As LA fires continue to burn, we should all be concerned about monetisation of water

At Mass yesterday, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles gave a moving homily in which he tried to offer reassurance to the people of the city that God has not abandoned them in their present time of apocalyptic crisis.

“We don’t know why these disasters happen,” said Archbishop Gomez referring to the seemingly unstoppable wildfires that have been ravaging the city’s suburbs, “but we do know that Our Father holds this world, and each of our lives, in his loving hands. And we do know that everything he does, he does out of love for us, and for our salvation.

“It is not an easy answer, but it is the truth,” he added.

The notion that God had a particular reason for razing thousands of homes to the ground in a very wealthy American suburb – and in a world becoming endangered by a growing climate crisis – makes for tempting theology and conspiracy theories, but the reasons for this particular human disaster are somewhat more mundane, if no less concerning.

Human reason – and especially Christian teaching – has always struggled with trying to account for why God lets the bad stuff happen to us; The Bible consoles us with story of Job, but the great theologian St Augustine even wondered if maybe God just has a different moral code to us humans.

Some disasters do defy rational explanation but one thing’s for sure, the California wildfires have been no act of God, but profoundly the result of a combination of human greed, and outstanding folly. Here in the UK there has been a lot of talk and animated debate recently about the growing crisis in our water supply management chain, but thankfully few of us have yet been impacted directly by the issues of water quality and supply – when you turn you tap on the water still flows and it’s still safe to drink.

Over on the west coast of America the problems of water supply have become far sharper and more frightening, and little of this is actually down to climate change. California has always been an arid state, and thus water has always been at a premium. There was harsh five year drought from 2012-2016, a further three year dry stretch in 2012-16 and 2020-21 were among the driest in the region’s history. This alone, in a landscape heavy with vegetation, wooden houses ad highly unpredictable winds, made this week’s tragic events all but inevitable, and expected.

What was less expected, though it shouldn’t have been, was that when the raging wildfires arrived there was a critical problem with finding the water to put them out. Much like here in the UK, California gets its water through a complex system of dams, canals and reservoirs, supplied by a number of different privatised companies. The water itself is distributed largely via the California State Water Project (SWP), at 700 miles of infrastructure the largest state-built water system in the United States.

The SWP made global headlines in December 2021 when it announced that due to severe drought, it was going to distribute no water at all through its system. The media focussed on parched lawns and worried millionaire mansion owners, but the real story was that water to citizens ranks only fourth in the hierarchy of SWP’s supply priorities – behind minimum urban health and safety needs, salinity control in the Sacramento river delta, water for endangered species and water for reserve in storage.

For those who may have been wondering, this is what President-elect Donald Trump was latching onto when he lashed out this week at Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom for prioritising a ‘worthless’ species of fish over allowing more water to flow to southern California.

‘Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,’ wrote Trump on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday morning.

But Donald Trump has been the only politician and social media influencer to blame the devastating wildfires on a tiny minnow-like fish called the Delta smelt, which lives in the habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and whose habitat is protected by the supply of millions of gallons of precious excess rain and snow melt water coming down from the north of the state. The endangered species is regarded as a critical indicator of the wider health of the region’s ecosystem, so this tiny creature has become the political Maguffin for either the absolute nonsense of woke environmentalists or the trivialisation of the climate crisis by right wing deniers.

I say that the poor little smelt is a Maguffin – a term popularised by film director Alfred Hitchcock to denote an insignificant object that is critical to a narrative – because it has become a very convenient distraction from the real narrative underlying the California wildfires crisis – the fact that despite its often arid landscape, the state is water rich and more than enough rushes through its rivers and aquafers to meet even the most extreme demands. Unfortunately this God-given supply is also a vital resource to the region’s food growers, who supply more than a quarter of America’s food needs. To make matters worse the supply of water to growers is controlled significantly by one company – called Wonderful, owned by US billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick. Wonderful quite legitimately buys water on the open market, and then stores it underground in the Kern Water bank – a 32 mile square recharge basin holding some 500 billion gallons – before pumping it on to the Resnick’s farmlands.

One might be forgiven for thinking this process delivers the USA vital wheat or vegetable produce, but the Resnicks are concerned primarily with producing luxury foods such as pistachios, almonds, pomegranates, seedless lemons, Halo mandarins, exotic flowers and wine. The company is estimated by Forbes to have $5 billion in sales and the Resnicks a joint worth of $8 billion. For many this is a powerful and frightening example of the dynamics of social inequality – whilst precious water is diverted away from urban centres by ruthless capitalists who in return provide luxury goods for those who can afford them, elsewhere a deep social divide is being created in California where smallholders and marginal farmers are being driven out of business by the cost of buying water and transporting it to their crops. For their part the Resnicks point out that they have pledged $750 million to help climate crisis research projects.

This may sound like so much America, but there are worrying signs that something very similar could happen here in the UK. Most of what puts water into our taps is in private hands already, and its management and supply has been mishandled appalling; a country that was once the envy of the world for its crystal clear chalk streams and reed-fringed rivers is fast declining into a land veined with effluent filled sludge. Beaches that just a half century ago were the holiday paradises of urban workers are now far too dangerous to even dip a toe in; pipes continue to burst in every high street whilst highly-paid executives continue to oversee chaos and pocket tax-payer funds. And there seems to be absolutely nothing that we or our government can do about it.

For what it’s worth the British government does show some sense of recognition that there is such a thing as a human right to water. I say ‘some’ because what the government actually says that the right to water is implied in Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights or ICESCR, which acknowledges “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family.” In fact there’s quite a library of government pledges and positions on the ‘right’ of everyone to have access to safe, clean water – but almost all are couched in caveats such as those expressed in Section II of ICESCR, which states:

“The right to water means that priority in allocation must be given to water for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene needs. States must have regard to sustainability and for the need for the right to be realised by present and future generations.

“It is up to each state to decide which measures are required to fulfil its obligations. However, states have a duty to take whatever steps they can to ensure that everyone enjoys the right to water, without discrimination. States must also monitor their progress in realising this right.”

For me that’s not at all reassuring, and it certain falls a long way short of anything I’d recognise as a ‘right’. In America the citizens of California may have been powerless to prevent aggressive capitalists from taking over their precious – but bountiful – water supply; maybe they just loved their seedless lemons and pistachios a little too much, but sadly they are now paying the price in the devastation and destruction we’ve been witnessing across this week. I dearly hope I’m right when I say that I can’t image the British public being quite so co-operative if anyone tried to strangle our water supply, but frankly – who knows? All I can say is that the dreadful California wildfires – and the lack of water to contain them – was no perplexing event delivered by the hand of God, it was a simple case of the folly of human greed and lack of concern for the proper care of our planet and its inhabitants.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic publisher and theologian