A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 17

17th in a Series

The Monster Frack

He did the frack, he did the monster frack,
The monster frack, drilled like a maniac.
He did the frack and made himself some jack.
He did the frack. . . until the earth did crack.

Apologies to Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt Kickers (click here and sing along)

In “Uncharted Waters,” The New York Times’ meticulous and eye-opening investigative series on the threats to the nation’s groundwater, I was introduced to “the monster frack” – enormous hydraulic fracturing operations that have “transformed the global energy landscape, turning America into the world’s largest oil and gas producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia.” (For those of us who lived through the “oil crisis” years of the 1970s, this is an incredible sentence to read.)

Extracting massive amounts of fossil fuels from deep under the ground costs a lot of money. It also requires a lot of water – millions of gallons for each new well, according to the Times’ research. Across the country, fracking has used almost 1.5 trillion (that’s 11 zeros after the 5) gallons since 2011. The industry claims that much of the water it uses is either brackish or recycled. Let’s hope so, but their water use is mostly unregulated, unpermitted, and unmonitored.

Moreover, unlike stream and river water, which is owned by the public, in many places the water in aquifers is owned outright by the landowner. “In Texas,” said Bill Martin, rancher and water conservation district member, “if you own the surface, you own everything to the center of the earth.” Perhaps a Chinese farmer owns from the center out the other way.

Anyway, since you own it, you can sell it, and in parts of Texas landowners pump as much water on their property as they like, even if it’s coming from under someone else’s land. And “if you’ve got water to sell,” Bruce Frasier, an onion farmer who sells groundwater to a fracking company, told the Times, “you’re making a fortune.”

That water is coming from the same vulnerable aquifers that everyone else is trying to tap into – water that has been in the ground for thousands of years and which replenishes itself very slowly. And it isn’t only an issue in the West.

“Most of the water we’re pulling out of the ground is thousands of years old,” Jason Groth, deputy director of planning and growth management in Charles County, Maryland, told the Times. “It’s not like it rains on Monday, and by Saturday it’s in the aquifer.” He predicts that, with the massive growth in suburban Washington, D.C. draining its aqueducts, the county won’t have enough water in ten years.

When you start thinking about water as little more than drinkable oil, the next step is to drill massively for it and send it through pipelines to places that are willing to pay for it. Actually, that has been going on for years. Right now, an Israeli company has proposed a $5-billion project to build a desalination plant near the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and pump the “fresh” water 200 miles to Phoenix. The city of Sonora will also get some much-needed fresh water and Mexico some money. The Sea of Cortez will get the industrial waste.

To see all of this and earlier series, please go to https://jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 16

16th of a series

“We admire the rivers as images of constant change and renewal; and as great Sacred Beings.

- Nature Evolutionaries

Readers respond to last week’s Mayfly post.

1. “Streams that have been polluted by acid look beautiful and pristine – precisely because there are no living organisms in them. What an irony.”

2. “Mayflies in the news today!!”

   Bangor Daily News, Nov. 16, 2023

Have a great Thanksgiving. See you next week.

Jamie

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 15

15th in a series

“Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.”

- Carl Sagan

“The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains.”

- George Carlin

I remember the first time I waded into a shallow stream with an entomologist many years ago. He scrambled about, looking under rocks, picking up bunches of dead leaves, and examining logs – enthusiastically identifying for me the bugs and other tiny organisms that seemed to be everywhere. He told me that by analyzing the numbers and species of what he called “macroinvertebrates,” he could learn much about the health of the water.

He showed me a mayfly, which lives in larval form for up to a year or more in the streambed, until it becomes an adult and flies off in search of a mate. The life span of an adult female is rarely more than 24 hours, and one species lives fewer than five minutes.

Thankfully, their value to scientists is not tied to their longevity. Mayflies are extremely sensitive to pollution. If a stream has a lot of them in larval form, it’s a sign the water is clean. In fact, he continued, we can evaluate a stream’s health by the relative abundance of different kinds of these microscopic organisms. Some bugs – sow bugs, water striders, beetles – live happily in polluted waters. But others – mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies – live only in healthy streams.

This was astonishing to me. Clean water? With all those bugs in it? That’s not how I ordinarily drink it.

A stream with no living things in it, he said, is a dead stream.

In states – such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia – where coal mining was a major industry for decades, even centuries, there are a lot of dead streams. The reason is acid mine drainage, the toxic runoff of highly acidic water and heavy metals from abandoned mines, which has left more than 7,000 miles of Pennsylvania’s streams biologically dead. It is, notes the Department of Environmental Protection, “the number one water pollution problem in Pennsylvania.”

“You can walk in it and not even slip,” said Katie Semelsberger, Land Manager of the Altoona, Pennsylvania, Water Authority, about the Kittanning Run, “There is nothing that grows in it.” Kittanning Run meanders across the Allegheny Plateau as it makes its way into the Susquehanna River and eventually Chesapeake Bay, which annually receives over 100 million pounds of acid discharges and sediments that are contaminated with heavy metals from the abandoned mines.

This is one more reminder that a stream is an ecosystem; it is not a pipe. As Robin Vannote and his colleagues noted in the River Continuum Concept, biological communities are continually adjusting to changes in the physical, chemical, and biological conditions as the stream flows from its headwaters to its mouth. One of the astonishing results of this is that a stream can actually clean its own water – if we will let it. This is part of the “ecosystem services” streams provide, services that can save consumers and taxpayers billions of dollars. Just think of the value to all of us of a stream that is teeming with fish, as opposed to a stream that has no fish at all. It's amazing what Mother Nature can do all by herself.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 14

14th of a series

It’s the same the wide world over,

It’s the poor what cops the blame,

While the rich, he ‘as his pleasure,

Isn’t it a bloomin’ shame?

-Traditional English Tavern Song

“Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires,” reports The New York Times in its major series, “Uncharted Waters”. “But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.”

As we discussed in an earlier post, the total amount of the earth’s water hasn’t changed since the world began. But everything else has – in particular, us . . . and our enormous impact on the rest of creation. Earth’s human population is approaching 8 billion, a fourfold increase since 1900. The World Resources Institute recently released a doomsday scenario that forecasts unsustainable population growth in many of the world’s poorest and most water-stressed regions, places that climate change is already making even drier.

