You'll be getting rid of the most valuable stick in the property rights bundle. We could do that. But in the process we'd have to purchase the property rights that we want to eliminate. So there are very strong federal and state constitutional protections protecting the priority system. Works from Montana to Idaho to Arizona repeatedly assert that if you don't protect the priority of a water right, you're effectively taking that right. So I think the way we can think about making a water rights allocation, more just or equitable is to try and bring in more and more participants to the system. Unfortunately, many people are not able to purchase water rights and dedicate them to the use they would like to many water supplies are limited only to agriculture or to municipal and industrial supplies. Imagine if the Sierra Club or the Center for Biological Diversity or the Walton Foundation. Very wealthy philanthropic foundation very interested in the Colorado River could purchase 500,000 acre feet of water rights and allocate them to wetlands. We are seeing more of that. But in terms of remedying past injustices. I think that may be a place where the United States or states would have the political authority to use their power the purse to redistribute some of these things. All right, and we may come back to that later but I want to bring Gabe Philippeli in here. And go back to this discussion we had about the change in an attention and change in perspective around water in the US. We saw the infrastructure bill last year what you've written about, or two years ago. Do you think that the health impacts people seeing how water bad water polluted water has affected health has changed the way we look at water systems in the US. Yeah, I do actually and I think that two things happen actually touched on both of our chapters in the last 10 years one is that of course Flint Michigan was not the first time that one of these events occurred it occurred in Washington DC in 2002. It occurred last year in Newark New Jersey. These failures of drinking water systems are are bound to happen, because we have dangerous dangerous pipes in our in our ground there delivers water to kids I think that the if Flint Michigan had just been a blip that had been dealt with quickly by the proper authorities, we probably wouldn't be talking about it as much, but instead it was a one year debacle of a of a thriller that was uncovered by a pediatrician who was seeing a skyrocketing number of cases in her practice of lead poisoning and kids. And of course there's all kinds of governmental malience behind that and suppression of information so it almost dramatize that event but the ripple effect is that here in my state of Indiana, our very conservative state legislature passed unanimously a bill to expand is drinking water testing to include all child care child care centers in and schools around the state. So it's events like that can truly change the dialogue so that doesn't even that doesn't even note or acknowledge the infrastructure bill, it's actually just public awareness right. The other issue that's come up with water in my opinion at least is, you might be able to guess what the 10 year hottest years on in recorded history of Ben if you look at a calendar the last 10 years. It's all been in the last decade. And so we are seeing climate change just rearing its ugly head and wreaking havoc on on precipitation and lack of precipitation throughout this country and throughout the world. So the Pakistani population is underwater as it was this year. It's okay. It is a wake up call. So, I think we are becoming increasingly aware of how vulnerable our infrastructure is. And I think increasingly armed with real solutions. Right. So, there are solutions to deal with some of these things that the lead and water pipes is an easy one you find them and replace them. But if you do it, the overflowing storm sewers and harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie well, you build resilience into a system, and ultimately hopefully you curb climate change, because what we're seeing now our planet now is going to be is already different than it was 10 years ago, and it will be significantly different 10 years and 20 years from now. And I'm hoping you can expand a bit on that and so we look at lead is one of these legacy issues where the infrastructure we put in place, 50 100 years ago is causing and has caused severe problems throughout its life course and we just remove those pipes that's the, the means of improvement to say climate change when we're looking ahead at challenges that are down the road. What steps can municipalities cities governments individuals even take to prepare themselves or their communities for the climate threats through water to health. Excellent as much of our work in the environmental resilience Institute revolves around that, that very issue is there have to be people that are working actively to stop us and meeting carbon, which is the cause of climate change right, but similarly there have to be people working with with communities and with organizations to help them grapple with climate change that is already here and will continue to worsen. And so a lot of our work recognizes the fact that a lot of communities have no resources to to apply the best science we have on climate change to make informed