California is finally embracing its rivers. But it may be a choking embrace.

We Californians have long celebrated our coastal splendor and toasted the height and beauty of our mountains. But our rivers? For most of us, they have been a mere utility, the plumbing that moved water around the state.

Today in the Golden State, its regions and its people are at long last taking the advice of the late environmentalist David Brower, who counseled his fellow Californians to “begin thinking like a river,” and fulfilling the eternal Christmas dream of Joni Mitchell: “I wish I had a river.”

California’s crowded communities, seeking space for environmental restoration and recreation (and some desperately needed housing), are treating rivers and riverfronts as new frontiers, and are busily reconsidering how these bodies of water might better connect people and places.

There is good and bad to California’s belated appreciation of even its lesser-known rivers, from the Klamath in the north to the San Diego in the south. A massive state bond passed in 2014 offers billions for water-related projects, and the state’s epic drought is inspiring imaginative thinking about our waterways.

But the new thinking is also opening up broad new conflicts that go beyond the famously difficult issue of water. So many California places now are making so many plans for so many rivers that we may have to ask just how much change our rivers can handle.

Some of these conflicts are bigger, updated versions of older battles. The so-called California Water Fix—Governor Brown’s much-touted plan to build two tunnels under the Bay Delta—is really just another chapter in a decades-long battle over how the state manages its longest and most important river, the 445-mile Sacramento. The tunnels would reroute water from the Sacramento, which otherwise would go into the Delta, to the south, in the name of creating a more predictable, if not larger water supply for the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.

The newer—and, potentially, nastier fight—involves the river that, with the Sacramento, helps form the Delta: the overtaxed San Joaquin. New efforts by the state to help restore fish and wildlife species by leaving more water in the San Joaquin and its vital tributaries—the Merced, Tuolumne and Stanislaus—represent perhaps the signature battle in this new era of river appreciation.

The environmental advocacy group American Rivers has called the San Joaquin “the hardest working river in California” with good reason. The river and its tributaries are part of the landscape of Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks, support abundant wildlife and a Pacific salmon fishery, supply some of the world’s most productive agriculture, power four million homes, provide recreation from whitewater paddling to waterfowl hunting, and deliver drinking water to 25 million Californians.

But the state wants the river to restore species too, and those who rely on the river say that is too much to ask. San Francisco officials argue that the state plan could force their city to ration water. San Joaquin Valley officials have all but declared war on the state proposal, exposing uncertainties in the state’s predictions about fish populations and demonstrating that the state has underestimated the economic consequences of its approach.

“With substantially less water, jobs will disappear, land values will fall and less will be collected in taxes,” wrote the Modesto Bee’s Mike Dunbar early this year in a withering critique of the plan. “A congressional report already calls us the Appalachia of the West; with less water, we could be the Sahara.”

Such fighting over water in California, while hard, can be easier than making peace. Farmers, ranchers, anglers, environmentalists, Indian tribes, and other stakeholders in the far north of California (and southern Oregon) negotiated agreements to restore the Klamath River basin by sharing water and removing some dams. But the deals required the agreement of Congress, which can’t agree on anything. Now the players are trying to move forward by themselves with certain aspects of the agreements.

At the same time, the Klamath and other northern rivers face new demands upon their waters, from the state’s fastest-growing industry: marijuana. Some cannabis growers have been drawing on water from the river—and letting waste end up in it illegally. The problem has gotten significant notice along Trinity and Humboldt county’s Mad River and nearby creeks, and the fight between two factions of greens—marijuana “trimmers” and environmentalists—has joined the bigger debate about the future of the northern-most part of the state.

In Los Angeles, a big, complicated debate has erupted over competing plans to restore the L.A. River, the famous concrete flood control channel. Many Angelenos see a beautified, renewed river as the spine of nothing less than a new L.A. with new open space, denser housing, and more amenities for pedestrians, bicyclists and, on the river, boaters. But now that big money is on the table for river restoration, there are growing clashes between the river’s elite and grassroots champions over control.

