(Reader opinion by Fred Allenbach) As a citizen concerned with local and regional water issues, I have attended Sonoma County Water Agency sponsored Sonoma Valley Groundwater Management Program meetings for the past year and currently sit on the city’s Community Services and Environmental Commission. I see that Sonoma Valley and Sonoma County have classic western water issues: pipelines bringing in water from other drainages, diminishing groundwater resources, arid climate and increasing population with increasing demand for scarce water.
The water supply in our region is tenuous anyway; add on a drought not seen in 435 years, and “Houston we have a problem.”
“Business-as-usual” water use is now, frankly, unsustainable. Citizens are asked to conserve water but then see a host of development projects and new vineyards approved. I’m a long time environmentalist; I thought conserving would help bring up the water table, to serve the benefit of the environment and existing users, not that any savings could instantly have new straws put in.
Our leaders must articulate exactly what the plan is here, what the rationale is to permit business-as-usual. How long will it take to feel like there is any real urgency, some sense of movement? It seems the de-facto plan is to squeeze more people and more uses out of less and less water, drought or not.
“Sustainable” can be a weasel word, each defining it according to their own particular interests. How do we bridge our differences in the definition of sustainability? How do we define harm and fairness? A fresh look would help but underlying all efforts at solutions seems to be a fundamental, perhaps irresolvable competition of interests. How to cooperate is the critical task. One thing is for sure, if we don’t get on the same team, if we’re not “all in this together,” we’ll be going down divided.
One possible strategy: a new paradigm in sustainability studies that incorporates a Three Pillars concept or Triple Bottom Line (TBL) of Economy, Society and Environment; all considered and included as equal, integral factors, the three critical legs of any common policy stool. This is an inclusive model respecting all interests. Applied to water, the goal is safe yield overall and a bearable, equitable and viable inclusion for all stakeholders. Do some research, see the Venn diagrams, internalize the concept; we need this type of approach, not only for water but for other important local issues as well.
Water, like air, is a common pool resource that transcends private uses. Common responsibility reaches across agricultural, rural residential, municipal, environmental, tourist and development water users and involves the whole community. Everyone here has rights and interests; we have no choice but to acknowledge that and begin to work together honoring our respective places and the integrity of the whole society. Hopefully, in this way we’ll arrive at a productive, community-focused water policy.
I’d prefer a Rodney King approach: lay down the old scripts, be partners, not partisans, have can-do leaders, work on the same team, and display the cooperative capacity that is clearly a big part of our specie’s success. If vested powerful interests resist working together in good faith, the inertia of business-as-usual will merely enable more of the same unwise practices until we run our regional quality-of-life into the ground. I hope I’m wrong. I want to encourage a definition and plan of reasonable sustainability; this should become part of the public discussion. I’d like to move the needle; perhaps others are in agreement, perhaps many.
Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” lists factors involved in failing: climate change, habitat destruction, soil erosion and salinization, water management issues and overpopulation. Sounds all too familiar. Failure also results from lack of anticipation, not seeing things as they are, a ‘creeping normalcy’ of detrimental practices (inertia), rational bad behavior that advances individual interests above common good, and disastrous values that result in the well-known ‘tragedy of the commons’.
Diamond mentions that in smaller proscribed areas with homogenous interests, people can successfully work together to form a “bottom up” strategy, incrementally bettering their common situation. The other way to succeed involves “top down” methods, typically put in place when interests are too diverse or unwilling to cooperate. Top down maybe called for in Sonoma if competing users can’t cooperate in an overall conservation regime. Bottom up may work in the agricultural and rural-residential communities as they have similar interests in conserving groundwater and could work together to sustain their mutual interests.
Rodney King wondered, “Can’t we just get along?” I hope, that with serious common water problems, we can step up, sacrifice, make the hard choices to get this job done together. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?
Be First to Comment