decisions today about what their infrastructure will be able to withstand in 10 years 20 years and a perfect example is if you're small time city manager who's considering well do I do I build a new a new pipe system for stormwater runoff or do I expand my my well field for drinking water supplies. They are just considering today, we built some tools that people can use like a dashboard that helps them actually consider what this is going to be like in 10 years and 20 years because I guarantee you those investments will either be excellent ideas 20 years from now, or terrible ideas 20 years from now right lead pipe ends up to be a terrible idea, as was lead and gasoline and lead and paint right. And you know hindsight is lovely and all but we're trying to arm communities with that that the power of hindsight, which is, which is present in currently available models models for precipitation, for example. To prevent bad decisions from being made in the first place. So something that everyone has touched on that it's one of the gorillas in the country for water policy is farming and some of the problems that farming causes. We've heard about groundwater depletion which is happening in the Oglala aquifer the Central Valley in California and Roy Arizona, even in Arkansas. Across the country that aquifers are being depleted for for food production and fiber production and then nutrient runoff as Gabriel talked about nitrogen phosphorus contributing to harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico, California Lake San Francisco Bay. So these are problems that are national. And I guess the big question here is how do you address farming and the problems it causes with water quality and water quality depletion. I'm going to actually put Burke right on the spot on that one because a lot of that revolves around our farm bill right are the federal protections that it provides to farmers, particularly in the area of agro chemicals and guarantees of prices and promotion of corn based ethanol. It has, it has been written. Yeah I'm no expert but it seems to have been written for and by the corn and bean producers in the US, and we are a victim of that so we're seeing unsustainable water use and profligate applications of fertilizers. And, and all of it is to the to the detriment of a lot of the environment around those areas. This is another one of those areas that could be a five to 10 hour seminar and I told Burke that we were bringing the farm bill up because it is farm bill season in Congress the new farm bill which govern subsidies and not only subsidies to farmers but also programs, food benefits for the poor. A big piece of legislation is for negotiation this year so Burke, how does the farm bill affect your say average American and your farm water connection. I think there are two pieces of federal legislation that you have to think about at the same time. The first one is the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act has been an extraordinary success in cleaning up many of our nation's rivers and streams, but it never would have passed Congress in the early 1970s without major exceptions for agriculture. Farm state senators thanks to the filibuster and even just simple senate majorities insisted upon substantial exceptions. So, for example, the runoff of water that you put on a field through irrigation soaks up all sorts of chemicals that Gabriel just mentioned. Also a lot of geogenic chemicals like, you know, selenium or even uranium. And because of that, Congress passed an exception in the federal Clean Water Act saying that the return flows from irrigated agriculture are exempt from the Clean Water Act permitting system. I'll put that in the foreground for the viewers today because there is a lot of heat and smoke about the waters of the United States controversy, we had a big lotus decision two weeks ago from the Supreme Court, which effectively solidified the very minimal Justice Scalia standard for what constitutes a water of the United States. The fundamental problem in the Clean Water Act are these statues they're not how the agency interprets what the regulations are or the regulations that the agency puts forth. This is why agriculture's become the top polluter of water in the country. It's largely because a lot of other industrial polluters have cleaned up their act through the permitting systems of the Clean Water Act. Now in terms of the farm bill, that's the other side if you think about the Clean Water Act, bringing the hammer regulation that the farm bill brings two things, agricultural subsidies commodity price supports tax breaks, all sorts of things, along with the supplemental nutrition assistance program or SNAP. Rural poverty is a real deal. When Lyndon Johnson through his political genius fused food stamps with farm bills in the 1960s, that was seen as this brilliant urban rural combination. And what we've seen since then is in many ways rural poverty's gotten worse. But there are hints of hope in the farm bill in terms of adjusting price supports to better uses of water. The conservation reserve program pays farmers flat out subsidy of course, but to use less water or to retire land from irrigation. Another innovation has to do with crop insurance. Ten years ago, in order to collect your crop insurance, if you had federal crop insurance and the drought blew out