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In this episode of Imagine If, Victoria Riskin sits down with environmental law professor James Salzman to unpack the hidden realities of water in America — from groundwater depletion and bottled water myths to outdated water laws and the future of the Colorado River.
They discuss:
- Why only a small percentage of Earth’s freshwater is easily accessible
- How agriculture uses roughly 80% of water in the U.S.
- The truth about bottled water vs. tap water
- Why almonds became the “bad nut” in water conversations
- How climate change is reshaping water scarcity
- The surprising history behind Western water rights
- Why we should think like “water citizens,” not just water consumers
James also shares insights from his book Mine! and the fascinating psychology behind ownership, scarcity, and human behavior.
About James Salzman
James Salzman is a world-renowned environmental law professor with joint appointments at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. An honors graduate of Yale and Harvard, he is one of the most widely read scholars in his field, with work translated into 10 languages. He has served as an advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency on drinking water issues and authored bestselling books, including Drinking Water: A History and Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives.
Meet the Hosts:
Victoria Riskin: I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
Transcript
Victoria Riskin: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Bluedot Living Imagine If podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, and I am unbelievably thrilled today to have James Salzman, who's one of the most widely read environmental law professors, with 13 books. You've written over 120 articles that have been translated into many languages. You teach law at UCLA, and you're at the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara, Columbia, Stanford, Yale.
You've taught at Harvard for many years. You've been an advisor to the EPA on drinking water issues. Are you not embarrassed by how popular you are and how successful you are?
James Salzman: It makes my mom very proud.
Victoria Riskin: I was just doing kind of a visual on water in the sense of imagining myself looking at the planet from outer space, and how much water is on the little Earth, how much of that water is drinkable?
James Salzman: Imagine you're a space alien, okay? And you're approaching this third rock from the sun. So the first thing you're going to be surprised to hear is that it's called Earth, because it should be called water. There's a lot more water on this orb than there is land.
But what you realize as you start looking closer is, first of all, most of the water you can see people can't use, right, because it's saltwater. And the fresh water that you do see is not water you can use. The water you can see from outer space either is clouds or is locked up in the ice caps as ice. It turns out where most of the fresh water is you can't see either, because most of the fresh water on Earth is underground, apart from the ice caps, and so roughly about 1% of the fresh water on Earth is easy for us to get to. It's on the surface.
Victoria Riskin: So that's the water we need to survive, right? It's the drinking water, the bathing water.
James Salzman: Yeah, NASA sends a probe to Mars, and what are they looking for? They're looking for water.
Victoria Riskin: We could just stop right there. That is sort of scary. So here we are using water up in big gulps, so to speak, and are we beginning to realize that we are depleting something that we need to survive, do you think?
James Salzman: So when you talk about water, water is very different from climate in the sense that water is really place-specific. If you emit greenhouse gases, it doesn't matter where you're located.
Those gases are going to mix in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Where you get your water from matters a lot. And so when you're talking about water, it's very important: Are you talking about in a water-scarce area or in a water-plenty area? And we'll talk about it later with climate change, but in a sense, water policy deals with either too much water or too little.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
James Salzman: And that's going to depend very much on where you are. So your question was, are we running out?
Victoria Riskin: All right. Well, then maybe I could put our lens on the United States of America. Where do we have to worry about the depletion of water, and where is there enough water?
James Salzman: Let me break it down a little bit because how we use water matters a lot. So your listeners may be surprised to know, we can put bricks in toilets and take shorter showers. It turns out that about 80% of the water consumed in the United States is agriculture.
Household use is actually quite small in drinking water, which is what a lot of people care about. That's literally a drop in the bucket in terms of overall water consumption. Where we're running out of water is more really a case for agriculture than it is for cities, because drinking water is the last thing that we'll lose because it's so important. A few big areas we need to be concerned about: In the Great Plains, the Ogallala Aquifer, largest aquifer in the United States, that's dropping quickly. In California, the Central Valley, the most productive and wealthiest in terms of crops farming area in the world.
About half of America's fruits and nuts come from California. They're depleting the groundwater there. Surface water, the Colorado, is super important for the southwestern United States. Interestingly, now in parts of the East Coast because of climate change, water scarcity is an issue. You're seeing it in Martha's Vineyard from time to time.
That never used to be an issue. And so it really is very place-based; you have to be concerned about it. Michigan's doing fine.
Victoria Riskin: Hmm. So in California people say, “Well, should I be eating nuts because they consume so much water?” You know, it's not like the consumer really has much sophistication about these things. So how should we think about that?