But don’t blame the poor. Jesus told his disciples that they will always be with us, but he was vague on the numbers. Today, after two millennia of growth, modernization, and scientific and technological revolutions, about six billion people (or three quarters of the world’s population) live on less than $10 a day. As we look at images of teeming cities and streaming refugees, of rivers that seem little more than slowly moving sewage systems, of too many people fighting over too few resources, it’s all too easy to think that there are just too many poor people and to blame our problems on their misery.

This is not new. Almost 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift addressed a similar situation in his country. In “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” Dean Swift proposed a solution to the overpopulation and hunger then ravaging Ireland. The poor, he wrote, should sell their excess children to the rich, arguing that a “young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

It is true that every additional person, regardless of wealth, increases the stress on our water and other resources, but rich people are in a league of their own. By one account, they use 12 times more water per household than the poor. It’s not only swimming pools and rolling lawns, it’s the lifestyle, and, in particular, the much richer diet. It takes, for example, 1,799 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. Because the poor don’t eat a lot of steak, they are making a significant, if involuntary, contribution to protecting our water. This is something that zero population groups sometimes forget to tell their big donors – that it is not just people who stress the system, it’s money.

The Yamuna River begins in the Himalayas as a pure blue stream. By the time it reaches New Delhi, “[it] is essentially a running cesspool.” The Yamuna is the world’s 16th most polluted river. Our own Mississippi is number 5. Its high levels of fertilizer run-off create the 4,000-square-mile Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 13

13th of a series

“A huge hydroelectric dam was halted by a tiny stupid fish, environmental extremism, and deviated homo-socialists.”

- Rush Limbaugh

In 480 BCE, Xerxes I, emperor of Persia, assembled a massive army and navy in an attempt to conquer all of Greece. He decided to take his land force of several hundred thousand men through the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae, where the king of Sparta had gathered an army of 7,000 Greeks to block him. The Greeks held their ground for seven days, until a traitor showed the Persians a little-known path that enabled them to attack from the rear and overrun the outnumbered Greeks. Since then, Thermopylae has come to mean a courageous last stand against an overwhelming force.

And that brings us to the story of the Tellico Dam and one of history’s most famous fish. The Tennessee Valley Authority had begun planning for the Tellico Dam in 1936, but construction didn’t begin until 1967. It would be the sixth dam along the Little Tennessee River and the 49th and last dam to be built by the TVA.

Six years later, two events threw the dam plans into turmoil: (1) On August 12, 1973, University of Tennessee biologist David Etnier discovered the snail darter, in the river. (2) On December 28 of that year Congress passed the Endangered Species Act by a unanimous vote in the Senate and 355-4 (that is not a typo) in the House, and Richard Nixon signed it into law. Now there were two endangered species: the snail darter and the Tellico Dam.

Five years later, “Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill” landed in the U.S. Supreme Court. By a 6-3 vote, the justices ordered construction to stop, even though $100 million had already been spent and the dam was nearly finished. The reason, wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, is that the dam will cause “the eradication of an endangered species.” Courts and administrative bodies tried to weigh the competing values of environmental and economic considerations, and surprisingly, the dam lost on both fronts. "I hate to see the snail darter get the credit for stopping a project that was ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place,” said Secretary of the Interior Frederick Dent.

But the politicians weren’t done. In 1979 Tennessee’s powerful Senator Howard Baker got a rider into the appropriations bill, ordering the TVA to finish the dam, and Jimmy Carter signed it into law. The project was completed that same year, 1979. It was the last dam the TVA ever built.

There were others who opposed the dam besides environmentalists. Unlike earlier TVA dams, the Tellico was built for economic development and tourism, rather than hydroelectric power and flood control. It required thousands of acres of farmland to be taken by eminent domain, many of which were subsequently sold to private developers long after the original residents had been relocated. By this time, also, people were awakening to the harm dams cause to river systems as well as to the displaced people.

Quotes by two eminent Americans best summarize the conflict between environmental protection and economic growth:

“In the midst of a national energy crisis,” said Howard Baker on the Senate floor, “the snail darter demands that we scuttle a project that would produce 200 million kilowatt hours of hydroelectric power and save an estimated 15 million gallons of oil.”

“The story of the snail darter and the TVA,” countered the legendary sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, “is the Thermopylae in the history of America’s conservation movement.”

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To see all of this and earlier series, please go to jamesgblaine.com

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 12

12th of a series

Paint me a picture of the landscape.

Dance me the dance of the waves.

Sing me of the legends of the river.

Tell me the story of the sky.

- Author Unknown

In 2010 I published an article in Waterkeeper Magazine, which included paintings from a series of river landscapes in Southeast Asia by my friend Sarah Sutro. To me, they capture the calm beauty of quiet rivers. I will let you see for yourself.

North Shore, Sarah Sutro

North Shore Landscape, Sarah Sutro

Phnom Penh 6, Sarah Sutro

Bangkok River, Sarah Sutro

Phnom Penh 7, Sarah Sutro

In Bangladesh, Sarah Sutro

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 11

11th of a series

Weekly update: a new feature of related news, stories, and reader responses:

John Kirkpatrick:

“As I read the top of this latest chapter of “A River and Its Water …” I couldn’t help but think that it should be no surprise that the folks who willingly wiped out a chilling number of Native Americans would shun [John Wesley] Powell for his inconvenient observations.

“Additionally, I couldn’t help but stop at your note about Las Vegas. Sara and I were recently in Las Vegas — my first time there. It really was stunning to see the artificial excess that makes up the core of the city as well as the tremendous and unrelenting growth of the surrounding area. And you are correct about the disconnect between the growth and the reality of living in a desert. It was disconcerting. I don’t think we’ll be back. 

“I have had a very hard time reading this “Perspectives” around water. It isn’t because of your work, which has been extraordinary in detail, readability, importance, and understanding. It has been because of the unrelenting forces that make clean, accessible water in many places a dream rather than a priority. It is just so discouraging. 

