Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education最新文献

Federal government agencies’ responsibilities for national water resources management grew rapidly in the 20^th century, along with the budget to execute those responsibilities. In most places today, river flows are the result of rainfall and runoff, as well as the presence of the water development projects of these agencies. Meanwhile in the nation’s watersheds, demands on water resources are changing along with changes in rainfall and runoff volume and patterns, suggesting the possible need for new investments and different management of the investments currently in place. However, by historical standards, there has been a radical reduction in the Federal roles and budgetary commitment to river management. This diminished Federal role has resulted from competing water management visions that I will refer to as “old water conservation,” “new water conservation,” and “watershed restoration.” Old water conservation is where I begin.

Throughout the nation’s first 200 years, engineering works (i.e., infrastructure) were supposed to remove the tails from the hydrograph – that is remove natural variation in river flows – promoting material prosperity and general social well-being. In 1934, the National Resources Planning Board declared¹,

In 1963, when dedicating the Whiskeytown Dam on the Trinity River in California, President Kennedy concluded his remarks by endorsing the old water conservation vision, as follows:

A drawing of an ideally managed large river basin in the 1950 Truman administration’s report on water resources has an illustration of the old water conservation. In the upper reaches of the smaller watersheds, cover crops and reforestation on eroded soils slow runoff and control erosion. Downstream, small dams are combined with diversion channels and other conveyance facilities to move water to irrigated farm fields and small communities. Previously wet areas are drained by small ditches leading to larger canals, with the drained land dedicated to cities and farms. On the larger rivers, dams create reservoirs to store water, while levees along the river edges and deepened river channels limit flooding of fertile soils. Cities are located adjacent to flood-protected rivers, and their manufacturing and other commercial facilities along the river edge are served by ports and barge terminals. The water stored in reservoirs irrigates agricultural fields, generates electric power, and provides for other water uses in dry times.

This grand vision of the ideally managed river basin was to be executed by Federal construction of levees, channels, dams, and reservoirs paid for by the Federal taxpayer. The Federal efforts were accompanied by state and local governments building water supply reservoirs, pipes, and open canals and transferring that stored water over long distances. This national investment in advancing the old water conservation vision transformed a natural water supply that

Both sides of the political spectrum now use deception and misinformation to argue their philosophical positions on environmental harm, present and future. And both use common logical fallacies to enhance their views: cherrypicking (selecting data fitting their preconceived outcome); hasty generalization (suggesting conclusions from a small set of data implies the same conclusion elsewhere); and ad hominem (personal attacks on the ethics, funding, or perceived associations of those having different views).

Beyond these long-known logical fallacies, the public debate of science includes outright lies, “fake and alternative facts,” and “feel good facts” information or ideas that feel like they should be true but are not. Real facts consist of information that can be reproduced by anyone with the same skills. How many people showed up at President Obama and President Trump’s inaugurations? This information can be found in the public record through photographs made by the U.S. Park Service and those made independently by others.

How do scientists change the conversation to allow for measured civil discourse to solving the large environmental challenges of the future? The fakery in public debate usually starts with the cherrypicking and then moves to never setting a bar for collective agreement. If these approaches fail to win the day, the ad hominem attacks begin and invocation of conspiracy theories which appeal to public ignorance (another fallacy). I became subject to these tactics in debate over hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) used to obtain oil and natural gas out of solid rock. I even wrote a paper on what happened to me when the dust settled (Siegel 2015).

Briefly, I challenged the premise of a published paper that concluded groundwater quality in northeastern Pennsylvania could be broadly contaminated by fracking. The paper used flawed statistics and a non-random small data set. I gained access to chemical analyses of groundwater from more than ten thousand water wells in the same area and showed that no broad environmental harm had in fact occurred. Indeed, groundwater quality in that part of Pennsylvania has actually improved since fracking, although this improvement did not relate to fracking (Wen et al. 2019).

Some of those who philosophically felt fracking should cause harm to groundwater (for them, a “feel good fact”), could not dispute the science since I effectively used the entire population of water wells. So, they attacked me ad hominen and suggested I participated in a conspiracy with the hydrocarbon industry. I ultimately testified at a Congressional hearing over the matter. You can find all the references and pertinent URLS to my unpleasant experience in Siegel (2015).

I see similar discourse happening to scientists across disciplines in almost every part of the environmental sphere. Soc

We are pleased to introduce a new feature of the Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education: Perspective Pieces. We invited experts in the water arena to give us their perspectives on a water issue near and dear to them. In this issue, Dr. Len Shabman, Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, shares his thoughts on the federal role in river management and the need to reframe the discussion. Dr. Don Siegel, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at Syracuse University, offers us some thought provoking insights on the current state of public discourse on environmental issues. Perspective pieces were a hallmark of our journal since its inception as Water Resources Update in 1964 and our editorial team wanted to reemphasize this feature in 2019 after a long absence. So, please enjoy Dr. Shabman’s and Dr. Siegel’s pieces and we invite you to consider sharing your perspectives on an important water issue with our readership. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Karl W.J. Williard and Jackie F. Crim

Co-Editors, Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education

Managing water resources is becoming increasingly difficult as demographic, economic, institutional, technological, and climate changes manifest across the U.S. and around the world (Cosgrove and Louchs 2015). These extraordinarily complex water quality and quantity challenges facing water resource management are “wicked problems” (Gold et al. 2013). Wicked problems - those that are difficult to resolve because of complexity, uncertainty, and divergence and fragmentation in viewpoints, values, and intentions (Rittel and Webber 1973; Head 2008) - arise in numerous resource management contexts. The act of simply trying to define the problem illustrates the level of difficulty associated with resolution. For example, multiple perspectives on an issue, the level to which numerous social and natural systems are connected, and the overwhelming number of potential fixes that need to be understood to clearly define the issue make water management a wicked problem.

Historically, water problems have been regarded as requiring engineering or technological fixes. However, because most water problems are largely the result of human activity (Schultz 2011; Rockström et al. 2014), it is the social - not technical - complexity of these problems that overwhelms water management. Social factors (e.g., equity, water rights, norms, attitudes, values, beliefs, etc.) are often the primary determinants of management success or failure (Mascia et al. 2003; Floress et al. 2015). Thus, the resolution or mitigation of wicked water problems requires interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly from the social sciences, to foster new thinking, behavior, and innovative ideas for management of water resources under conditions of rapid change and uncertainty (Jury and Vaux 2005).

Despite the social complexity of water challenges, most people working in water resource management are trained in the bio-physical sciences, in turn limiting access to knowledge that could be gained from social sciences (Floress et al. 2015). Water resource professionals and the staffs of myriad water-related agencies tend to have backgrounds in engineering, hydrology, ecology, aquatic sciences, and so on. Thus, agencies and organizations may not have the necessary skills to effectively address the human dimensions of water resource management (Sexton et al. 2013). Many lack the capacity to deal with the social complexity and interdependencies of current water resource management. “The management of water resources is currently undergoing a paradigm shift toward a more integrated and participatory management style” (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007, p. 1) in order to address “complex interdependencies, human behavior and social institutions” (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2012, p. 25). Future water management will require new and cont