Season 5, Episode 1: Why the U.S. Needs a New National Water Strategy with Dr. Newsha Ajami and Dr. Martin Doyle (Part 1)
Dr. Newsha Ajami
Dr. Martin Doyle
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It’s been 75 years since the United States released its first and only national water strategy. In this episode, John talks with Dr. Newsha Ajami of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Dr. Martin Doyle of Duke University about why that original plan mattered, what it accomplished, and why today’s challenges call for a new approach. They explore the historical context of the 1951 plan, the issues it identified that remain relevant today, and how political boundaries, fragmented agencies, and modern pressures like groundwater depletion and climate change make a new national strategy essential.
“We have come a long way, obviously, since this document has been written. We are facing totally different challenges as we faced before. ”
Key Topics
What the 1951 National Water Strategy Tried to Solve: Martin explains the historical context: post-Depression expansion, public works momentum, and the foresight behind coordinated federal action and data collection.
Enduring Challenges From the Original Plan: John highlights how issues identified in 1951, like the water-energy nexus and the importance of linking land and water, are still central research themes today.
Why a Modern Strategy Is Needed Now: Newsha describes how today’s challenges differ: aging infrastructure, groundwater depletion, climate-driven extremes, and the need for guiding principles that prevent unintended consequences.
Fragmentation Across Federal Agencies: Newsha details how water responsibilities are split among EPA, USGS, NASA, NOAA, DOE, Bureau of Reclamation, and the Army Corps, creating overlaps, gaps, and misaligned funding.
The Role of States in Water Governance: Martin argues that states may be the primary beneficiaries of a national strategy, especially as federal leadership on environmental issues shifts.
Revisiting Natural vs. Political Boundaries: The group discusses why ignoring hydrologic boundaries still creates significant management problems and why this must be addressed in any future plan.
Links to Relevant Studies and Resources:
Martin referenced the “308 studies,” which were foundational river-basin assessments that informed mid-century federal water planning. Learn more about the 308 Report Series here
Newsha mentions different entities that manage water:
the National Weather Service manages hydrological forecasting
the Army Corps of Engineers manages infrastructure related to water management
The Bureau of Reclamation’s manages water projects and basin studies. Learn more about their Basin Studies Program.
“That was kind of the vision that they laid out, and it was incredibly foresightful for the types of things to be considered, for the types of different branches of natural sciences and engineering that were going be pulled into it. It’s a pretty extraordinary document.”
Transcript
START (AUDACIOUS WATER EPISODE 1 SEASON 5)
[MUSIC]
JOHN SABO: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast at the center of water and climate adaptation. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University. It's been 75 years since the U.S. released its first and only national water strategy. Today we're looking back at that plan, why it was created, what it accomplished, and why it might be time for a new one. My guests are Dr. Newsha Ajami, Chief Development Officer for Research at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Dr. Martin Doyle, professor of River Systems Science and Police at Duke University. We'll discuss the origins of America's first water plan, along with what it got right, and how it shaped the water systems we still rely on today.
JOHN SABO: Newsha, Martin, welcome to the show.
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Thanks for having us.
DR. NEWSHA AJAMI: Good to be here.
JOHN SABO: Good. Well, let's start with a question for Martin. It's been 75 years since the first national water strategy was developed and published. What was it about? Why was it important? And how do you think it improved things, or not?
DR. NEWSHA AJAMI: Well, it was - the policy that was kind of laid out was - it was really what were the big federal agencies going to do? So this was in the - 1950, 1951 was when they pushed it out. And it was in the wake of the Great Depression and after World War II where the United States was in this enormous economic and demographic expansion phase. And we knew that there was going to be development, we knew there was going to be infrastructure expansion at a pretty vast scale that we had started to experiment with during the depression and the kind of public works era. And this was really a policy that said, rather than just doing it somewhat haphazardly, what if we did this intentionally, and what if we did this in more of a planned fashion? And so that was kind of the vision that they laid out, and it was incredibly foresightful what they laid out for the types of things to be considered for the types of different branches of the natural sciences and engineering branches that were going to be pulled into it. It's a pretty extraordinary document when you consider that they were doing this with typewriters, slide rules, and compasses, and graph paper for all of their engineering. It's just pretty remarkable what they pulled together.
JOHN SABO: Yeah, I agree with you on the foresight. And it's incredible, I was thinking about - I'm glad that you painted that picture of the history and the backdrop of where the strategy came from. I was thinking about the go-go years of dam development which were happening during - about the same time. And you can see some of the thinking about the impacts of that and how they were going to have to grapple with the impacts of that, which I also think is pretty foresightful, as you said. Newsha, do you have anything to add to that, you know, especially about just, like, your impressions of why it was important?
