It’s not either-or. It’s jobs and the environment

“Jobs or the environment” is a familiar refrain, and frankly, it’s as wrong as it is rote.

It seems everyone with a “channel”— media, elected officials, a variety of policy influencers — repeats the same tired argument: jobs/economy v. the environment. Apparently, we can’t have both. It seems we cannot recognize the common interest in human survival and creating jobs that pay the bills and provide real opportunity for upward financial mobility. We are not two different groups, environmentalists and workers; we all need a job, and we all need a planet.

Unfortunately, The Sacramento Bee (and it was also reported in The Fresno Bee) recently fell prey to this tired old trope in a series of stories about water in the central San Joaquin Valley. If you missed this reporting, allow me to recap: Agriculture is king and the Central Valley is nothing without Big Ag. We get it: Agriculture is a driving force of the Central Valley’s economy. But what good is a job if we don’t have a planet or safe drinking water, or water at all?

Ag didn’t just appear here out of divine right or sacred manifest destiny. The power of this industry evolved in this area because of massive state and federal investments in building water infrastructure and setting up legal frameworks and incentives for environmentally destructive business to settle and expand here.

By allowing unfettered pumping of groundwater and not holding agribusiness accountable to social and ecological harm, our governments have gotten us into this mess, and many people have profited off of it for a long time, at the expense of precious drinking water and critical environmental resources.

Now, a water crisis is upon us, and the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) should be one of the tools we use to get out of this fix through implementation of effective Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs). Yet virtually none of the draft plans we’ve studied require monitoring of agricultural pumping while virtually all of the plans all but guarantee failure of domestic wells in vulnerable communities.

Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) in Merced, Fresno and Tulare counties know that hundreds of domestic wells will go dry from the policies they are proposing in their plans. At the same time, these agencies reassure farm owners at their board meetings that they will not have to meter their wells or restrict their pumping. How can our local representatives so callously protect business as usual, knowing that doing so will continue to cause families to find themselves with no water coming out of the tap? No water for cooking or bathing or anything.

No one wants to hurt agriculture, but our elected officials must help this industry pivot to sustainable water practices that don’t hurt people. We need to find other ways to power a thriving economy that don’t lead to destruction and human suffering. As a region and a state we’re going to have to think creatively about how we transition to an ethical and sustainable economy.

We have precedent. The New Deal of the 1930s put millions of people to work doing the jobs that America needed to transform our economy. Our water crisis in California demands equally bold action. We can knit together labor and environmental concerns, and create a movement toward a common vision, but we cannot have business as usual, where agricultural water usage runs amok and wrecks communities and our environment. We must all be part of a solution that provides jobs and a healthy environment with the resources we all need.

Amanda Monaco is the water policy coordinator for the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability in Fresno.

This story was originally published November 29, 2019 at 6:15 AM with the headline "It’s not either-or. It’s jobs and the environment."