“It also might be because it comes on top of our country’s incredible political/cultural dysfunction, our inability to invest in the future, all on top of the world spinning more and more out of control. 

“I am a happy and optimistic person. But increasingly I find I need to step back now and again to recharge from all that is swirling around us.”

Bruce Babbitt (via Tony Barclay):

“One factual error that does not affect his very powerful advocacy. His description of Butler Valley as a ‘reserve for storing water from the Colorado River’ is not quite right – it was designated as a reserve of the existing groundwater for future urban use in the Phoenix urban area.”

Bruce Babbitt and Robert Lane

“The notorious state lease that is giving away Butler Valley groundwater to grow and export alfalfa to Saudi Arabia will expire on Feb. 14 of this coming year. . .  .Will Arizona capitulate to lobbyists pressuring Governor Hobbs to renew the lease?

“All Arizonans should also urge Governor Hobbs to direct the State Land Commissioner to reject the lease application and to restore the Butler Valley as a designated groundwater reserve to be held in trust for Arizona’s future.”

Bruce Babbitt was governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987. Robert Lane was State Land Commissioner from 1982 to1987.

Tim Thomas:

The New York Times, Oct. 23, 2023 (part of the Times’ major series on water, “Uncharted Waters”

“When Maine lawmakers tried to rein in large-scale access to the state’s freshwater this year, the effort initially gained momentum. The state had just emerged from drought, and many Mainers were sympathetic to protecting their snow-fed lakes and streams.

“Then a Wall Street-backed giant called BlueTriton stepped in.

“BlueTriton isn’t a household name, but its products are. Americans today buy more bottled water than any other packaged drink, and BlueTriton owns many of the nation’s biggest brands, including Poland Spring, which is named after a natural spring in Maine that ran dry decades ago.

“Maine’s bill threatened BlueTriton’s access to the groundwater it bottles and sells. The legislation had already gotten a majority vote on the committee and was headed toward the full Legislature, when a lobbyist for BlueTriton proposed an amendment that would gut the entire bill.”

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 10

Tenth of a series

“They both listened to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming.”

- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Economics. Environment. Esthetics

Human activity is the single greatest threat to the rivers on which all life depends, and that dependence is not going to change. We can’t stop drinking their waters, nor eating the food they provide. We will continue to demand the power they generate, the transportation they make possible, and the recreation they support. But we must stop reducing streams and rivers to their utilitarian functions and calculating their value solely in economic terms.

For beyond economic – and even environmental – issues is a third dimension that is too often overlooked. Esthetics. As with science, beauty is rooted in the particular – the play of light on the water, the caddisfly in its tiny case, the sound of flowing water, the scent of riparian plants in the early spring. It leads us to enjoy the stream directly, as we walk along its banks, raft its reaches, and fish its pools, feeling at these moments the solace of solitude and the paradoxical sense that we are not alone.

“I came to the River for science,” wrote biologist David Campbell who spent 30 years studying the deep wilderness of the western Amazon basin, “but I stayed for the beauty. My memories of the species I found – each an invocation of sunlight and water and minerals – and of the play of light in the canopy, the night sounds, the aromas and textures of the forest, the time and space shared with friends on the frontier – make up a tapestry of experience so rich that now, years later and thousands of kilometers away, it imbues my papery life with dimension and perspective.”

In A Land of Ghosts Campbell found that knowledge enhanced his appreciation of beauty. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain found something else after he had achieved his childhood dream: becoming a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River:

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. . . . All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a ‘break’ that ripples above some deadly disease. . . . And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?”

A river is not just a collection of resources for humans to exploit, but a community of which we are members. Beauty pulls us out of our individual selves and connects us with a world of immeasurable – and infinitesimal – things.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 9

Ninth of a series

“How did their water get under our sand?”

Butler Valley is a sparsely populated area in the western Arizona desert. Situated about 125 miles northwest of Phoenix and 40 miles east of the Colorado River, the 315-square-mile valley has only one paved road. The state owns 99% of its land, which it holds in trust for the benefit of its public school children. In terms of annual rainfall, Butler Valley is one of the driest places in the United States, but beneath the surface it’s a different story altogether. For almost 40 years the valley has been a reserve for storing water from the Colorado River, and it currently holds more than 6 million acre-feet of water underground.

Enter Fondamente Arizona, a company that produces thousands of tons of alfalfa, a highly water-intensive crop, on land in Butler Valley that it leases from the state of Arizona. Don’t be fooled by its name: Fondamente Arizona is not a southwestern farming operation; it is a subsidiary of a Saudi company called Almarai, and the alfalfa it produces is shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed the kingdom’s cattle.

Why? Because Saudi Arabia has banned large-scale production of alfalfa and other animal feed crops to protect its limited supply of water.

No such regulations exist in Arizona, and The Washington Post reported that a proposal just to measure the Saudi company’s water use was stonewalled by the state’s Republican government, with the help of heavy spending and lobbying by, surprise, Fondomonte Arizona.

According to U.S. Geological Survey studies, alfalfa in Butler Valley requires 6.4 acre-feet of water per acre of land. That means the company has likely been pumping 22,400 acre-feet of water each year for the last seven years. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep. One acre foot = 325,850 gallons. So 22,400 acre feet = just shy of 7.3 trillion gallons of water.)

And what has Arizona charged Fondamente for all this water?

Not one penny.

So, go figure. For the past 10 years we have been using massive amounts of water in drought-stricken Arizona to grow alfalfa, which is then shipped more than 8,000 miles to Saudi Arabia to enable that desert country to conserve its own scarce water resources.

Isn’t what they are doing to “our” water what we used to do to “their” oil?

Perhaps colonialism is alive and well; only now it’s working in reverse.

By far the biggest user of water on Earth is agriculture. Once upon a time we called it farming, but this is neither Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer nor Norman Rockwell’s family farm. This is industry, and it takes up more than a quarter of the world’s land to conduct its business. On most of that land it grows crops – like alfalfa – to feed animals, not humans.

Agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s annual water consumption. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. It takes one gallon of water to produce a single almond – and 1,900 gallons to produce a pound. Rising demand for food around the world, due to both population growth and richer diets, has led to fresh water being sucked from the ground in such massive quantities that the Earth’s tilt has shifted.

While the specific effects of climate change on these matters is still not fully clear in the short or the long run, I don’t think we should count on cosmic benevolence.

* Earlier this month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced that she will cancel Fondomonte’s leases, saying she will do “everything in my power to protect Arizona’s water so we can continue to grow sustainably for generations to come.” This, of course, is a political response, not an ecological one. Will a politician, particularly in the very dry American West, ever question the possible incompatibility between limitless growth and healthy water?

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Weekly update: a new feature of related news and stories, often sent in by a reader:

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — The Negro River, the Amazon’s second largest tributary, on Monday reached its lowest level since official measurements began near Manaus 121 years ago. The record confirms that this part of the world´s largest rainforest is suffering its worst drought, just a little over two years after its most significant flooding.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 8

Eighth of a series

“Rain follows the plow.”

- Charles Dana Wilbur

Here is all you really need to know about the history of water in the western United States: This map, which appears on page 170 of Wallace Stegner’s 1954 book,

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, shows a line just east of the 100th meridian that divides America into a wet half and a dry half – a map that has remained essentially unchanged since white Americans began aggressively settling the west over 150 years ago.

Through a long history of damming, drilling, diversions, and water grabs, we have dried up the West’s rivers and extracted its groundwater at rates that are now – and have long been – unsustainable. Over the years, prophets have tried to tell us so – Stegner in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid(1977) and The Control of Nature (1989), and Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1993) – but we didn’t listen.

Before them, there was John Wesley Powell.

Despite having lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, Powell made the first recorded expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers and through the Grand Canyon. Later, as director of the federal government’s U.S. Geological Survey and its Bureau of Ethnology, he argued that the West was far too dry for intensive development. That made him a lot of powerful enemies – from railroad moguls to homesteaders, from farmers to every real estate speculator in the land. “Fraud was never provable,” Stegner wrote of western land deals, “but it was estimated that 95% of the final title proofs were fraudulent, nonetheless.”

“It is good to be shifty in a new country,” said the fictional Captain Simon Suggs.

But Powell’s prescient words were drowned out (if you will pardon the expression) by Charles Dana Wilber’s crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.” Needless to say, Wilbur was a land speculator and booster of agricultural development in the West. His mantra, which maintained that agricultural production would actually lead to increased rainfall and greater prosperity, had a huge following in the late 19th century, not only in the West but also among the rich and powerful, and therefore, in the halls of Congress.

 “I tell you gentlemen,” Powell said to an irrigation conference in 1893, “you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” He quickly became a pariah.

“He told them,” wrote Stegner, “and they booed him.”

Forty years later, the Dust Bowl devastated land and ruined lives, primarily west of the 100th Meridian, just as Powell had warned them. The drought lasted for almost the entire 1930s. On April 2, 1935, desiccated western topsoil rose up in the wind and blew all the way to Washington, D.C., where the director of the Soil Erosion Service was testifying  before Congress in favor of a national soil conservation program. Powell had been dead for 33 years.

And so, in southeast Nevada, which gets 4.2 inches of rain a year, we built the sprawling city of Las Vegas, home to almost three million people and endless fountains – most famously, the “Fountains of Bellagio”, a 375,000 square-foot lake whose 1,214 “devices” keep 17,000 gallons of water in the air. In California, which is just now emerging (hopefully) from years of drought that threatened both water supplies and food production, we created “one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions” in the desert of the San Joaquin Valley . . . by extracting so much groundwater that the land itself is literally sinking. And today, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, California, and Idaho continue to extract more water each year than they replenish.

Average annual rainfall, 2000 – 2013. Compare with the  map at the top of the page.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 7

Seventh of a series

“[T]he West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.”

- Marc Reisner

In the first season of the television series, “Yellowstone,” a California developer named Dan Jenkins reveals his plans to divert the Yellowstone River to provide water and power to the huge casino he intends to build in Paradise Valley. When the timid bankers voice skepticism, Jenkins replies, “On our land, it’s our river. This isn’t California, gentlemen. This is Montana. We can do whatever we want.”

Well, not quite. Jenkins’ dam was still on the drawing board when John Dutton dynamited both the valley and Jenkins’ plans, rerouting the river so that it now ran solely through the Dutton ranch. That took care of that problem.

A couple of articles have subsequently tried to spoil the fun. One noted that Jenkins seemed ignorant of Article IX Section 3.3 of Montana’s Constitution, which states: “All surface, underground, flood, and atmospheric waters within the boundaries of the state are the property of the state for the use of its people and are subject to appropriation for beneficial uses as provided by law.”  Montana allocates water rights through a system called “prior appropriation”, which basically means whoever gets there first gets the water (“first in time, first in right”). Because the Duttons came to the valley in 1883, “they didn’t need dynamite, they needed a decent water rights attorney. . . and a permit.” But that ain’t the way the Duttons do business.

Nor were the people of California – at least the old timers – the wimps whom Jenkins mocked. They were just more subtle.  At the beginning of the 20th century, when the power brokers in Los Angeles wanted water to build the city and enrich themselves, they stole it. All the way from the Owens Valley, 270 miles to the northeast, where they had surreptitiously bought up the land and built an aqueduct.

The original name of the Owens Valley was Payahǖǖnadǖ or “place of flowing water,” which is a bit ironic since it took Los Angeles only 13 years to empty the 100-square-mile lake completely, sending to the city four times as much water as it needed. Draining the lake put the local farmers out of business, and they did respond with dynamite – by trying to blow up the aqueduct on 17 separate occasions. Today, Los Angeles owns most of the land in the valley, and the empty lake’s dry bed has created serious air pollution issues for the inhabitants.

Several years ago, I went to the Owens Valley to spend a week without food and only a little water in the Inyo Mountains. Because the high Sierras on the west side of the valley suck up all the Pacific rains, it is the driest place I have ever been. Just to its east is Death Valley.

