Are we allowing reckless driving as long as there are no crashes?

by Roland Dumas, PhD.

There are several issues with our use of the term “sustainability;” many of them are so easy and simple that we can do a lot of very unsustainable things while thinking we’re preventing bad outcomes. This is particularly worrisome when we consider water security in this time of severe drought.

The Sierra Club Napa Group has requested our Groundwater Sustainability Plan Advisory Committee to consider the following approach to setting sustainability indicators. We requested the opportunity to present, explain, and answer questions on this and other issues we consider critical. We have been denied the opportunity to present, explain, and answer questions on this and other issues we consider critical. This short overview is offered in lieu of a fuller discussion.

In the SGMA (Sustainable Groundwater Management Act), guidelines for setting indicators for sustainability involves a focus on six undesirable results and the agreement on undesirable conditions that function as early warning indicators for the major areas. The major areas are:

•    Chronic lowering of groundwater levels
•    Reduction in groundwater storage
•    Seawater intrusion
•    Land subsidence
•    Water quality degradation
•    And depletions of interconnected surface water.

It’s clear that these are highly correlated in certain geographies, such as Napa. It’s also clear that they are very bad outcomes that we do not want to experience. (Photo Credit: Berit Barton)

Each sub-basin in the county has an agency responsible for listing indicators of adverse conditions that are precursors to major failures of the primary indicators. They monitor for early signs of seawater intrusion or land subsidence and perhaps conditions that tell the agency that bad situations are starting.

The challenge with these kinds of sustainability measures is that they are not indicators of sustainability at all. They are indicators of the failure to manage human activity sustainably. They are lagging indicators. By the time indicators are flashing red, you have already allowed the usage, development, and practices to get out of hand, telling you that you were not managing sustainably.

An analogy is that you are developing indicators of drunk driving, but the indicators are of the damage from drunk drivers – crashes large and small. If you set as your drunk driving indicator small fender benders, you’re still allowing a lot of damage to accrue before you take action. Also, the difference between a fender bender and a major accident is just luck. (Photo credit: Raymond Clarke Images)

If that is the kind of indicator you’d use for drunk driving, you are going to sacrifice a lot of lives before you get things under control. The action would have to be dramatic and not address the underlying problem: too many people drink too much. You’d still have all the adverse impacts of alcoholism to deal with.

If we apply this metaphor of “drunk driving” to water security, we would have to address the decades of mismanagement of water resources to reverse the damage. Over-permitting of commercial use of water; lack of monitoring of permitted wells, overreliance of unreliable foreign water sources, destruction of watersheds, all would have to be addressed. Imagine the effect of cutting off water to all the homes and businesses that have been permitted. You’d have to mitigate the bad outcomes by cutting back on water usage by people and businesses that have trusted that their supply of water will be reliable.

What’s a better way to set indicators?

There are two ways of establishing preventive and predictive indicators. They should be used together. The first is to look at the adverse condition as a bad result of human activity. Look at the chain of things that leads to that bad outcome, the causal chain. If you start at seawater intrusion, ask yourself, “what might we be doing to cause that?” It’s easy; we drew more water out of the system that was replenished. Then, ask, “what might we do to cause that?” Go up the causal chain one step. You go up the causal chain three more times; the guidance is “Ask why five times.” Then you are in the upstream causal chain. You will have captured a web of activities that lead to the bad outcome. You put indicators at crucial points in that web. In the case of our water management, you’ll have indicators in hillsides, watersheds, and the planning commission decision making process. (Photo credit: Janet Guynn)

The second way of setting preventive indicators is to measure stability. Indicators have a certain randomness in them, which is normal. When the indicator starts behaving as though it’s not just the random variation, that’s when you start paying attention. You are detecting instability, which might mean something is changing that you aren’t aware of. Think about it this way: you are managing the causes of change that might lead to adverse outcomes. You’re getting ahead of the system. (Photo credit: Matthew Gibson)

That is sustainable management.

Sustainable management is superior to the drunk driving management style where you wait for the adverse outcomes before you go into action.