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Sewer analogy > Heuristic fail
It’s not possible to comment directly at the CA WaterBlog, so I’ll do it here, always happy to trot out the blind men touching the elephant image.
Professor Jay Lund’s recent post there is titled “Multiple stressors - funding the Delta like a public sewer”. The title and imagery in itself is interesting—more in-your-face rhetorically than usual for the people who write at CWB - but as analogies go, it doesn’t test so well against a few key measures.
Professor Lund’s thoughts are related to “stressor fees” suggested in the Delta Stewardship Council’s draft EIR. On the one hand, his thoughts as usual are founded on knowledgeable contextual assessments that lead to reasonable conclusions—but on the other, are politically tone-deaf and culturally reductive - even if these conclusions are only about funding, not valuing, change in the Delta.
Consider any normal well-run urban wastewater system. Thousands of communities, large and small, build and pay for urban wastewater systems, including many miles of sewers and pumping plants to collect wastewater, regional wastewater treatment plants, and treated wastewater discharges.
Leaving aside his view that the “multiple stressors” ambiguities are opportunistically played by the various Delta interests, which seems to me to be an accurate assessment, “stressors” don’t account for significant qualitative factors of the Delta as a landscape. I don’t think it’s trite to say that landscapes are cultural things, not (simply) natural things, not (simply) technical, engineering things. This makes his sewer analogy a heuristic fail.
1/ Generations of families haven’t lived in and on urban wastewater systems.
2/ Urban wastewater systems do not contain historical landmarks. Though I’ve long thought that the American Society of Civil Engineers should pursue making the Delta a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.
3/ Urban wastewater systems are not beautiful.
Contentiousness exists on the quantitative front as well:
4/ Urban wastewater systems are not the habitat of endangered species whose future is dependent on the health of complex, stressed ecosystems that are poorly understood by scientists.
5/ Since the USACE cannot produce inarguable evidence that vegetation on levees increases flood risk, people who enjoy the scenic aspects of flood-prone landscapes will resist. So will the DFG.
None of the above five aspects of the Delta can be accounted for by Prof. Lund’s analogy. They are slippery but persistent facts that frustrate those who seek strategies for straight-line thinking. They are all intrinsic parts of a more complete picture of a Delta’s ecosystem that cannot be reduced to numbers.
Nevertheless, Prof. Lund’s proposals, if not his analogy, seem to be headed in a plausible direction that will help define future policy. Hopefully, he and others who have influence will be able to expand their definition of the Delta’s ecology, finding a way to value (and game) its qualitative elements, too.
Comments
Wow! Thanks for the comments, but you are reading way more into this post than I ever intended (clearly due to lack of clarity on my part).
The extensive multiple stressors discussions and recriminations regarding the Delta have been largely counter-productive in terms of moving us towards a solution, and brought unrealistic expectations of ability to precisely and accurately fix responsibilities for the damages caused by each stressor and the value of reducing individual stressors.
On thinking about wastewater systems, it seemed that this example had some lessons for the Delta in terms of a really nasty problem (that actually killed thousands of people per year) involving much complexity (and multiple stressors in some senses) that our civilization has largely (albeit imperfectly) solved. Most of the lesson was optimistic about how people (including water agencies) actually can govern and fund solutions to nasty complex problems, although it took decades to do this (Tarr 1984).
With this example, I hoped to point out that actual water agencies today govern and fund nasty and complex problems as part of their day-to-day operations. Alas, I apparently was not clear enough.
I intended to say nothing in this post about Delta levees, people who live in the Delta, or other important aspects of the problem - just an optimistic note about our civilization’s ability to sometimes effectively address nasty problems.
Professor Lund, Thank you for your comment. My response was mostly interested in things that, as you say, you did not intend to discuss. Nevertheless, those things are to my way of thinking always implicitly present in any discussion about the Delta’s future.
The how to fund question is a nasty and complex one. I simply wished to portray a fuller sense of that nasty complexity. The devil’s in the details of principles like “beneficiary pays” and “co-equal goals,” after all.
I too am an optimist about the Delta’s future. My optimism lies in the future of its levees. I think their development can be the locus of all of the negotiated, transactional financed processes that will both ensure statewide co-equality and local control and profit. Most of my speculative work focuses on how they might be transformed and re-programmed toward those ends.
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