The story of the great water theft in the Owens Valley is told mythically in Roman Polanski’s film, “Chinatown,” and majestically in Marc Reisner’s book Cadillac Desert, while the Yellowstone story is told melodramatically in the eponymous television series. But the less electrifying historical and academic papers show that, while “water wars” did bring violence and fraud to the West, “armed water insurrections have been replaced by court fights and water rights sales.”

And that brings me to another truth the headlines often overlook: that rivers have at least as much ability to bring people together as to send them to the mattresses – and that the commons does not have to be the catastrophe that Garret Hardin makes it out to be.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 6

Sixth in a series

“Whisky is for drinkin’; water is for fightin’ over.”

- Mark Twain (reputedly)

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Who Owns Water?

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We will spend some time on this question in this series. Rivers and their waters have been the source of conflict throughout human history, and nations and states have devised all kinds of treaties, agreements, rights, and regulations to protect and allocate what they see as “their” waters. Too often, though, the matter comes down to one word: power.

Consider who owns these waters:

The Golan Heights

In 1967 and  again in 1973, Israel and various Arab States fought major wars over the Golan Heights. This was hardly new: Israelis and the people of Aram were fighting over Golan in the Old Testament.

Much is made of the Golan Heights’ strategic military value as the high ground in the region, but its even greater value lies in the fact that it feeds both the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee and is a major source of fresh water for Israel.

The Colorado River

The Colorado River begins in the Never Summer Mountains, flows southwest through Colorado and Utah, and enters Arizona, where it turns west through the Grand Canyon and on to Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.

There it turns south and flows along the Nevada and California border until it trickles into Mexico and ends its 1,450-mile journey in the Gulf of California. At least it used to. The river, which provides water to 40 million people and makes possible some of the most productive farmland in the world, rarely gets to the Gulf. The allocation of its water to seven US and two Mexican states involves a complicated set of calculations first laid out by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. There is no longer enough water to go around, and the Colorado has been called “a river in crisis” . . . if you can call something a crisis that we have seen coming for more than 60 years.

The Amazon

The Amazon is the world’s largest river, annually sending into the Atlantic Ocean about 20 percent of the world’s total freshwater discharges. Although two-thirds of the Amazon is in Brazil, the river begins in Peru and also flows through Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

Its drainage basin is the size of Australia, and it is so critical to the planet’s climate as to be a global resource. But governmental, corporate, and private encouragement of agriculture, oil drilling, road development, population growth – all accomplished primarily through deforestation (and of course corruption) – are destroying the forest at exponential rates. Is it too late to slow or reverse the damage? Can the basin be protected? If so, how? If not, then what?

The Nile

“From its headwaters in Ethiopia and the central African highlands to the downstream regional superpower Egypt, the Nile flows through 10 nations,” writes Fred Pearce. “But by a quirk of British colonial history, only Egypt and its neighbor Sudan have any rights to its water.

Attribution: Sir Samuel Baker, 1875

“That is something the upstream African nations say they can no longer accept. Yet as the nations of the Nile bicker over its future, nobody is speaking up for the river itself — for the ecosystems that depend on it, or for the physical processes on which its future as a life-giving resource in the world’s largest desert depends. The danger is that efforts to stave off water wars may lead to engineers trying to squeeze yet more water from the river — and doing the Nile still more harm. What is at risk here is not only the Nile, but also the largest wetland in Africa and one of the largest tropical wetlands in the world — the wildlife-rich Sudd.” And to its upstream neighbors, Egypt has made it as clear as the headwaters of the Blue Nile that it will destroy any efforts to impede the river’s flow.

The Tigris and the Euphrates

“The massive Ilisu Dam under construction in Turkey,” said Ulrich Eichelmann of Riverwatch, ‘is an infrastructure project with a 1950s mindset: big, bigger, as big as possible.’. . .[E]xperts say the [dam’s] impacts will be felt hundreds of miles downstream across large parts of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, which includes Syria, Iraq, and Iran, exacerbating water shortages that will affect irrigation, biodiversity, fishing, drinking water, and transportation

‘But in a political context in which water is power, Turkey is not budging on its prerogative to dam ‘its rivers.’

“‘Turkey sees itself as completely sovereign in the management of its rivers and basically does whatever it wants, in terms of damming and discharging pollution,’ said Nicolas Bremer, author of a book on Turkey’s dams. ‘Turkey refuses to be bound by the international treaties and laws that exist.’” Paul Hockenos

New York City

The water that supplies the people of New York City with some of the world’s cleanest drinking water starts over 100 miles away in upstate streams, which then flow through tunnels into huge reservoirs on land the city acquired mostly between 1905 and 1967.

At the bottom of the reservoirs lie the remnants of 25 communities, which were condemned through the process of eminent domain and required the relocation of more than 5,000 people. Tensions between the upstate communities and the city have festered for years, primarily because New York grew to astonishing wealth and power despite a serious dearth of onsite water. Almost all the city’s water is delivered without the need for exorbitantly expensive filtration, which is a consequence of its unending efforts to protect the reservoirs from contamination and pollution. That has caused great conflict in the upstate watersheds, as New York City, perhaps the most urban and developed place on Earth, has for years used its economic power to preserve the rural nature of a poor region that is desperate for economic growth.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 5

Fifth in a series

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

- Pogo

A river is the ultimate commons. Its waters don’t belong to any one of us, but are held in common by all of us, for all of us. At least, that’s the theory. It has rarely been the reality. Moreover, throughout much of human history, “all of us” has meant, well, us humans. But we overlook, to our detriment, that our well-being depends on the health of literally trillions of other living organisms with whom we share the watershed.

Rivers are not simply pipes for delivering water from one place to another. They are complex and fragile ecosystems that provide a myriad of often-conflicting benefits to various claimants. Particularly over the past 60 years, scientific research has vastly expanded our understanding of rivers and their ecosystems – their hydrology and chemistry, their physical properties and biological communities. Perhaps the most profound result of this work has been to demonstrate empirically what people understood intuitively for millennia – that a stream is a dynamic system whose equilibrium depends on constant change, that it does not flow in a vacuum but is an integral part of the landscape it drains, that what happens throughout a river’s watershed determines the health of the stream, and that upstream activities determine downstream health. No part of the river’s ecosystem – not even a single organism – can be completely understood except in its relation to everything else.