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: When we found this document I was quite impressed how aligned some of the issues we are facing right now is with what they were sort of grappling with around data, funding, dealing with infrastructure. A little bit different in a sense that it was more about development rather than sort of rethinking how we operate things, or rethinking how we do things. But the level of detail and coordination that were sort of laid out in that document was very interesting to me. And their recognition that you need information and data to be able to accomplish that. There's also a discussion around natural boundaries and political boundaries in that document, which we often talk about this is one of the biggest challenges we face. Because often when you focus on political boundaries in the way we manage resources, water especially, you have a disconnect there because watersheds and water actually operates within its own natural boundaries. So these political boundaries do not really have a say into how water flows, or operates, or, you know, behaves. So we have had that conflict since then, and we are still having the same conflict now. So you see some of the problems are still lingering, and some of the goals that they had at the time was actually met and solved by this document that they put together.
JOHN SABO: Yeah, I was going to say, just to highlight that point, I mean, the lack of agreement between political boundaries and hydrologic ones is something we talk about in almost every water meeting, right, even today.
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Yeah.
JOHN SABO: It's still a challenge. It's an even bigger challenge in trans-boundary water between countries. But I think in a country with 50 states we have our own internal trans-boundary water issues that are often at play, certainly in the West but in other places as well.
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: One quick thing I would also add to that is, while they do recognize this, we see at the time we build all these dams and water infrastructure, then moved water from one watershed to another one to enable growth and development. And that has definitely sort of evolved to become a big issue in some of these communities, and watersheds, and states. Talk about the Colorado River, talk about, like, California's infrastructure and how we moved water from the Sierra Nevadas to the southern California region, or the western and coastal region. So you see some of those challenges are not either anticipated or recognized when that document was put together. And, you know, we are now dealing with some of those unintended consequences.
JOHN SABO: Right. You know, a couple of things, just in a brief review this morning of the document - the summary of the document, a couple of issues that they pointed out that I think, you know, underscore Martin's point about foresight that have been research topics, you know, in modern times in the last decade--one, they call out the link between energy and water, in particular hydropower and the race to put up hydropower facilities to meet growing energy demand. You know, the water-energy nexus was a huge topic, as you know Newsha, in the national labs, and I think also in academia through NSF programs. A second one was there's a really nice connection made between land and water stewardship with respect to not just agriculture but other things, forestry practices. And then I think, like you pointed out, there's a strong call for evaluation of success of projects, which requires data. And that laid the groundwork for lots of data collection and science by federal agencies to measure impacts and efficacy of projects. And then I think the last thing is the document does call out groundwater, not just surface water, and kind of points out that, you know, just like there are these discrepancies between political and watershed boundaries, groundwater basins don't follow hydrologic boundaries for surface water either. So there's some challenges there that were called out that I think we're still dealing with today. So that was just a quick summary of what I thought was interesting in the document in terms of what we talk about today. And Newsha, maybe turning to you, we don't have an updated strategy--it's been 75 years almost--is that a problem and why?
DR. NEWSHA AJAMI: We constantly talk about it in different meetings. Whenever we are talking about all the challenges we are facing in the water sector we all say, "Oh, we don't have a national water strategy, that's why this is happening." And partly because you have to think about something like this as a sort of roadmap or a guardrail that enables us to make better decisions, right? You don't need to specifically say what every state, what every regionality, what every locality needs to do. It's more about what is important, what you need to consider, what data do you need, and kind of providing those guiding principles that can help them to manage their water resources more effectively. And that's what we felt it was missing at this day and age. We have come a long way obviously since this document has been written. We are facing totally different challenges as we faced before. The infrastructure we built was built to face the needs and challenges of the time, and if you really want to be able to deal with the, you know, challenges and take advantage of the opportunities that are available to us, we do need to have some guiding document that helps us to think about what needs to be done, and also somehow help us to avoid some of the unintended consequences. And that's why we thought it's important to have this conversation and be able to kind of put a strategy together. One other thing I would say is, you know, we organized ourselves, as I said before, around the challenges we were facing and the infrastructure we built at the time, right? Manage source water, manage - you know, distribute water, and then manage floodwater, and then deal with wastewater. So we put them all in these three buckets, and those buckets are sort of - they don't really represent some of the challenges we are facing right now. That's why we are having a lot of problems. So that's why we thought it's good to be able to have these conversations right now and try to provide some guiding document and a roadmap for what we need to be doing to deal with today's challenges and manage our resources based on the opportunities we are facing today.