Rivers are a bigger part of the conversation elsewhere in urban Southern California. Ventura County’s tight development restrictions have allowed for restoration of the Santa Clara River, the closest thing Southern California has to a wild river, but parts of the river remain attractive for development. The 96-mile-long Santa Ana River, which runs from near Big Bear all the way to Huntington Beach, is a hot topic in three counties—Riverside, San Bernardino, and Orange—inspiring plans for parks, bike and equestrian trails, and riverfront economic development. Further south, San Diego has adopted a plan for a parkway along the length of the San Diego River, and efforts are well underway to make it a reality.

That I’ve gotten this far without mentioning perhaps the most endangered and contested river in America—the Colorado—is testament to just how river-crazy we’ve become. Drought and climate change are crushing the Colorado, which already has been deeply diverted by agriculture, as well as Los Angeles, San Diego, and other cities of the West. Development and industry still have plans for the river, and Mexico would prefer that the river not dry up before it reaches the Gulf of California.

Of course, all California’s river dreams and duels could be roiled by the currents of the Potomac. Among his many outlandish campaign pronouncements, President-elect Donald Trump bizarrely denied that California is actually in a drought, while promising farmers quantities of water that defy all laws of nature.

I suppose we’ll just have to cross that particular river when we come to it.

The post How Much Can California Ask of Its Rivers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If California is going to transition successfully to full legalization of cannabis, our state is going to need its own cartel.

For the record (and to reassure my friends in federal law enforcement), I am not smoking anything. And I am not suggesting that California encourage a criminal syndicate like the Zetas or the Sinaloa Cartel for weed. The California cartel actually would need to be a legal corporate oligopoly. The cartel members would be a small number of companies with the size and resources necessary to control the distribution of cannabis so that our state can properly track, regulate, price, and tax America’s largest marijuana market.

Yes, oligopolies have their drawbacks. But without a powerful force to wrangle the many motley cannabis players who operate in remote corners of the state, California marijuana could quickly spawn yet another convoluted unaccountable regulatory mess for which our state is famous.

A new market, like the one California needs to develop for cannabis, must be carefully designed. But the early attempts to design regulation around cannabis are worrying.

For starters, instead of designing one system to cover all forms of cannabis, regulation is moving right now on two separate tracts. Regulatory work is underway on a new system for medical marijuana, which has been largely unregulated at the state level since it was made legal in 1996. At the same time, voters are considering whether to approve Prop 64, which legalizes, and proposes regulation of, marijuana’s recreational use.

Hopefully, the two would be combined into a single regulatory system with Prop 64. But even then, things might get convoluted. Prop 64, at 62 pages, is the longest initiative on the November ballot. And it outlines so many different priorities and rules, from protecting everyone from children to today’s outlaw growers, that a regulatory system based on them would be highly complicated and difficult to manage.

How to bring order to the potential chaos? A cartel is by far the best answer.

For one thing, it’s proven. Alcohol has worked this way since the end of Prohibition; it’s managed by a three-tier system, with a middle tier of powerful distributors connecting a diverse array of brewers with all the various places that sell beer. For another, having a big centralized cartel makes it possible to protect the existing small growers and small marijuana retailers. Some larger entity is needed to connect them, and to do many costly time-consuming things — transporting the product, keeping it fresh, bearing the brunt of regulatory compliance and taxation — that smaller players can’t easily do themselves.

Having a powerful distributing cartel, as with alcohol, allows for ownership and accountability in the system. The cartel must buy the product from the growers, and thus provide a check on supplies and quality and licensing. And the cartel then must sell to the retailer, thus providing a check on the amounts of sales, and the quality of the product sold. And by tying together the system, they provide the natural vehicle for taxing all three tiers of the system—the suppliers, the distributors themselves, and the retailers.

The cartel has another important role: Keeping the price high enough to protect small players. Without a choke point in the industry, legalization of recreational cannabis in California will likely produce a big drop in price. That’s because demand is unlikely to spike after legalization; most of those who use cannabis in large amounts already have access to it, via medical marijuana and the ubiquity of the black market. But legalization is all but certain to increase supplies significantly, as growers can move out of the shadows, expand their operations and thus make their once illegal businesses vastly more productive.