Human activity is the single greatest threat to the rivers on which we depend – and our dependence on rivers is not going to change. We cannot stop drinking their waters, nor eating the food they provide. We will continue to demand the power they generate, the transportation they make possible, and the recreation they support. But we must stop reducing streams and rivers to their utilitarian functions and calculating their value solely in economic terms. It is both an environmental and an economic imperative to restore their place in the natural world so that they can both regenerate themselves and continue to provide their unique array of benefits and resources.

In place of the multi-faceted relationships people historically had with rivers, we have substituted a single determinant of their value: What can this river do for me? In our drive for economic growth, we have bent rivers to the human will. Across the globe there are now more than 50,000 large dams, which collectively have displaced 40 to 80 million people. From Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River to China’s Yangtze, we continue to impose ever-bigger engineering solutions on natural wonders we do not understand and have ceased to care much about. Nor are we safe from these solutions: In 1975 a dam in China collapsed and as many as 230,000 people died; and they will be accounting for the dead in Libya for a long time to come.

Rivers have provided us immeasurable benefits. But we are destroying them, and in doing so, we are imperiling our future. We need to step back from the brink and reconnect with our rivers. We need to understand them, not simply try to control them – to appreciate the whole of a river, not just those parts we find useful, to realize that a river is not merely a channel through which we can push water and waste, but a natural system of which we are a part. We need to awaken to the beauty of our rivers and to see clearly the forces that threaten them.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 4

Fourth in a series

“To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it."

- Hal Borland

In the early 1970s, Robin Vannote presented a novel idea to a group of freshwater scientists who had gathered from across the country at the Stroud Water Research Center in rural Pennsylvania. His idea would evolve into the “River Continuum Concept”, which forever changed our understanding of streams and rivers. As you may have guessed, both from its name and my last post, the River Continuum Concept was based on the fact that a river flows, which might seem pretty obvious to you.

“In those days,” Vannote told me many years later, “most scientists studied a square meter of water to death.” But a stream is fundamentally different from a lake: it changes constantly as it moves downstream, and it can only be understood as a continuum. Bern Sweeney, then a young graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, vividly remembers Vannote outlining his idea. “The scientists gathered in that room were just in awe. It was a major, major event.” Part of the reason was that, in hindsight, the concept was so simple that they couldn’t believe no one had thought of it before.

From those early insights, Vannote, other Stroud Center staff, and a few university colleagues developed the River Continuum Concept, which revolutionized stream research.

During the same period, noted geologist Luna Leopold was developing a formula for understanding a stream’s physical behavior. He saw that a river’s width, depth, velocity, and temperature change constantly as the water flows downstream. More importantly, he recognized that those changes are interrelated — and because a change in one factor affects all the others, a river’s pattern is predictable.

Drawing on these physical studies, Vannote and his colleagues added a critical element to the puzzle of how streams work. They argued that a river’s biological and chemical processes correspond to its physical attributes, and that the nature of biological communities changes just as the river itself does as it flows downstream. This means that the structure of a stream’s living communities is also predictable and that the communities adapt to the particular conditions of a stretch of stream.

The work of Vannote, Leopold, and others not only upended traditional scientific thinking; it also added a crucial new approach to water and watershed policy making. Underlying the economic, social, and political factors that had dictated almost all previous water policy, they demonstrated that a stream’s geological, geographic, physical, and biological dynamics must undergird the effective management of water resources. Big engineering solutions, such as massive dams and moving channels, would give way to understanding a stream’s ecology, and politics would henceforth have to take science into account.

A river is not a static body of water, and it is more than the sum of its parts. It is a single continuum that flows ceaselessly from its source to the sea. To understand what is happening at any point along the way, you must understand both what is happening upstream and what is entering it from the land through which it flows.

The River Continuum Concept was the first unified hypothesis about how streams and their watersheds work. It dominated river studies for the next decade, and it remains, almost 50 years later, the most often-cited article on freshwater studies.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 3

Third in a series

“No man can step into the same river twice.”

- Heraclitus (6th century BCE)

Question: What is a river?

One simple definition I found is: “a wide, natural stream of fresh water that flows into an ocean or other large body of water and is usually fed by smaller streams, called tributaries, that enter it along its course.”

On a more ethereal level, Herman Hesse describes Siddhartha sitting by a stream and discovering “one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed, and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” Or, as Heraclitus put it more succinctly over 2,500 years ago, “No man can step into the same river twice.”

That a river flows is hardly breaking news. But it’s precisely what distinguishes streams and rivers from other bodies of water and what underlies the science, history, politics, economics, and aesthetics of rivers that this series will consider.

Let’s look first at the science.*

Question: Is fresh water a renewable resource?

No. At least not in the sense that water molecules reproduce themselves. Water does recycle itself, but the total amount of water has not changed since Earth began – and 97 percent of it is salt water. Of the remaining three percent, three-quarters is locked in glaciers, which climate change is melting at unprecedented rates, or is in deep aquifers or too polluted to drink. That leaves only 0.5 percent for all the needs that all living beings – not just human beings – have for fresh water. Increasingly, there is not enough to go around. There are too many of us. We use too much of it. And we pollute it.

More questions:

• Is fresh water a commodity to be bought and sold . . . or is access to clean fresh water a basic human right?

• Who owns water?

These are critical questions, and the answers to them are not clear, even though the health of all of us and the survival of many of us depend on getting them right.

Question: Are we doomed?

Much of the world is looking to technological solutions, such as desalination. Certainly, we need to employ all the innovative technology we can. But as Bern Sweeney, my former colleague and scientific mentor, told me many years ago, desalination is not so much the solution as it is a manifestation of the problem.