JOHN SABO: That's really good context. Who manages that strategy? Like let's think the old strategy, but also, like, if there were a new one how would it be implemented, and who would be in charge of overseeing that some of the recommendations are followed through on?
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: I mean, I think you are touching on something very important, which is we have divided water among so many different agencies when it comes to a federal level, and how we manage it at a federal level. And that's a challenge because, you know, data is one place, you know, clean water is managed by EPA for example, data is gathered by USGS or NASA, NOAA is managing our climate data, and National Weather Service does hydrologic forecasting and (better) forecasting. And then you also have Department of Energy that's looking at the technological value of, you know, building technologies or innovative solutions for water. But they still also focus on art system modeling that sort of informs our hydrologic forecasting and some of the climate forecasting. And, you know, then you go to (the) Bureau of Reclamation that manages some of our dams and waterworks that we have, that allocates water among western states, and also does land management, right? And then you have Army Corps that's building infrastructure, at the same time sort of setting up some rules on how to manage that infrastructure. So these are all divided. There are also overlaps, some lack of overlap, and some mission and, you know, sort of objective that each one of these agencies have. But they don't really officially coordinate, and the biggest problem is the money that they get, or the funding that is available to them, is very much specifically allocated to do what they are doing. And even if there's overlap, those overlaps don't end up having a multiplier (factor), because they're not really required to talk to each other or share resources, per se. So those disconnects is a big problem, and that's not just federal government--as you go down, that model has been sort of replicated across different states in different ways. So that disconnect needs to be solved, that fragmentation we have needs to be dealt with. And I think--I would like for Martin to answer this as well--but I think we - our hope was if we have some guiding document (that) can actually create some coordination across these agencies, provide some opportunities for them to figure out what is it that they can work on together, and maybe can help allocate resources in a more effective way than we are talking about managing too much water, too little water, different qualities, and also enable us to kind of uptake some of these inhibitive solutions that has been out there but are not really seeing the daylight, because the way money is allocated and the rules are set, it doesn't create space for them.
JOHN SABO: I want Martin to also get a chance to respond to the question, because you prompted him for it. But I want to say that your point about states is well-taken. We're dealing with that fragmentation issue in Louisiana right now. We dealt with it after Katrina for creating this EPRA, and now we're creating in the state another water resource agency that brings together all the (line) agencies with responsibility in water to do the upland states that are not coastal. And so I think it's a challenge that probably all states will have to face at some point. Martin, I kind of stole the mic from you--do you have anything to add to the governance piece here?
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Yeah, I think - I mean, why do we need a strategy? You know, we probably in the United States at the federal level will never have a national water agency or a national water policy, but we can at least have a national water strategy. And that was kind of one of the motivating factors of trying to pull this group together. I think in terms of, you know, who would implement this or might pull it together, I think it will take a constellation of different entities, organizations and agencies, which is just a reality of the way American democracy works and the American economy works. But I do think that the entities or levels of organization that will potentially benefit the most from a strategy like this are the state governments. And I think that that's appropriate because state governments by intention have been the drivers of water management in the United States, and I think we are probably entering into a series of decades in which the federal government will take a backseat in environmental management in general, and especially in water management, for a variety of reasons. And so as states start to grapple with an increased set of roles, and increased responsibilities, and increased demand on their own funding, I think that they in particular with benefit from a strategy that is relevant to the state level, but also relevant to regional levels that encompass multiple states around a singular water resource. So I really view the states and even the local governments as the primary recipients for this strategy beyond almost anything else.
JOHN SABO: Up next, Newsha and Martin explain how fragmented water management became one of the biggest challenges in the U.S., and what we can learn from the way the original plan tried to solve it.
JOHN SABO: Do you envision each state creating their own strategy then, like, that would be a reflection of the federal, but regionalized or localized?
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: I don't think that they each need an individual strategy. I mean, they certainly need, like, a decadal water plan, but not just in the water quantity or water rights, or even, like, a capital improvement plan that a municipality might have. But I think that states need to start getting a coherent strategy. So I think what Newsha, and I, and the others have tried to create here is a bit of a portfolio of activities that need to happen regardless of the level of organization, in order to generate water security. I think that individual states could grab this overall strategy document and pull pieces of it that are most relevant for them, given their geography, and given their timing of development that they have. And their portfolio may look very different than another state, and I think that that's a reflection of a little bit of our intent, but also the intent of, you know, federalism itself here in the U.S.
