Why we can’t publish a new edition of our book “Water: More or Less”
My co-author, Rita Schmidt Sudman and I recently reunited in person after a couple of covid centuries. I was so thrilled to see her. We tossed around the idea of updating our book which we’d starting writing in 2015 in response to the last obvious drought. Rita was the Executive Director of the Water Education for 34 years, promoting knowledge about water issues in CA, and mentoring people in her water leaders program. I wouldn’t let her retire then, arguing that CA needed her institutional knowledge–the kind of understanding that can’t be replaced.
Rita started her career in radio and broadcast journalism, and unlike me, she’s a real journalist. She’s observed California water, its people and agencies for all those years, and probable knew just about everybody in the industry, including four governors.
So we were considering a new edition written now more for the general public than we had the water industry then. Having moved to San Diego, Rita was interested in issues along the Mexican border. I was interested in learning about the Native People’s legacy along the American River because of my collaboration with the Water Forum.
I opened up a copy and began reading. I stopped. I couldn’t go on. Our book revised in 2018 was out of date. Yesterday’s optimism. Not today’s reality.
I thought about my essay in the Bee in 2014 about how forests recover from fire. In September 2020, I wrote about how it was already changing–after my too close experience in the urban fire in Santa Rosa. And this before my intimate and close up dive into the Paradise fire for the first six months of 2019.
My email crossed with Rita’s. We talked. “We can’t do it,” she said. “I agree,” I said. “I don’t have the knowledge about this any more,” she said. “I can’t write a book that contains so little hope,” I said.
I asked her what she would write about. The Groundwater Management Act, she said, and expressed regret that it wasn’t adopted years ago. “It’ll be interesting to see how the courts respond to the State Board.”
So much politics I‘m thinking, too little too late. Still searching for optimism.