But the significant and measurable improvements to stream health that came in the wake of the 1972 Clean Water Act show that watershed restoration is possible as well as necessary. We have made good progress over five decades reducing “point-source” pollution, which means we can identify its origin and entry points into a stream. We have done less well with “non-point source” pollution, which is difficult to track as it travels across the land in the form of run-off.

Perhaps no place offers more hope than New York City. Despite its growing population, the city has cut its overall water consumption by about 30% over the last 25 years, and it has put in place a system for monitoring the water at its sources, which has so far enabled it to forgo a billion-plus-dollar filtration system downstream.

The lesson is that, while restoring the commons is expensive and time-consuming, it can be done. Not to do so is to condemn future generations to fresh water that is both more scarce and less clean.

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*For much of the scientific ideas that will follow, I am indebted to a small scientific research and education laboratory in rural Pennsylvania and those who work there. I am not a scientist, but I spent many years working in various capacities at the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, which has become, since its inception in 1967, perhaps the country’s foremost institution for understanding streams, rivers, and their watersheds. Its scientists taught me what little science I now know. I take full responsibility for the ignorance that remains.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 2

Second in a series

“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

- Garrett Hardin

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Readers’ views: “Thank you, Jamie, for this new blog. Water and blood, the two most mystical, magical, essential, and interesting of fluids. I would hope that, as all things seem to be coming apart, we return to our ancient and common belief – or in the current vernacular, story – that rivers are sacred.” Warren Burrows

Editor’s Note: I apologize for the redundant sentences and missing word in the first paragraph of Monday’s post. Embarrassing.

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“Picture a pasture open to all,” wrote Garrett Hardin a half-century ago in his landmark essay. His pasture, however, is no idyllic meadow where local herdsmen amicably graze their cows, but a place of impending devastation, where it’s in each farmer’s self-interest to pack as many cows as they can onto the communal grass. The resulting “tragedy of the commons,” wrote Hardin, “brings ruin to all.”

He had a point. By treating our commons as a resource to be exploited instead of a public trust to be protected, we threaten to destroy the very thing on which we depend. Nowhere is this more true than with our treatment of rivers and their watersheds, which sustain all life on earth.

Consider all a river provides us: drinking water, electric power, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, recreation, nourishing food, intangible beauty, habitat for wildlife. Hardin describes two types of commons: ‘a food basket,’ from which people take what they need, and ‘a cesspool,’ into which they put what they don’t want. Rivers are both – and more, for people actually take the commons itself, removing ever-increasing quantities of water or diminishing its quality to the point it becomes unusable. It’s as if some of Hardin’s herdsmen crept back into the pasture after dark, dug up the grass, and replanted it in their backyards.

Meredith Sadler designed and drafted the figure.

Given all the diverse claimants to – and uses for – a river’s goods and services, is it possible to protect it both now and for the future . . . so that the commons will be passed on to future generations in the same or better condition than it was inherited from the past.

Start with the premise that (1) almost everybody needs clean fresh water, healthy wetlands, and unpolluted rivers and (2) most of us depend on economies that have long despoiled all three. To stop, or even slow, the decline is a difficult task, but it pales in comparison to trying to restore a river to its more pristine past. Just as damage was caused by a thousand cuts across time and the river’s watershed, so restoration will require tens of thousands of physical, chemical, biological, and political bandages. At the core of the matter are a river’s many constituents who continue to resist cleaning up the messes they and their predecessors have made. For them, the commons is not a public trust. It is a public trough.

The result? Almost half of America’s streams and rivers are in poor condition, particularly the smaller watersheds that provide over 70% of the nation’s water. The cause, of course, is us. For centuries people have dammed and removed more water than our rivers can replenish and have disposed of more waste, toxins, and detritus than our rivers can process. No worries, we said, everything goes downstream – until we discovered that everyone also lives downstream.

Clean fresh water is not free, and it is no more inexhaustible than a pasture’s grass. A river is not a pipe whose function is to deliver water and other products for human consumption. It is an ecosystem in which all life is connected. As the life’s blood of the watersheds through which they flow, all rivers are deeply impacted by human activities. “The health of our waters,” wrote Luna Leopold, “is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”

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Much of this post is taken from an article Bern Sweeney and I published in Waterkeeper, Jan. 27, 2021.

A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 1

First of a series

“Rivers are the gutters down which run the ruins of continents.”

- Luna Leopold

The Colorado River provides water for 40 million people and is the lifeblood of some of this nation’s the most productive cropland. It stopped flowing regularly to the sea in 1960. Earlier this year, more than six decades later – and following 23 consecutive years of serious drought exacerbated by the increasing impacts of climate change – American Rivers designated the stretch of the Colorado that runs through the Grand Canyon as the most endangered river in the United States. For over two centuries, Americans have brought a variety of tools to exploit this majestic. Foresight has rarely been among them. Are we at finally waking up to the crises of our rivers?

Nor is it only a problem here. More than half the world’s rivers are seriously depleted and polluted. China’s Yellow River runs dry for two thirds of the year; the Ganges is befouled almost from its source; and the Volga annually transports 42 million tons of toxic waste to the Caspian Sea.

Streams and rivers provide the essentials of life – water and food – for all living beings. For humans, they have done much more. We have used rivers to bathe our bodies, wash our clothes and remove our waste. Rivers have irrigated our farmlands and carried in their waters the fertile sediments that create and replenish the soil itself. Rivers have made possible the inexpensive and efficient transportation of goods—and with them the social, cultural, and intellectual exchanges that have spurred the development of ideas and the spread of knowledge. Harnessing the flow and capturing the power of rivers was the source of the Industrial Revolution and the modern world as we know it.

The earliest civilizations grew on rich alluvial plains that rivers created, and to a great extent rivers defined those early communities. People venerated their rivers as the source of life. Their earliest gods were river gods. But rivers could also be arbitrary forces of destruction, and people were often at their mercy, as floods obliterated their homes, droughts withered their crops, and contaminants poisoned their water. The river brought death as well as life.

Today, despite all humankind’s spectacular engineering feats, over a billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water – and three times that number suffer from inadequate sanitation. Diarrhea kills almost three million people each year, the majority of them infants and children. Two hundred million people suffer from schistosomiasis, an infection caused by drinking contaminated river water, and more than six million Africans have river blindness.