James Salzman: So the almond just keeps getting beaten as the bad nut. It's complicated, right? So almonds do take a lot of water, but you know, lettuce takes a lot of water as well. The key thing about almonds is that, the phrase that folks in the water world use, they talk about hardened demand. And what they mean by that is pistachios, almonds, basically fruits and vegetables that we get from trees.
Victoria Riskin: Mm-hmm.
James Salzman: If you're having a dry season, you know, maybe you don't grow tomatoes this year, maybe you don't grow lettuce this year. You can't not grow almonds this year. The trees will all die.
Victoria Riskin: Oh.
James Salzman: Right? Because they're trees, right? You can't rotate crops. And so, as a result, it hardens demand, which means that it's high consumption, and it's high consumption every year. Now, are almonds a particularly bad thing to grow? It's complicated because almonds are very high value. And so if what you're measuring is economic value per gallon of water, almonds actually do pretty well.
Farmers are very smart, very savvy, right? These are major, major international businesses. They're very sophisticated, and they figure out basically how to optimize the value per gallon used. Here's where things, though, get tricky, and this is something that your listeners should understand for why our water policy is so, so screwed up in America, is that in the western United States, most of the water that is used is what's called prior appropriation.
So this is a rule, a law for how you get water. It came out of the mining camps in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s. The rule that we have in America from the original colonies, they brought over their water law from England. And that water law basically was called riparian. And what it means is if you live alongside a river or a lake, you get to use that water to a reasonable amount.
If you're not living next to it, then you can't use it. Fast-forward to the mining camps. They're basically using these incredibly powerful hoses called hydraulic mining to basically get slurries from the foothills to run through the sluices to get the gold and such. Where they're doing the mining is not near rivers or lakes.
They've got to move the water long distances, and so riparianism won't work. And so they develop a totally new body of law called prior appropriation. It's called first in time, first in right. And so the first party to divert water from a stream or a river, put it to beneficial use and not waste it, they've locked in a water right, and they keep it.
And there's also a doctrine, it's called use it or lose it. If they use less water over a period of time, then their water rights are decreased.
The problem is that we now have this system in the West. We've got some users who were there early who have enormous water rights, and they get it for free. And there's no incentive to use it efficiently. So get ready for this. This is one of the facts that's going to shock you: 20% of the water rights to the Colorado River are held by the Imperial Irrigation District. This is an area in the southeastern part of California, and they're growing cotton, they're growing alfalfa. They're growing incredibly low-value crops because they can. The market is not disciplining them to basically put the water to the most efficient use.
They're getting this huge amount of water for free, and so they grow hay and such, but they ship it to water-scarce countries like China and Saudi Arabia. It's called water exports, water footprint. And so those countries very cleverly are saying, “We're not going to waste our water growing these low-value crops. We'll buy them from other countries.”
Victoria Riskin: Well, then what are we going to do about that? That doesn't make sense anymore, does it?
James Salzman: If it ever made sense. It doesn't, but these people now have property rights and they're going to defend them, and the Constitution will defend it. And so ultimately, what's going to have to happen, if they have senior rights, which a lot of these growers do, they're going to have to be bought out.
Victoria Riskin: Are there new irrigation technologies that are helping conserve water? I hear a lot about water, waste of water, water runoff from farmers. Can you talk about that a little bit?
James Salzman: Yeah, sure. Actually, a lot of it's developed by Israel. Because basically, they make the desert bloom. The most important one has been microdosing or drip irrigation, where instead of having sort of irrigation furrows — you just grow stuff between the furrows, that's drip irrigation, right? You run it for a period of time, and you place it exactly where you want to put it. You can be even more water-efficient and actually put some of them underground, so you're not getting any evaporation. People need to realize that the farmers who have to pay for their water, they're very efficient.
The problem is you have these enormous distortions where, either because of prior appropriation, they get this water for free, or until very recently, groundwater, they would just pump it up and use it for free as well. And so there was no incentive to conserve. So during the great drought in California from 2008 to 2015, farmers made record profits.
Now, the downside is they were pumping the Central Valley Aquifer, and so the water level kept dropping. And that's obviously not a long-term strategy. And so something called SGMA, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, was passed, and it's the single most important piece of water law in 100 years.
And basically what it says is the major areas under risk, the major aquifers, groundwater areas at risk in California have to come up with plans that are going to make the groundwater sustainable by 2040.
Victoria Riskin: So at a moment where we're all feeling very cynical about the political process, there was a crisis and people came together and at least came up with a possible solution. Should we just make a note of that?
James Salzman: There's a phrase I'm sure you've heard, which is, “Don't let a crisis go to waste.”