your crops, you had to prove that you had fully irrigated your crop, which led to some of the more heart-rending things you could see across the Great Plains. It's October, growing seasons over, the crops have failed, but you see the center pivots running 24-7 so that they can pump their full water right so they can collect on their federal crop insurance. Federal crop insurance is starting to turn around into more of a partial crop insurance situation. And we have other things in the farm bill we could go into, but I think with this administration, there is a very, I think, middle-of-the-road approach to developing pragmatic, practical subsidy packages that will achieve water conservation-y aims without reducing the subsidies that farmers get. Some things are out of our control, and one of these is the incredible increase in the size of the average American farm and the decrease in the percentage of the American working public that works on farms. I think both of these need to be more recognized. If we are working in a democratic system, I think we do need to recognize that, you know, the farm community in terms of people who actually grow crops is at least 10 times smaller than it was a generation and a half ago. It does not take many people these days to farm 15,000 acre wheat fields. In Kansas, you need like five people, and that's all it takes. We're going to get to audience questions here in a second, but I want to wrap up here the dialogue portion with solutions, and we've talked about solutions throughout this conversation. Some are, you know, large-ship property rights, water, law, things that take a while to turn. And I'm wondering if you know in your respective fields of something that perhaps is overlooked, a solution could be to a big problem, to a smaller problem, that maybe low-hanging fruit or just needs a wider audience for it to be implemented. It's something that could be applicable in Florida or in California, national or local. But something that you think would be a positive benefit for water broadly. Well, I can jump in here for just a moment. So, I mean, I think that one of the things that tribes have been thinking about. First of all, again, thinking about the diversity of indigenous communities and how of an indigenous religion and religious practice, you know, there are certain tribes that think of particular waterways, whether it's a river, perhaps a lake, or even the underground aquifers as something that is part of the supernatural realm or the divine. And so there are some tribes where there's an effort to protect certain places because certain waterways, because it is a sacred place to them. But what has the benefit of then protecting that water as well for other people? There are some cases that have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. You know, a case from way back when was the Taos Blue Lake case where the Taos tribe literally spent almost an entire century fighting for the Blue Lake in New Mexico because it was a place that was sacred to them. It was a sacred site and they wanted to protect not just the lake but the watershed of the lake as well. So long story short, they were able to be able to protect that particular site. Other tribes today are trying different efforts that are both within the federal legal system but also within tribal systems as well, where tribes are setting aside places that they view as sacred. Again, whether it's a river or a lake or other kind of water system. And are using different apparatuses today. So one, for example, is the idea of personhood status and applying personhood status to particular natural entities such as rivers. This has been done in other parts of the world. It's beginning to be used here in the United States as well. Mostly now just within tribal communities but also sort of the discussion is in other places like off reservation communities as well. So there's different ways that tribes are thinking more creatively. But again, it's connected back to their own religious expression. The reason why they're doing this is not necessarily to protect water so that it's not polluted so that it's not being used. It really is because of religion. And so, oftentimes we have to think about that and sort of separate out sort of how do we use water right in America versus how do we revere water in America as well. And so tribes are thinking creatively about how to work within the system that we have. And again, Burke can probably say more about this than I because of all of the different cases that have occurred, especially more recently about how tribes are trying to work within the system, because the system does not. Surprisingly, the United States system does not really protect sacred sites or sacred places you have to use a different kind of legal apparatus to say why you're setting aside a place. Oftentimes that becomes an environmental thing or some some other legal way to sort of set aside those lands but for tribes themselves the reason why they want to set aside. Again, a particular river or a lake or some sort of waterway is because of religion. And because they may view a particular river or place as sacred to them. So they'll end there. All right. Yeah, so a different different view on how water should be managed. We're going to go rapid fire here with solutions. Burke minute. I would urge us to do two