I could hear the cries of protest as she spoke — what about all those jobs? “California’s farming communities are the most poverty-stricken in the state,” Green said. “The profits, the benefits, go to Stewart Resnick. He’s the biggest farmer in the state — he owns Paramount Farms — and he lives in Beverly Hills.”
A lot has changed since Managing Water was published last year, at least some of it good. In the spring and summer, a federal court ruled that the Central Valley’s water projects were about to bring endangered Chinook salmon and steelhead populations to the edge of extinction, and ordered the water contracts reformed to restore sufficient flows to certain rivers. Orange County instituted a municipal wastewater-recycling program, which Green was thrilled about. She hoped Los Angeles County would move in the same direction. “We’re spending all this time cleaning up water so we can put it in the ocean. We’re throwing it away. Where’s the sense in that?” And she acknowledged that the Schwarzenegger-Feinstein water bond might not be “a total disaster,” as “some of the money would go toward wastewater reuse, conservation, and toward converting concrete channels back into natural streams.
“We seem to be moving toward capturing water and putting it into the ground instead of shunting it away as quickly as possible,” she said. “That’s encouraging. My watershed council has been working on that whole business, looking for ways to salvage storm water and get multiple benefits — built wetlands in the city, create parks, playgrounds and natural systems so we can educate people on how the world really works.”
Another one of Green’s organizations, the California Water Impact Network [CWIN], filed a formal complaint with the state board “asking them to hold hearings on all of these water issues that we’ve been talking about,” to find out who owns the water and how much they get, and get its impact on the environment on the record once and for all. “We’re asking them to hold not just ordinary hearings but hearings that are under oath with cross-examination and witnesses.
“That way,” Green hoped, “by requiring that they’re under oath, the facts will be more, well, factual. And if scientists are threatened with felony charges, or other charges — the scientists won’t be so readily for sale.”
Green continued, “We’re just raising the money to pay the legal fees without any expectation of getting them back, at least not directly. But then we build a record that has withstood cross-examination under oath. We find out what the truth is. The whole truth. Not bits and pieces of it.”
Flashing a smile, Green said, “The hearings will begin in November. We’re scoping it out. We’re excited about it.”
When she said “we,” I imagine she predicted she wouldn’t live to attend the hearings or see the results herself; she was already lamenting that she’d be unable to attend POWER (Public Officials for Water and Environmental Reform), the water-policy conference she initiated (she was scheduled to deliver its opening remarks on November 6). But that wasn’t so important: “We” in this case meant her colleagues at CWIN, and by extension anyone who cares about California and the natural world.
“We’ve got to find some way to get politics out of water,” Green said. “That’s the big issue. Let’s get the politics out of water.”
As our conversation wound down, I had to marvel at Green’s tenacity. So many people have a hard time staying motivated when they’re feeling just fine. She could barely stand up.
“How do you do it?” I asked her. “It’s so depressing to be an environmentalist right now. There’s so much bad news.”
“I agree,” she said. “But if we didn’t have hope about something, why bother being alive?
“You need to get the word out, and then you’ll feel better,” she advised me. “You just need to get the word out.”