Victoria Riskin: That's right. Or don't let the water drain off or whatever.
James Salzman: Mark Twain famously said that whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting.
Victoria Riskin: Well, dive into that just for, not to make a pun, could you dive into that water just a little bit?
James Salzman: Yeah. So the Colorado River is in itself actually not a very impressive river. It's about one-thirtieth the flow of the Mississippi, but it is the most fought over, most litigated river in the world. And the reason is because it is the only major river system in the American Southwest. And so you take away the Colorado River, you don't get Los Angeles, you don't get a lot of the sort of growth that's happened.
The difficulty, as I mentioned before with the Ogallala, is you have seven different states that are able to pull from Colorado. And so in 1922, these states got together, and they developed something called the Colorado Compact. And it basically says the upper basin states agree to what's called a delivery obligation. So they will not deplete from the river such that 75 million acre feet can go to the lower basin states.
The problem with this approach is that when they made this deal, they didn't know this, but the period that they were negotiating in was hydrologically the highest the Colorado River had been for centuries.
And so turns out, 50 years later, it goes back much lower.
And so they essentially over-allocated the river. It's a very complicated story, but the bottom line is that California gets the lion's share of the water coming out. Arizona gets less. The problem is the Colorado River amounts keep dropping. This year is a record low snowfall, and so it's going to be even less.
And so the upper basin states and lower basin states are fighting over how much water the upper basin has to deliver to the lower basin, and how much the lower basin can use. The level of Lake Mead is kind of the trigger for all these things, and it's approaching a level that's called “dead pool,” which is a mediocre movie and a bad name for a garage band.
And essentially what that means is that once… actually, do you have any idea what dead pool is referring to? It's kind of cool.
Victoria Riskin: Can I guess? Can I guess? Give me one guess. When it gets very low, they see the dead bodies in the bottom.
James Salzman: It does have to get that low to see the dead bodies actually, because they're just tossing them. Vegas is nearby. They actually found some cars in there as well. No, dead pool refers to the level at which it can't get into the intake pipes.
Victoria Riskin: Oh.
James Salzman: Mead then becomes a bathtub, and that's very, very bad. You don't want that.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
James Salzman: Essentially, the challenge is, how do you keep enough water in the river so you don't get the dead pool? No one knows because right now the states have been kicking the can down the road. They've been negotiating. They don't like each other. Arizona hates California when it comes to water.
Victoria Riskin: Wow. So Arizona is very busy. Phoenix is very busy building data centers that use a lot of water. Tell me how that makes sense.
James Salzman: Well, that's complicated too. So it turns out that data centers don't just suck water out of the river or something. Data centers have to use treated water to cool things down.
Victoria Riskin: All the energy. Yeah.
James Salzman: Right. So one of the key questions is where is that water going? So if you're in a water-scarce area, data centers, if you're using water to cool it, especially in the desert, right? That's an issue. But a big question is: Where is the water going? The other big issue is data centers, essentially with water, are competing with other water users within a utility.
So one of the key problems with data centers and water that people don't talk about enough is they're getting these sweetheart deals in terms of how much they're paying. And so if the utility has to somehow increase the amount of water that they're providing, it's the normal rate-payers who are paying for that.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. I understand they're using gray water. They're grabbing whatever they can, which is I guess the best that they can do. They're trying to create another Silicon Valley there. So, competing interests. I have to ask you about a couple of other things. One is there's an obsession in this country with bottled water, plastic bottles you get. And please help me understand, do we in this country need bottled water, or can we just drink water out of the tap?
James Salzman: Well, you say need, whatever you mean.
Victoria Riskin: I mean, it's like, first of all, all these plastic bottles that pile up and also create microplastics in the body. But is most drinking water safe? Of course, again, it probably matters where you're talking about, but in general and then in specific.
James Salzman: So this is a really important point. I want to be as clear as I can, OK? There's good reason to think that tap water is actually safer than bottled water. OK, why is that? That's the case because tap water is regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. If the bottled water is just in state, then it's up to the state to regulate it. When I wrote my book, Massachusetts had one and a half people in the entire state who were looking after bottled water within the state.
So, if there's a reason to be concerned about your tap water, then for sure. But one of the greatest, I think, miracles of America is I can drink tap water safely anywhere in the country. Flint is a tragedy, right? There's no question about that. And that failed on multiple levels.
That's unusual, right? Everyone that's listening to this in the States, you can get water quality reports daily if you want. In most places of any size, the water is tested multiple times a day. Unless you have some specific reason to think that your tap water is unsafe, then drinking bottled water for safety, I think you're wasting money.
