By Jay Lund
“Rite” noun:
1. a religious or other solemn ceremony or act.
2. a social custom, practice, or conventional act.
California has complex and hallowed water rites. Here are some:
- Claim other water users are engaged in a “water grab” (when you grabbed it first).
- Correlative rite 1.1: Declare a “water war”.
- Insist climate change will require actions you wanted even without climate change.
- Blame water use by others for your water scarcity.
- Correlative rite 3.1: Insist that others stole your water.
- Correlative rite 3.2: Claim that your group’s water woes are caused by others.
- Insist California’s water rights are unfair, because you should get more.
- Insist that State or Federal authorities at some time in history promised you more water, and you want it now.
- Assert your water use has extraordinary importance to people and ecosystems, even if this is implausible.
- Expect impossible operational capabilities for water forecasters, modelers, and project operators.
- Correlative rite 7.1: Blame the CalSim model for being unable to justify your advocacy position.
- Insist on the “need” for State and Federal subsidies, but without regulations.
- Correlative rite 8.1: Ask for one-time state and federal money, into the indefinite future.
- Correlative rite 8.2: Ignore that water bond funds come largely from water ratepayer taxes and diminished state services to ratepayers.
- “Thirst in time, thirst in right.” Old industries have senior rights in water and land. New industries struggle with institutions established for older industries to gather needed land and water from older industries. The process can be slow, expensive, and awkward. Economic transitions from mining to agriculture to cities and their industries in the west have brought economic progress but also a long turbulent wake from awkward transitions.
Perhaps Western water rhetoric might become more concise by referring to these now-numbered rites.
About the Author
Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California – Davis.
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Jay — Nicely said and with your signature tongue & cheek humor. It would be instructive to craft Eight California Water Responsibilities — fashioned as the positive expressions of these “Rites” and “Correlaries” 🙃
Alas, the responsibilities that most stakeholders feel most acutely is to “Get what I can”. Fortunately many stakeholders also see a need for some higher responsibilities. California’s water system benefits from being a giant cooperative game where all are rewarded by many benefits from cooperation, but suffers from the non-cooperative games of trying to maximize individual stakeholder shares from the gains of cooperation. This seems to be the historical and likely future structure of California water, with important variants locally and changing back and forth over time. Some humor helps with cooperation and might sometimes nudge us away from pure conflicts.
Pingback: Response to Jay Lund’s “Nine California Water Rites” – California Water Research
But are stakeholders expecting “impossible operational capabilities” of DWR’s water forecasters, modelers, and project operators?
I don’t think so. But stakeholder do need DWR to incorporate 21st Century climate shifts into climate modeling. More here:
https://cah2oresearch.com/2025/12/01/response-to-jay-lunds-nine-california-water-rites/