That combination—a big increase in supply, while demand stays relatively flat —could produce a dangerous drop in prices. Such a price drop might encourage more people, particularly young people, to use marijuana. And it could put pressure on smaller producers to consolidate.

Distributors, as middlemen, would by their existence make prices higher. And there would have to be serious checks on the distributors. They would have to be barred from playing favorites with growers or retailers. It would have to be illegal for distributors to purchase exclusive rights to shelf space, or offer special pricing to some retailers but not others.

Still, as a business model with this oversight, a distributor oligopoly would be able to attract investment into the industry at a scale that individual small players can’t. (To quote Warren Buffett: “The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”) The cartel would thus be powerful enough to defend the industry. For example, governments tend to raise sin taxes in the name of raising revenues, but high taxes can keep black markets alive. A distributor cartel would be a force for keeping taxes reasonable, and the black market in check. (Colorado recently lowered its cannabis tax for this reason).

And this cartel would have the money to fight the federal government to overturn rules and laws that make it difficult for people in the industry to have bank accounts or pay federal taxes.

Encouraging such a cartel poses a political challenge; many growers and dispensary owners oppose Prop 64 and other regulations because they fear such a corporate entity. But, in a regulated and legal market, some bigness may be inevitable and its virtues outweigh its potential problems.

“Corporatization … brings advantages in terms of public accountability and regulatory compliance, product safety and reliability, market stability, and business professionalism,” said a Brookings Institution report on legalizing cannabis in California. “Attempts to block corporatization are likely to backfire or fail. For policymakers, the concern should be bad marijuana, not big marijuana.”

So, what sort of person could assemble such a cartel?

My own choice would be someone like Eric Spitz, who has already publicly raised his hand as a person interested in shaping the future of pot in California. I got to know him a few years ago when he and a partner purchased The Orange County Register and made a game, if unsuccessful attempt, to give the paper a brighter future by hiring journalists and expanding its offerings.

Spitz, who has an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, ran a brewing company and founded a “fast-casual” food chain. He talks messianically about how those experiences, along with the newspaper investment that brought him to California, make him the right man to help the state design a new regulatory regime and structure for the industry. “I was meant for this moment,” he says.

Spitz’s goal? To help shape the system and eventually become a distributor. Spitz is now advising local governments about how to regulate cannabis businesses and he’s been talking with former state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. “It’s great fun to see how he thinks,” says Lockyer.

Spitz says the question is not whether such a cartel (which is my term; he uses the word “consortium”) arises, but when, and how it’s structured. Will it have only a couple of distributors or many? And will such a distribution system be divided up into regions, or be truly statewide? He says that it should start statewide and then become regional as the number of outlets proliferates and retailers transform themselves from marijuana-focused dispensaries to restaurants or clubs that offer cannabis in the same style that bars offer alcohol.

“We have a responsibility to do it right, not only to make sure our system works, but because we know how California is going to tilt the scales for the rest of the country,” Spitz says.

And how will you know if the system is working? My own view: When people in the marijuana business stop complaining about all the uncertainty and chaos as their industry emerges from prohibition—and start complaining about the decisions of a quasi-monopoly that’s in charge.

The post Why California Will Need Its Own Weed Cartel appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Surprised to hear from me? In normal times, I wouldn’t be inclined to cooperate with the anthropomorphic scheme of a writer desperate for a mid-summer column.

But today so much is being said about agriculture here in the Central Valley, and dairies in particular, that I felt the need to—if you’ll pardon the pun—milk the moment. Too many of you city slickers have the wrong impression of the cows you pass along the 5 or the 99.

In the stories and headlines, we cows are usually invoked as symbols of the past, the epitome of a traditional way of life. And so the stories say we’re threatened by whatever is the news or preoccupation of the day—climate change, labor costs, taxes, regulations, cheap food, the environment. Sometimes cows and dairies are portrayed as victims, unable to flee this dysfunctional state for greener pastures, like other businesses have. Or we cows are seen as victimizers, part of a water-guzzling agricultural industry that is getting its comeuppance with this drought.

