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“Abundance” is a concept in wide circulation among California water folks. Adel Hagekhalil, General Manager of Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, recently said Colorado River issues need to be addressed “from the lens of abundance… The future can’t be just all about cuts.” Governor Newsom is moving forward major water projects, including Sites Reservoir and the Delta Conveyance Project, and legislative and funding initiatives such as CA Water for All seek to commit the state to long-term abundant water supply strategies.
For background on this effort, Edward Ring‘s self-published The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022) is a useful, if one-sided, resource. Seeded by Ring’s own essays published by the California Globe and California Policy Center (which Ring co-founded) and updating a policy perspective championed by Congressmember Tom McClintock and author Steven Greenhut, The Abundance Choice lays out the thesis that California’s water issues can best be solved by immediate and sustained investments in infrastructure improvements — reservoirs, wastewater reuse, ocean desalination — rather than reductions in water use.
Ring’s book is as much a critique of what he sees as California’s conservation-based capitulation to water scarcity as it is an abundance manifesto. However, its greatest value is the Ring-side (sorry) description of his recent citizens’ initiative effort. Ring led the appropriately named “More Water Now” coalition that attempted unsuccessfully to place an initiative on the November 2022 ballot requiring 2% of the state’s general fund be invested to create 5 million acre-feet of new annual water supplies. The Abundance Choice chronicles the financial hurdles, opponents’ slings and arrows, and lessons learned from his attempt to give voters the last word — an attempt which may be repeated in 2024. Helpfully, he provides practical recommendations for future state initiative organizers based on his experience.
Some might be tempted to lump Ring’s exuberance for infrastructure with other huge concrete-based fantasies for solving the U.S.’s water woes, the greatest (and still most entertaining) being the North American Water and Power Alliance — a 1950s engineer’s wet dream of water development. In contrast, Ring often acknowledges the environmental, social, organizational, and regulatory realities of large-scale projects, even as he uses strong language to directly criticize the “hostile media,” “environmentalist-industrial complex,” “Lords of Scarcity,” “corrupt bureaucrats,” and “opportunistic oligarchs” standing in the way of reaching “sustainable abundance.”
Ring clearly has serious complaints to levy with a number of key sectors engaged in state water policy, especially the environmental community. Indeed, there are environmentalists who open themselves up to valid criticism for voicing extreme concerns without advocating for equally extreme solutions. That said, it seems that Ring could find common cause by both accepting the dire warnings of climate science and advocating for robust water supply infrastructure development, which he admits would need to be “socialized.” For example, both he and Peter Gleick, whom Ring dismisses as a “predictable” environmentalist, enjoy common cause in supporting aggressive wastewater recycling.
One of the book’s many strengths is its ability to describe in layperson’s terms the difficult, long-standing as well as more recent statewide water disputes, such as the north-south agricultural divide and its implications for the fate of the Delta tunnel. Another strength is Ring’s unique angle of criticism for what he calls the “elites,” namely major corporations seeking to profit off of unnecessary water scarcity.
Ring’s intervention helps inform California’s current water policy discussions about the future of statewide water development and management. What will be the balance between infrastructure investments needed to create additional supplies and the reduction of water demand through efficiency and overall conservation? Can we create an abundant supply for all current and future uses, or must we curtail these uses to fit within the constraints of an ever-scarcer and environmentally sustainable supply? Or is the answer somewhere in between, or all of the above?
Even those leaning a bit to the left of Ring’s ideological commitments will come away intrigued by his proposed voter initiative and its fate. We may also the threads of his thinking into the current and upcoming debate over the state’s water future, the supplies it will need to meet the efficient yet robust demands of a world-class economy. As California struggles to develop efficiency-based urban water use regulations and negotiates climate-based infrastructure bond proposals, now is a good time to review Ring’s insightful reflections. While two years may be a lifetime in politics, it is merely a blip in the long story of water in California. Ring may well be describing a prelude to a momentous year ahead that will be the subject of future books.