This series will take a wide-ranging look at rivers and their waters, examining their history, science, politics, and economics; marveling at their beauty; grappling with the issues they face; and seeking remedies at both the macro and micro levels. For if, as Luna Leopold wrote, “the health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land” (and it surely is), how then can we ignore Marq de Villiers’ lament that “a child dies every eight seconds from drinking contaminated water?”

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Last of a Series

Last of a Series

Lincoln Memorial, 2023

“. . . to bind up the nation's wounds. . .”

- Abraham Lincoln

My granddaughter, Sutton, looks outward from beneath Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

This is the last in the series: “American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery.” You can find the whole series in chronological order here.

Thank you for reading the blog and supporting me. I have learned a lot from your responses, and I have grown through the conversations. At my age, it’s hard to ask for more.

My next series: “A River and its Water: Reclaiming the Commons” will start in about two weeks. I hope you will join me.

Gratefully,

Jamie Blaine

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 15

Part 15 of this Series

America’s Lodestar

“Everybody’s askin’ that. What we comin’ to? Seems to me we don’t never come to nothin’. Always on the way.”

- Casy in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath

Contrary to many of this country’s origin stories, the first European settlers did not happen upon an empty wilderness. They landed on the edge of a vast continent inhabited by millions of people, whose land they took. They soon established on much of it a plantation system anchored in slavery, and over the next 400 years, America’s sins left a stain on the landscape – from the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee, from Gabriel’s Rebellion in Virginia to the Pettus Bridge in Selma, from Homestead, Pennsylvania to Love Canal, New York – and beyond, to Nagasaki, to My Lai, to Guantanamo.

So, what then do we make of Winthrop’s “city on a hill”, of Jefferson’s “self-evident truths”, of Lincoln’s “new nation”, of King’s “dream deeply rooted in the American dream”? How can we reconcile their lofty rhetoric with a reality of dreadful crimes?

First, we must confront our history and own it. We cannot claim these atrocities did not happen or that somehow they don’t represent who Americans really are. The evidence is overwhelming: this is who we are. But it is not all that we are, and it is not who we have to be.

The path forward lies neither in seeking some non-existent middle ground, nor in clinging to one image of America and demonizing the other, but in forging a new synthesis that recognizes the power – and the truth – of the contradictions that have defined us from the beginning. We are a land of liberty; we were built on a foundation of slavery. We have failed in our mission from the beginning, but we haven’t yet given up on our ideals. Perhaps this is our calling . . . not to be the most powerful nation in the world, nor the richest nor the greatest, but to strive to be better than we are – to at once accept and transcend our history in pursuit of universal and self-evident truths. Although we’ll probably never get there, it’s when we cease to try that our experiment in nationhood will end.

In every century since European settlement, an American Jeremiah has stepped forward to remind us of that calling, to reproach us for our failures, and to stir us, in King’s words, to “rise up and live out the true meaning of [our] creed.” Every century, that is, but this one. In the wake of the wreckage of the last several years, it’s time for a new summons to our best selves. For it is only by embracing the whole of it – our aspirations and our failures – that we can begin the process of reconciliation. Flag wavers and flag burners – what makes America exceptional is that we are defined by both.

The term American Exceptionalism has been through many incarnations. It has been battered at home and derided abroad, but it will not go away because it says something essential about America to Americans . . . and to the world. It is not a portrait of who we are but an aspiration of whom we might become. By insisting that we live up to our country’s avowed ideals, American Exceptionalism offers the last, best hope of holding us together as a nation. It is King’s promissory note, Lincoln’s unfinished work, Jefferson’s not-so-self-evident truth, Winthrop’s city on a hill. It is America’s lodestar.

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 14

Part 14 of a Series

Newark and Detroit, 1967

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,"

- George Santayana

Fewer than four years after Martin Luther King shared his dream from the steps of the Lincoln memorial, inner cities burst into flames across America. It wasn’t the first time. There had been deadly race riots in New York City in 1863, Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, in Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1935 and 1943, Watts in 1965. Nor would it be the last. In the summer of 1968, in the aftermath of King’s assassination and with the ink barely dry on the  “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,” riots again broke out in more than 100 cities across the nation.

President Lyndon Johnson had charged the commission, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, to investigate the 1967 riots, primarily in Newark and Detroit, and to answer three questions:

1. What happened?

2. Why did it happen?

3. What can be done to prevent it from happening again?

The Kerner Commission produced a 440-page report. It boiled down to one sentence: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

It was that simple. But it was hardly new. Hadn’t that sentence described America in 1963? In 1863? In 1776? Even in 1619? The results have been devastating. “Segregation and poverty,” the commission reported, “have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.” Ignorant perhaps, but not innocent: “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

Newark, New Jersey, an American City, July 12-17, 1967

I don’t believe you could find a more succinct definition of “systemic racism.” Yet, even now, half a century later, local school boards and governments are bent on eradicating those two words from curricula and textbooks across America. They want to rewrite our history precisely so we will forget what happened. George Santayana’s famous saying was clearly meant to be a warning. For those intent on whitewashing our past, particularly in our schools, it has become an aspiration. But if four centuries of American history have proved anything, it is that, unless we deal with our past openly and honestly, we will continue to repeat it.

Already we witness politicians and other pundits describe the urban unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and other police killings, as the efforts of radicals and other bad people to sow chaos and undermine the rule of law. So, it’s worth noting that 56 years ago the Kerner Commission found that the number-one grievance in the communities it studied were the practices and attitudes of the local police – who had “come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression. And the fact is that many police do express and reflect these white attitudes.” Unfortunately, the official response from many city governments was “to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.”

These words, let’s not forget, were written in 1968. How much had changed by 2020, when George Floyd was killed?

And yet, for all the anger and violence and despair the commission discovered in our inner cities, it found something else, something surprising: the rioters were not “rejecting the American system,” the report noted. Rather, “they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.” As I hope this series has illustrated, that has long been so. “Black people have seen the worst in America,” wrote Nicole Hannah-Jones, ”yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.”