things take the communities that we've recognized now, the tribal communities, state communities, the federal government, environmental communities, religious communities that aren't tribal. And think about what it means to be a water public. Most people live in San Francisco at all they have never been to the Central Valley. Most people live in Kansas City have never been to Western Kansas. Kansas is one of the most urbanized states in the Union, in terms of its percentage of population. Most Texans have not been to where we irrigate cotton. We have a lot more Americans who vote and are concerned about water. Then we do who use the lion share of the water supplies. We need to reconnect the American public with the water supplies upon which that public depends. If we can do that and Brett's work does that I want to compliment you on your journalism. If we can do that, then we can correct many of the distortions that are allowing the misuse and the pollution of our nation's waters. And Gabe. Well, I would say the same things I always say about climate change, you need to talk about it, and you need to vote for it, right? So much like climate change, you can significantly impact the trajectory of a system by the power of your vote and the power of your voice. So the more you learn about it, for example, by buying this book, the more you feel like you understand the situation and you're able to act on it, you care about it. Alright, let's move to a couple audience questions. Sorry if I mispronounced the names but Nancy Phillips Burgess ask and this is a question applicable to the Western US because there are many of these proposed but she asks, can you discuss legal ethical concerns and ramifications of large companies, wholesale shipping of water from rural aquifers to large cities. So these have been proposed in New Mexico and Colorado and Utah. And it happened all the time back in the day cities went farther out for water tapped watersheds that were hundreds of miles away, but still today there are groundwater proposals in the west to move water from rural to urban and legal ethical concerns or any ramifications there. Yes. But again, I want to emphasize two things, water rights or property that their property subject to really intense regulation. And if the people want to put limits on how much water can be moved, and the conditions under which that water can be moved limitations. They've done so. So, if you are looking at this from the viewpoint of a an agricultural community, whether it's an Eastern Colorado or, or Northern New Mexico or Southern Colorado. This is a problem we call by and dry the water leaves the rural community to supply growing urban and suburban development destroys the tax base and the economic productivity of the local ag community. But we have willing sellers. Okay, that the owners of this farmland with the water rights are selling that. Okay, the states and the communities are not coming in and condemning those water rights that would be politically suicidal. So, I think one of the ways you can think about these large scale water transfers from from rural to urban areas is think about these rural publics. There are very few number of the people in the rural community may actually own the water rights look at the Central Valley California and the San Joaquin. That's a serious serious oligarchy when it comes to water. And the same could be said for the San Luis Valley in Colorado. So, that's a problem on the other hand you've got to acknowledge the economics of it. Agriculture is not a hugely profitable industry. If you can move a, even a small water right to a more economically valuable use, such as to use for microchips or for municipal water supplies. And that same amount of water is generating a lot more economic activity. And that's where I think we need to start paying attention to economically marginal agriculture, especially the way in which certain crops are grown in the wrong places. We should grow corn in Gabriel State of Indiana. That's where corn was born to be grown. It should not be grown in Western Kansas, where we get 16 inches of rain a year. So, there are all sorts of judgments going on here and I will close the particular question with something to keep in mind. Water of water rights only recognized as a legal right if it's applied to a quote beneficial use. But our understanding of what a beneficial use is evolves over time. 130 years ago, leaving water in the stream was a terrible waste of water. You should use all of that for irrigation. But now we know that there are a bunch of millionaires in Roslin's home state of Montana, who will pay millions of dollars to pay farmers to stop pumping water for their fields and leave the water in the stream so that they can fly fish. So our culture and what we view as a legitimate use of water is changing and the movement of water from rural to urban areas as part of that legitimacy puzzle. All right, we have another question here on some of those changes and how we're changing our relationship to the natural world I'm combining two questions here from Mary Hayden and Mikhail Gorgio about nature based solutions so using nature to hold water to do some things to benefit cities. And so the question here is, how do you hold water on the watershed to prevent flooding, while also incorporating health and socioeconomic benefits