Now, for convenience, that's a different issue. So you know, when I was growing up in the 1970s, if I had gone to a gas station and said, “Can I have some water?” They would have pointed me to a hose that they used to fill their radiator, right? The idea of selling water, I mean, what a ridiculously stupid idea.
It wasn't a market before the 1970s. It's a market because Perrier basically has a massive PR campaign in the late '70s that coincides with the aerobics and fitness craze and all of a sudden becomes this sort of chic thing.
And then Coke and Nestle and Pepsi get into the game with Aquafina and Dasani and Pure Life, and they basically put the bottled water, which is a huge profit margin, alongside Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke. It's just another thing.
Victoria Riskin: And where do they get their water? They just get it out of the spigot like I do? Where's the water?
James Salzman: Do you believe in Santa Claus? So they're getting their water from the same spigot that you are. Then they run it through filters. But you don't want to drink water that's close to distilled water. If you've ever done it, it dries out your mouth. So what they do in the industry, they call it pixie dust. They add minerals back into the water. Most bottled waters will show the images of mountains.
Victoria Riskin: Right. The Himalayas.
James Salzman: I got news for you, sister. Stuff that you're drinking in the Vineyard's coming likely from Ayer, Massachusetts, far from the Rockies.
Victoria Riskin: And there's this whole new issue of microplastics. The bottled water sits in my car on a nice hot day, and that leaches from the plastic and gets in, and I'm just drinking lovely microplastics.
James Salzman: Yeah, so microplastics are a big concern at the moment, and it's an issue where frankly, we know a lot more about monitoring than about health. In the sense there's not good data for whether ingesting microplastics actually is bad for you or not. It's hard to imagine it's good for you. But whether it merits the sort of major health scares is really unclear at the moment.
Victoria Riskin: I did a review of a movie called Plastic Detox, and there's an endocrinologist in New York who says that those microplastics can interfere with the endocrine system.
James Salzman: It's unknown. Doesn't mean that it's safe, right? But it also doesn't mean that you should tear your hair out.
Victoria Riskin: Right. And why do it if you don't have to? Why spend the money?
James Salzman: One thing I do say when I give these talks about drinking water is if you're concerned about health, in my view, what you eat has a lot more impact on your health than the water you're drinking.
Victoria Riskin: What foods are drought-tolerant? Do you have any insight into — here we are helping people think about what kind of food they eat — whether it's healthy for the earth, where it comes from. So are there particular foods?
James Salzman: I want to push back on the question because I think it's misguided, and it's misguided in the sense…well, it's misguided in the sense that a lot of food is grown in places where water's not scarce, and so you're not doing the Earth a favor if all you do is eat drought-tolerant foods if the food's being grown in a place where there's plenty of water.
Victoria Riskin: Good point.
James Salzman: So for instance, you know with the carbon labels, right? What's the carbon footprint of the product? A water footprint's not helpful. So if you look at the water footprint for breakfast foods, right? It turns out chicken uses a lot of water. Bananas use a lot of water.
It doesn't mean you feel guilty if you have chicken sausage and bananas for breakfast. If you were to have meaningful water labeling, it wouldn't simply be the amount of water, the sort of water footprint to produce it. Did it come from a water-scarce region or a water-plentiful region? If it's a water-plentiful region, knock yourself out. It's just not an issue.
Victoria Riskin: Mm-hmm. OK, fair. That's a really important question. Tell me about the book, because I hope people just go out and read it. And it's not about sustainability, it's not about food, it's not about water, it's about human nature in such a fundamental way.
James Salzman: Mine basically is an insight into the different ways that we own things. I mean, there's a reason “mine” is one of the first words that infants speak, babies speak all over the world, right? And it basically focuses on the question of who gets what and why.
So let me just give you a simple example that we've all dealt with. You're on an airplane, right? You put down the tray table, you start working on your laptop, and the person in front of you reclines their seat, and you're furious. And the question is, who owns that wedge of space? So you say, “It's mine because I was there first, and I'm occupying it.” The person in front of you says, “It's mine because I have this button, and the button gives me control over the wedge of space that's attached to my seat.” And you complain to the airline, and they say, “Work it out,” even though they're the ones that created the problem in the first place because they've reduced the amount of space between seats.
So, you know, when you and I were flying years ago, no one used to fight over reclining airline seats. A, there was enough space. It's called pitch. There was enough space between the seats, and you didn't need the space, right? Now it's basically used for your entertainment system and everything. You were just eating rubber chicken before.