Most of these narratives, I can assure you, are just so much manure. The truth is, I’m not old-fashioned, and these are neither the best nor the worst of times for me. In fact, if you got to know me, you’d realize that I’m a lot like you, my fellow Californians. And no, I am not just saying that because we’re mammals, or because there is some of me inside you if you drink milk or eat cheesy pizza.

What I am saying is that we all feel a little like cattle these days. Like all my fellow Californians, my life is being reshaped by technology. Like most of you, I am producing more than ever before. And like many of you, I experience a higher quality of life than those who came before me. But, just like for you, my day-to-day remains a struggle, and I don’t have a clear sense of what the future holds for me, not to mention my calves and grand-calves.

The story of my California probably sounds a lot like yours. We’re still the number one state in dairy (as we are in so many other things), producing nearly 5 billion gallons of milk annually, more than a fifth of the American supply. The county where I live, Tulare (this piece was inspired by a stare down I had with a columnist there), is one of four California counties among the top five dairy counties in America.

But California’s continued leadership among cows is not assured. The end of the last decade was brutal for us, much as it was for you with that housing crisis and recession. Supplies got so high that prices dropped. Then the cost of feed soared, in part because of a lack of rainfall. The combination of lower prices and high feed costs was too much for many dairymen. Since 2007, as a result of foreclosures and consolidation, California has lost about a quarter of its dairies.

Some dairies actually left the state. That may sound strange—how can you pick up and move a farm?—but it’s not uncommon. More than a generation ago, my ancestors lived in Southern California’s Inland Empire, which was full of dairies, but they relocated here in the San Joaquin Valley where land was cheaper. Today, states like Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota seek to lure our dairies with promises of cheaper land and less environmental regulation.

The result: The one constant in my corral is change. Just as you probably have to do more with less in your office, today’s economics require dairies to produce more with fewer cows.

That’s been good for me in some ways. It’s more important than ever for me to live comfortably so I give more milk. I now enjoy special fans and water sprays that keep me cool in the summer; flat, dry, and fluffy bedding (some cows even have water beds); and more freedom to exercise and socialize with my herd mates. I spend half the day resting; otherwise, when I’m not in the milking parlor, I eat (I need as much as 35 gallons of water and 60 pounds of feed a day). The medical care I get is better than a lot of humans’ (and I don’t have to deal with the Covered California website or phone line). Not that things are perfect: Many of today’s cooler dairy sheds have hard floor surfaces that make my hooves tender when I walk on them too much.

The pace of life in today’s more productive, technologically enhanced dairies has sped up. The game changer: sexed semen. You read that right—for nearly a decade, dairymen have been able to impregnate their cows with semen modified to produce more female (milk-producing) animals. And you thought online dating had taken the romance out of mating.

Parenting has also gotten more complicated. We’re having babies—calving— at 24 months old, and calving season is now year-round. Younger, fresher animals mean that a dairy makes more milk today with 700 cows than it used to make with 1,000 cows. The downside: It’s like being a billionaire’s wife—there always seem to be younger, hungrier females around, ready to take your place. Cows now typically have five years before they leave the dairy; there’s a nasty rumor in the sheds that we all eventually become meat for human consumption, but I prefer not to think about it.

In the last year or so, because my fellow cows and I are so productive (despite the drought), there’s been talk of a California comeback in dairy. Milk prices are up as overseas demand for dairy products increases, and our cow competitors in Europe and New Zealand have their struggles. But the comeback feels tentative.

There is also the problem of all those nuts out there. There’s only so much land in California, and if you’ve been in the Central Valley lately, you can see almonds (as well as pistachios and walnuts) taking up more and more land that once belonged to us cows, or to our feed. Olives are gobbling up more acres too, as the world can’t seem to get enough olive oil. With the drought taking more land out of cultivation, feeding me and the cows that come after me will get harder.

But you won’t hear me complain. California cows live by the same rule that the boys in Silicon Valley are always citing: adapt, or die. So you can whine about all the change in the state until the cows come home, but that doesn’t mean we’ll listen.