with these nature based solutions. So I guess with Gabriel perhaps, you know, how are you looking at nature based solutions as a remedy for resilience. And now the non nature based solution that we see in a lot of cities is for example stormwater goes straight into rivers and streams when the stormwater capacity is exceeded of the sewer system, much like in my city of Indianapolis. And almost all those stormwater discharges are in low income communities of low income communities of color right so it's currently set up in such a way as completely inequitable. So what we've been working on with this green infrastructure is is having things like sacrificial wetlands within a particularly vulnerable sub watersheds right where you are actually letting land not be developed or you're taking it out of development. So that that can either be a natural recharge zone for groundwater that Burke is talking about, or it can actually be flood protection. So the question here is if you're a city, would you rather, you know, expand your tax base by putting up another Walmart downtown and making people happy because they can shop, or are you going to leave that 150 acres to a sacrificial wetland. Well it becomes a real challenge so that requires cities to consider the environmental benefits of some of water, when they're considered zoning and when they consider tax abatements and tax credits for development. So I'm just wondering, Rosalind or, okay. Another big picture question here. And you can interpret this how you will but is it reasonable for us to think we can reach sustainable water usage levels given our population projections, and in what timeframe. Sustainable, I'll just preface this by saying you can look at sustainable nationally or you can look to sustainable by watershed or by city and what they currently have. So let's take this at a city level because I think this is where the questions going. Western cities Eastern cities how do cities become sustainable in their water use. Sounds like a Gabriel question, but I'll come after you. One of them is that we simply we have two issues in in in densely populated areas like cities is that we use water stupidly and we a lot of leaks out of our water supply system right, Andrea mentioned that the tremendous percentage of water perfectly clean, safe drinking water which leaks out into a there's a whole nother hydrology on this underneath cities that you don't even see that's water leaking out of water systems. Some of that leakage is designed so that you want you don't want bacteria coming in water supplies you always want a little bit of a leaking out but 30%. No, that's crazy. The other is the so thinking of think about farming on the neighborhood scale. The amount of water that is used on household lawns, the amount of farm chemical are chemicals are used on household lawns is just absolutely unsustainable, and, and it's a question of rethinking what we consider landscaping my own campus is as much of a fender of that as any they want to have a beautiful campus with a loss of green space and some trees so people can see this impressive campus just like you're in Cambridge or something. Well, if we were in a way in the West, I guarantee you there are similar campuses like mine there where that waters precious. It ends up as Burke said, we usually had get too much water. That's actually usually our problem. There's a lot of situations where, you know, yeah so my answer is, yes, there's enough water to to to provide water for 331 million Americans that's not the issue is how we use this issue. And there's prerogative to interject here a number of lawns in the Western US can use half or more of a city's water supply. So you see water use spike up in the summer when people are watering their lawn so there is a lot of water there. It's how we choose to use it. It is the big question. Brett, we've seen in the Colorado we've seen some cities in this space and do a much better job with that right Las Vegas with kind of banning non functional non functional lawns, doing it through subsidies but then also the regulation my own city in Tucson is tackling it as well and the campus that I'm at the University of Arizona really prides itself on kind of desert landscaping that zero scaping you know kind of rocks and you know drip irrigation and native landscaping but it took a long time because you know, there really is this psychology that a campus looks green and has you know certain kinds of flowers and that sort of thing so it really does take a mindset and then a big policy mix to kind of help move people forward. Thanks Andrea, Arizona representative there. We're coming towards the end there's I guess two questions I want to combine here to make sure people have a chance to answer. We've kind of addressed most of this question. I've got two here the first question is what does a good water system look like regarding security reliability and climate change for the future is anyone getting this right. So I guess there if you can think of a highlight city to highlight that might be doing better than others in these terms. Here goes back to responsive Burke gave about you know democratization of water and someone in Arizona is concerned about expansion of dairy in southern Arizona and wonders how the people in quotes her quotes can accumulate more power to make sure there's