But the way we sort of navigate the world of ownership, the world of “mine,” is we tell competing stories, and there's no single story that explains it. And it turns out there are just six of them. So an example I gave, let's say I'm the person sitting in front of you.
You say, first possession, first come, first served. I was using this space first. You're saying, current possession. Possession's nine-tenths of the law. Those are your two stories. My story is about attachment. Basically, the space behind the seat is attached to the back of the seat, and I control that with my button.
But realize, this translates into some of the most important issues of our time. So for instance, who owns your click trail? Internet companies all the time are tracking all types of things you do on the internet, right? They're leaning their virtual seat into your lap and taking things, claiming that. But you could push back and say, use a different story, which is to say it’s personal, it's part of me. What I do is part of who I am. I should own that. Their story is labor. We put in the time to build this cool website, and so if you leave information, cookies on the way, we're going to pick them up.
And the key thing is there's never a single correct story. And so what the book does is basically it takes all these different examples, as much as you can imagine, and some of the stories are about water and the environment. A lot of that is mine. And once you can understand what the stories are that are competing, things become much clearer all of a sudden.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. Just take one minute and talk about the parking space in Boston.
James Salzman: Yeah, and Pittsburgh, too. So basically, these are places that have heavy snow. And you go out there, you dig out your car, and you're about to go to work, and you think, “Oh, here's a problem,” right? Because I've put in all this work, and as soon as I pull out, some jerk is going to pull in when I get back tonight.
I've got to dig out another space. And so in Pittsburgh, they call it a parking chair. In Boston and Southie is where it's most common. It's not a chair. You can put out a pylon — we read one story of someone putting out a cereal box — and essentially what you're doing is you're marking. It's like a dog.
You're marking your scent. And how is it enforced? It's enforced that if someone comes in and they don't know, they take it, their car gets keyed. There are examples of windows being broken. And in Southie, it was a big issue because certain areas are gentrifying. And [there are] folks who don't know the rules, right?
You got to know the rules or they come in. So it's been a lot of back and forth, and the city finally said, “You can use a parking chair, but only for up to three days.” Good luck, good luck enforcing that.
Victoria Riskin: Oh my gosh. It brings back memories of my grandfather bringing me a toy. See, I even said it that way, bringing a toy that my brother and I were supposed to share, and he was sure it was his, and I said, “No, it's mine.”
And I never… I was so unhappy about the whole incident because it meant my grandfather was insensitive just to give us one toy to share in one way, and my brother for being so grabby, and we've never gotten over it.
James Salzman: You were in the right, so it's difficult, right?
Victoria Riskin: Of course I was. Of course I was. Generally, we close each podcast with the following question. We call the podcast Imagine If, and it leaves it open for people to think about what they would imagine if the future or if things could be better or different. And we just make it a blank slate for you to fill in. Would you be willing to do that?
James Salzman: Yeah, sure. What I would say is I can imagine a world where people really have an understanding and care about where their water comes from and how water is being used.
Water is very much an invisible resource. We just don't think about it. We just turn on the tap, and we assume clean water's going to be there. We get our food, and we just assume that it's grown, no problem with water. That's not the case. You really need to focus on water quality, water quantity.
And people think too much as water consumers, and not water citizens. Imagine if we can get people to think more as water citizens and say, “No, it's important to us as a public good, as something we care about, we want to leave for future generations,” to really focus on how we manage water and to realize the systems we put in place made sense 150 years ago.
Oftentimes people talk about water. We have 21st century problems, 20th century technology, 19th century laws, and that needs to change. So I like to imagine, what if all of those were in the 21st century?
Victoria Riskin: Thinking about the bigger picture and the needs of the community and how we can learn to share.
James Salzman: It's not easy.
Victoria Riskin: No, but I would add that it's easier to share when there's enough.
James Salzman: Sure, of course.
Victoria Riskin: And when there's not enough space between yourself and the person in front of you, or enough parking places in Boston, or enough water? Whatever it is.
And if we know there's enough, if we think about it and we can just sleep at night because there's enough, then we could perhaps have a better policy. I'm so grateful that you spent some time with me today. It's wonderful. I always learn so much, and we hope to put this into some kind of application as we think about this pale blue dot.
James Salzman: Yeah, and I have to say, I admire what you've built. I remember we were chatting over your table a few years ago talking about your Bluedot, and I was thinking, “Wow, if anyone can, she can,” but boy, that's ambitious, and you've achieved it, so kudos to you.
Victoria Riskin: Thank you so much. And my imagine if is, what if everybody took care of this pale blue dot and had enough? That's a big, big imagine if. But anyway, see you soon, and thank you for spending time with me. I really appreciate it.