The post If California Cows Could Talk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Jeffrey Lebowski, better known as the Dude, is arguably the most successful fictional Californian of the past two decades. Created by the Coen brothers in their 1998 film The Big Lebowski, and embodied by the actor Jeff Bridges, Lebowski became a cult favorite for being an outsider (in his own words, not a member “of the square community”). He was a stoner who drank White Russians, wore a bathrobe to the grocery store, bowled, tangled with pornographers and German nihilists, was indifferent to work, and retired the trophy for most laid-back Angeleno ever.

But times have changed since the movie was made (and since 1991, when it was set). And so has California. This weekend, Bridges and his country-rock band, The Abiders, headline Lebowski Fest Los Angeles at the Wiltern Theater. Tickets, priced at $40, are sold out, though as of this writing $25 tickets for the Lebowski Fest bowling party in Fountain Valley are still available.

Yes, Dude, there are signs that you are no longer the outsider. Indeed, no movie character better represents the 2014 California mainstream than Jeffrey Lebowski.

Let’s start with Lebowski the stoner. Since the film, medical marijuana has become so commonplace in California that I used to pass four dispensaries while taking my baby for a walk in our old Los Angeles neighborhood. Last year, for the first time, a majority of Californians supported legalization in a Field Poll. Governor Jerry Brown recently warned against this creeping Lebowskization on national TV: “How many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?”

Perhaps an unfair question, but it is true that in matters of economics, we are all Lebowski now.

The Dude used to stand out because he didn’t hold a steady job. Today, that makes him an avatar of L.A. As Judy D. Olian and Edward F. Leamer of UCLA pointed out in the Los Angeles Register, Los Angeles has lost more than 3 percent of its payroll jobs since 1990, ranking dead last among American cities. And since 2000, San Jose has lost 3 percent of its job base; booming San Francisco has gained just 1.5 percent.

The work Lebowski did—apathetic detective stuff involving the location of a young woman named Bunny—was purely freelance. Today, Southern California is the national capital of self-employment, according to data from Atlantic Cities; the Bay Area is full of freelancers, and Sacramento has more than its fair share. The number of Americans working from home, as the Dude did, increased by more than 4 million from 1997 to 2010, with Western states leading the way.

The Dude’s consistently slovenly attire, even in professional situations, was ahead of its time. As someone who is writing this in his office while dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, I’m appreciative. And the Dude was forward-thinking environmentally: He devoted himself to carpooling, riding with his friend Walter Sobchak (played by John Goodman) even though it meant tolerating the Vietnam veteran’s rages.

Lebowski’s cultural passions have been widely embraced. The Dude enjoyed imbibing heavily, and Americans have followed suit; adult binge-drinking rates have increased significantly since 1997, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures. Bowling, the Dude’s great passion, has rebounded in recent years, though growth in casual, recreational bowlers masks a decline in devoted league members like Lebowski. And while few Californians do battle with German nihilists like Lebowski did, it should be noted that the number of UC Berkeley undergraduates majoring in philosophy increased 74 percent in the last decade.

Lebowski remains out of step from today’s California only in his dislike of the Eagles; their recent run of sold-out shows at the Forum in Inglewood demonstrates that they are more popular than ever.

Some of these statistics may surprise. California’s image of itself is of a young and diverse place. But in fact, for all our diverse heritage, we are rapidly becoming, like Lebowski, middle-aged and thick around the middle.

Let’s not forget that the state has plenty of people like the film’s “other Lebowski”—an elderly plutocrat, also named Jeffrey Lebowski (confusion over the two Lebowskis drives the plot). This Lebowski pretends to be wealthy and philanthropic, but we learn during the course of the movie that he is actually house-rich and cash-poor. Presumably he would have to sell the place, if it weren’t for Proposition 13’s limits keeping his property taxes so ludicrously low.

It will be interesting to see how long the Lebowski phenomenon persists. As the film’s narrator puts it, “Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that’s the Dude, in Los Angeles.”

And in California. The cult has become cliché.

The post We’re All Lebowski Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.