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I too read Tyler's recent link to a muddled and ahistorical account of the conflicts about water in the Klamath area. I considered debunking it, but really, this is widely available information. Only willful ignorance*, political cynicism or, well, whatever, could have resulted in the vacuous arguments being made.
Today Tyler links to a rebuttal. Someone made the effort. It is unfortunately characterized as a conflict between libertarian and authoritarian world views. This is only part of the problem. Those nuturing either bias would have to reach different conclusions if they simply considered the data available. It clearly contradicts the authoritarian view while also revealing that there are insufficient mechanisms in place for a libertarian solution. It may be that either approach could "fix" things, though that is improbable.
Eric, the debunker, did a nice job of grounding the discussion in reality.
According to this article, "Starting in the 1920s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained most of Tule and Lower Klamath lakes for agriculture and built an irrigation canal to send Upper Klamath Lake water to farms in the neighboring Tule Lake basin."Eric establishes that a fatal flaw in the bureaucratic position is that it bounds the investigation in an arbitrary and unhelpful way. Unhelpful, that is, if you truly seek a useful and equitable policy position. If all you seek is aggrandizement of the bureaucracy then that's another matter. But Eric's proposed bounds are also arbitrary and unhelpful. They don't consider larger effects. This is more understandable since this sort of large system thinking is uncommon and is often based on emerging insights. For example, people far away from the Klamath area can be affected by diminished sediment loads carried into the ocean when water flows are reduced. This can disrupt coastal stability as beaches are not replenished and so erosion increases. Similarly, the character and content of sediments are changed, perhaps carrying nutrients that lead to altered ocean ecologies that affect other fisheries. This can be considered as being either helpful or unhelpful depending on point of view.The government not only promised land to settlers, they promised water to them and water and fishing "rights" to the Native Americans before them. . .
Then, those farmers got subsidized electricity. (used for pumping water) . . .
By first abrogating the rights granted to the Natives, then spending taxpayer money to "reclaim" the valley for agriculture, then encouraging people to move there, then subsidizing their electricity (and God knows what else), thus bringing many competing interests into the valley, bureaucrats established the conditions for conflict. . .
bureaucratic decisions don't solve conflicts, they create the conditions for eternal conflict. One side is in, the other is out, and the side left out has no recourse but to politics. This is the unstated goal of much public policy: simultaneously remove traditional decentralized mechanisms for problem solving while replacing them with a central mechanism which puts politicians and bureaucrats in the role of Solomon.
Because we have only a dim grasp of the issues there is no ready fix for the conflict. Job security for bureaucrats involved in conflict resolution is assured. There will be new and different conflicts even if the old ones are settled, and those new conflicts can unsettle previous agreements. It's a never ending process. That does not mean that those bureaucrats should have a major voice. Their interests are not legitimate. They are witnesses and facilitators, not principals.
This isn't only a conflict of preferred political systems since physical reality trumps ideology, and we are still toddlers trying to gain some understanding of reality. We don't truly know what we want since we don't yet know what we can have. IMO a useful first step in the ongoing process would be for the bureaucrats to begin to withdraw. They made this mess - not that there would otherwise be no mess, but it would be different - so they need to pay penalties to make injured parties whole. Promises made to farmer and fisher folk can't be kept, so they must be compensated. The power to make future promises should be severely reduced to avoid otherwise inevitable repetition. Bureaucrats need to face reality: they have no idea what they are doing. No one does. Bumbling around like bulls in china closets isn't useful. They need to become more gracile, reduce their social footprint, to warp a currently popular concept. They are massive social polluters.
*See Ignorantia Affectata
The source of the vitriol of naive pseudo-environmentalists is a politics based in ignorance. It is willful ignorance, a cultivated ignorance, an ignorance so useful they don't want to get rid of it. It's what Aquinas called ignorantia affectata.
Recently I discussed the issue of these public conflicts with a well known individual who has been very successful at the upper levels of the federal government and corporate management and now retired is engaged in public dispute mediation. His take is that battles such as these are fought out in three linked venues - the media, the courts and the legislature - and that upon loosing in one venue each group heads to the next where they think they might have the upper hand. This process continues until all are spent; then they might be are ready for mediation where a successful resolution might occur. Otherwise, coffers are refilled and the battle starts anew. Bureaucrats, although an easy target, are primarily under the control of the legislative venue, who can call them on the carpet at any time (hearings) and can strangle them with a quick pull on the purse strings (enabling legislation vs. funding legislation). Unfunded mandates abound.
When I pressed him for something that described his view of this process that I could understand, he suggested the book "The Wisdom of Crowds". On the face, this seemed a somewhat odd suggestion and I'm only part way through it but to this point it is an interesting perspective of how groups come to decisions.
Posted by: JMG3Y at July 7, 2007 04:48 AMGroup decision making is a contentious subject, in part because there has been some interesting new work in the area in recent times. The research Surowiecki based his book on has been widely discussed for some time, and found inadequate to illuminate more than a small subset of cases.
Other work finds that the quality of group decisions go up when there is risk, when folks have to place a bet rather than just express a cost free opinion.
Still other work finds that many real world issues aren't resolvable by a single up or down answer because there is no correct answer, or because there are other problems that must be solved first, in sequence, and each requires a different skill set. For these problems a heuristically diverse group, closely communicating, can divide up the task into pieces that are solved in parallel unless there are dependencies and so sequence.
I think that we should pay more attention to risk. Experience shows that the answer, whatever it is and however divined, will most often be wrong. Since we know this it makes little sense to place large bets by implementing them on large scales or in irrevocable ways. An experimental approach makes more sense, and multiple parallel experiments most often reveal better answers more quickly.
This leaves no role for either legislatures or bureaucrats other than to enable experimentation, mostly by getting out of the way. As a society our best move would be to increasingly limit them since they will not limit themselves, even when it does harm for them to remain engaged. To a significant extent they are the problem. Few problems are usefully worked by political methods. This is a primitive behavior unsuited to a post-industrial world.
Posted by: back40 at July 7, 2007 05:55 PMback40: Do you know of a book or of on-line materials that groups involved in such seemingly intractable disputes could use to help them work their way through to a robust solution? It seems that the first thing everyone has to realize is that winning a battle in one venue won't likely win the war, that the final solution has to be win-win with everyone having a deeper understanding of the rationale opposing sides' positions.
Fresh water scarcity is looming as a serious threat in many places. Combined with the increasing energy scarcity in the form of declining crude oil EROEI and increasing food needs, such problems and thus the need for methods to solve them are becoming critically important.
Posted by: JMG3Y at July 10, 2007 05:22 AMI pay attention to the journal Ecology and Society and the Resilience Alliance in general. I often disagree with them, they drank way too much kool-aid, but they approach problems like this as being inherently complex, requiring both social and ecological insights to do any good at all. Oddly, this is unusual, though I've seen a trend toward this approach emerge in other places of late.
The E&S home page lists some water related special features in progress, so you may not have to dig around too much to have a little fun. Do dig around though if you find the initial taste to be good. You can also give them input and ask them questions. I've commented on some articles in the past that touched on subjects I knew well from a practitioner perspective, and they accepted them.
They aren't the only ones doing related work, but it's a start.
Posted by: back40 at July 10, 2007 11:40 AM