The Russian River watershed, just north of San Francisco, is surely one of the more progressive and resource-conscious areas of the country. I was staying in Guerneville on the river for a few days, about midway between Santa Rosa and the coast, and I got into a conversation with a local couple about the river and related water issues. They were in their sixties. They had lived in Guerneville over 30 years, raised their kids there and remained involved in the community.
When the topic of water use came up, the man spoke with deep resentment. I’ll paraphrase:
Santa Rosa just keeps dumping on us. Literally! This has been going on for decades. They take the water out of the river for development, always more development. The more water they use, the more waste they’ll wind up flushing downstream.
Once we proposed that they put their own intake pipes downstream from their effluent, so they’d need to use the same water we do. They looked at us like we were crazy. “Why would anyone want to do that?” they asked.
I asked him if there was any solution that might work. He smiled.
Well, we had a farmer around here who once drove up to Santa Rosa City Hall and dumped a truckload of manure on the steps. I think that got their attention.
His wife added that another step, at least as effective, had been the construction of a pipeline that ships treated wastewater to the Gysers steam fields – over 10 million gallons per day – where it helps produce enough electricity to power all of San Francisco.
Since then I’ve been intrigued by the question of water use along the Russian River. One important pitfall which that conversation highlighted: the temptation to frame a resource crisis as a conflict between two opposing groups, in this case the city upstream and the town downstream. Here’s what I’ve learned so far, and some big questions that remain unanswered.
Competing Interests:
- Downstream Residents: the river provides most of their water supply; sufficient water quality and flow is also needed for tourism and recreation (swimming, canoeing, fishing) which is vital to the local economy
- Fish: Endangered species such as the Coho and Chinook salmon need unpolluted rivers for spawning with sufficient forest cover to provide shade and erosion control along the riverbank. However, apparently they also require LOW overall flow rates on the lower river near the estuary.
- Agriculture: Sonoma county vineyards and other agriculture use the lion’s share of water. But extractive industries, including logging and gravel mining, also require water for their operations.
- Urban Residents and Development: Earlier this year, water contractors representing Santa Rosa water users successfully fought a proposed 30% increase in water rates. Meanwhile, the Sonoma County Water Agency continues to try to increase the amount of water it draws from the river from 76,000 to 101,000 Acre Feet/Year (over 30 billion gallons).
Of course there are many more groups and subsets of groups at work, and agencies that represent different interests and mandates. Brenda Adelman at the Russian River Watershed Protection Committee has been reporting on these issue now for some time: see www.rrwpc.org/articles.html
Questions:
Are there any solutions on the table that would balance the needs of all the impacted groups fairly> Could pricing water use in accordance with its scarcity and high environmental impact not only curb unsustainable development in urban/suburban areas like Santa Rosa (by reducing the economic incentives for developers) but also reduce waste discharges downstream. Less water used equals less wastewater discharged.
My biggest question is this: if Guerneville and Santa Rosa can’t make peace over the Russian River, what are the chances for India and Pakistan over the Indus?
My Green21 partner, Jennifer Thompson, wrote a great blog entry about the film Slumdog Millionaire. If we go back exactly 30 years ago, the film Prophecy forewarned of how humankind’s abuse of our natural resources have horrible effects on the environment. My Dad took me to see this bit of bio-horror when it came out in the theatres in 1979, I was 11 years old at the time. Directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Talia Shire and Robert Foxworth, Prophecy is about how a lumber company’s pulp mill plant used a chemical process in which methyl mercury was dumped in a lake to process the cut lumber. The eating of the fish in this lake caused mutations in the birth of all the local wildlife and even the Native Americans who live in this Maine wilderness. The upshot of this is that a mutant bear kills a lot of people when trappers kill one of its mutated cubs in a net and the surviving cub is rescued by our protagonists (that is until it bites Talia Shires’ neck in a chase scene across a lake).
Seeing this film brought an awareness of environmental issues to me for the first time. Even though the film is a B-movie rip off of Jaws, it has some unique messages about how nature can go very wrong when it is disturbed by our destructive activities. This film had a lasting impact on my impressionable years and it unfortunately really serves as a “prophecy” of sorts to us 30 years later, our abuses have consequences that will ultimately hurt us.
Green21’s first episode, Welcome to the 21st Century, includes an interview with Dr. Susanne Moser, co-author of Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, where she discusses how difficult it is to communicate to the public about climate change issues because people feel fear and guilt about being part of the cause, they are not able to focus on empowering themselves and the planet with solutions. They become paralyzed with fear. That kind of reminds me of the victims in the film Prophecy.
One thing that is really fascinating about Propehcy is that it is based on a real incident in Minamata, Japan, it was called the Minamata Disease and it was caused by methyl mercury dumping.
Please write a post if you remember Prophecy or know of other bio-horror films.
This weekend I saw “Slumdog Millionaire.” It’s an amazing movie that’s often hard to watch but has a happy ending. However, what struck me the most was the trash. I mean the actual trash on the ground, the trash in the background and the enormous trash heaps. I loved that the film didn’t pause the storyline to talk about trash – the filmmakers wove it into fabric of the characters’ lives. One of the best examples was when the main character, a homeless orphan, talked to his brother as he filled a discarded plastic water bottle with tap water and resealed it for resale. The film treated this act just like brushing teeth, part of an everyday routine.
The visuals in “Slumdog” startled me because I thought I knew trash. In 1994, I spend a year in Asia as a college student and as an intern for a film about Vietnam. During that time, I often talked to people about trash because there was no place to put it. I would carry it around with me, and every so often I would ask someone what to do with it. Once in Nepal, when I was living with a family, I asked the father what I should do with some old candybar wrappers and fax papers. He authoritatively took these bits of wrappers and paper, walked to the other end of the house, opened the window and threw them across the Himalayas. I froze. I waited several weeks before asking the next person what to do with the various scraps of debris I had accumulated. Now, fifteen years later, the trash in “Slumdog” still caught me off guard. Maybe my memory of trash has faded, or maybe there’s actually visibly more trash.
Working on Green21, I’ve realized that our understanding of trash has evolved and become more systemic. We’ve gone from focusing on the visible symptoms of waste to looking at “lifecycles” as detailed in Cradle to Cradle. Now it seems we need to move beyond exploring waste management systems to trying to understand our need to consume. The Story of Stuff is a great place to start.