a stable water supply when some of these decisions are made at high levels of government. I see that's doing well and you know how do how do the people get the power in the water. It sounds like Tucson is doing well. Well, every you know I I've studied cities around the world and in the US and I think at the end of the day there is no like perfect city that it's doing everything right, but there are little examples or experiments and cities so globally since the pandemic we've seen how to do this like really big, you know investment at the city scale around water access and sanitation Singapore has been doing a lot with the reusing so reusing all of their water supply. It's been imperfect but we've seen some pretty good developments in Australia in First Nations actually achieving their appropriate water allocations and through kind of more of a legal process. In the US, Tucson has been an award winner with green infrastructure and actually seeing stormwater like as a resource and Los Angeles to I think they announced one of your stories maybe in circle of blue but Los Angeles recently announced that I don't know in the coming decade, you know the majority of their drinking water will come from stormwater capturing stormwater treating it and using it for potable water supply. These have been good at recognizing equity concerns like Philadelphia and Baltimore really kind of seeing these trends with homes being repossessed by banks for people, you know, not paying water bills being delinquent and water bills and really changing those, you know, municipal ordinances to make water available like in efforts to make water available for the poor these kind of sliding scales, minimum access to certain quantities of water so I feel like it's more like there are shining moments here and there but there's not kind of this perfect package or perfect city. Jump in I want to give some kudos I grew up in Denver so my sympathies on the Colorado River with the upper basin. Several of the fastest growing states in the country are Utah Colorado, the lesser extent Wyoming and New Mexico but those four states have ballooned in population and have ballooned in their economic productivity over the last 50 years without increasing their water use. This was sort of thing that is not necessarily as acknowledged across the Colorado River basin that many of the crises we're seeing in the Colorado or lower Colorado River basin crises there Arizona and California problems. I'm not trying to get the upper basin off the hook here, but it shows you that cities like Las Vegas or Salt Lake or Denver have done a lot in terms of graduated water bills use a little water the water is cheap. Use a lot of water the water gets really expensive really fast. In the cities in Arizona in alfalfa and the Central Valley. That's a really naughty problem, and KNO TTY it might be an NAU GHT I problem too. And one thing I would, I think offer to that questioner is we used to have Jerry's and cities, we used to have meat packing plants and cities. And you could smell the Ralston Purina plant where's that it's right by 25 and I 70 just south of the stockyards. But federal environmental law, of which I'm a big fan. Pushed a lot of these polluting ag industries to rear really dry really rural areas. Urbanite can just out of sight out of mind open up the refrigerator, not think about where the electricity came from the milk or the meat. We need to try and reintegrate our food systems with our civic systems. And I think if we do that will scrutinize these dairy operations a lot more there isn't. There's no real desire to look too closely into big ag right now for fear of what we might find. I think we have to leave it there we brim up against the time. I think the conversation could have a conversation series on any one of these 55 topics we discussed today, have a whole year of it. Yeah, Martin and other others to determine that but yeah, we'll get Martin will give the other closing. Yeah, no thank you so much, Brett and Rosalind and Burke and Gabriel and, and Andrea this is really been a great discussion. I feel like I really learned a lot. So I think we got a really good view of not just how kind of complicated water is, I think we maybe knew that but just got to I have a much better grounding and all the kind of the different social and economic and legal and health issues that are that that are just part of solving these problems so it was really wonderful discussion and I hope all the attendees kind of got some good ideas and got a greater awareness of water. How it works in our society and what a, you know, precious resource it is. So, to answer everyone's questions yeah we'll post this on our will post this on our YouTube site we should be able to do that within a few days. Lisa is now sharing links to our website or donation page. We are a nonprofit after all, and also the site for for the book. I really want to thank attendees for sure for coming and but really want to thank you. All the panelists and bread for really leaving it really interesting and important discussion. So, with that, we'll finish up and everyone have a great day. Thanks again. Bye bye. Thank you. Thanks, we're done. You guys, that's great. Great job, Brad. Nice to see you. Let's talk sometime. Of course. Good to meet everyone else. That was amazing. Great. Thank you. Good night.