JOHN SABO: It's interesting because, you know, there are those states that have decadal water plans, right? Texas I'm thinking of in particular, California to a certain extent, Colorado. I mean, there are states that have done this kind of planning. There are also states that are doing resilience and climate-adaptation planning in kind of the same way. Those two are overlapping I think, right? And so there's probably some need for guidance for states on how to fold those into one and the same thing because they're similar, you know, if we think of water as being the primary agent of need for adaptation.
DR. NEWSHA AJAMI: I think maybe I see this a tiny bit different from Martin's point of view. The way I think about this is, what we are providing (is) a skeleton. You know, you have to have very specific things if you want (inaudible) skeletal, you know--number of bones, how do they set up, right? But how it feels is very different from one human being to another one. And I think this document is supposed to be that skeletal, right, or will have some of those guiding principles that are important nationally for us to achieve water security. Now, different states are going to build it in different ways, but they still need to follow that framework, which I think is very, very important. For example, we can't really--and maybe this is where sort of the difference comes in--we can't assume all the states are equal. They don't all have the same kind of capacity, the same kind of institutional setup, the same kind of depth, just because of the way they're set up, the population, the different regions, geography, we can go on, and on, and on. But what we have realized, for example, just using groundwater as an example, is we always thought groundwater is a western water issue. We have come to realize more recently that this is not the case. Actually groundwater is a national issue. It might be highlighted more in the west just because we have these ups and downs, you know, droughts, millennial droughts, short droughts, long droughts, you know, all these different problems that we are having in the West, so groundwater - the pollution comes into play a lot more clearly. But when you go to the eastern states you're dealing with sea-level rise, groundwater quality depletion, you deal with seawater intrusion. You also in the Midwest are dealing with some of their groundwater-depletion issues that you're dealing with in the West. So if we don't really have a national guideline on how to deal with groundwater, then we actually can totally go another few decades and end up with resources that we don't have anymore, right? So I think that's where I was trying to go with that. I think that guideline is important. And one other thing I would say is, we go back to that discussion that we had earlier around political boundaries versus natural boundaries. And I think if we highly depend on states to make decisions, considering how water is becoming more and more of a challenge for many states across the country, every state is going to make decisions based on their own political priorities and economic priorities. So if we don't really have a national guidelines on how to manage these watersheds and groundwater basins in an effective way, we actually are going to have a national security problem, you know, in decades to come. Because, you know, no water, no life, no dichotomy, no social well-being, right? So I think that's I'm hoping at least the way - a little bit of a twist to this for me is how can we create those guidelines or that skeletal in a way that would help us to coordinate across different states, or across watersheds, across groundwater basins, and nationally to be able to sustain, and maintain, and preserve our water supplies?
JOHN SABO: That's great. That's interesting. I'm going to go to a question for Martin. When you were reading the original one that's now 75 years old, what were your impressions about what a new one should look like and how a modern version of that might be different, and having hindsight 20-20, right?
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Yeah, I think, you know, I’m always going to fall back on context for when the documents were written. But the thing that's most striking to me in addition to the foresight, which we talked about earlier, the number of times that the word "democracy" shows up is just kind of jarring in a good way. And I think that I hadn't appreciated until I read some of the other stuff that the authors--Gilbert White was one of the primary authors of this as well--they were writing this in an era when the Cold War was, you know, really - the flames of the Cold War were really getting fanned by everybody. And what stood out to me on this was it seems like they were trying to come up with a strategy that fit the era. The number of times that they talk about federalism, the number of times they talk about democracy, the number of times that they talk about how water policy is a reflection of the will of the people. And it seems like what they were trying to do was set this up as a contrast and what they thought water planning would look like in the emerging Soviet Union. And we can kind of think that that's quaint or, you know, an anachronism of the time or something, but I think it behooves us to keep in mind that policy is a creation not just of windows of opportunity, but it's also a creation of the era in which we live. And so that's one of the things that stood out to me. So when I was thinking through what would an ideal policy look like for the second quarter of the 21st Century, yeah, we live in a highly fragmented, atomized society now. Our demography, our economics are increasingly fragmented along a lot of different lines, whether political or economic. And I think what Newsha and I were always trying to kind of figure out is, is what a way to draw society together? Is water a way to draw groups of people together, not just to get the benefits out of it, but as a reflection of a better-integrated society? So how do we create a water policy of the modern era that reflects the challenges that America faces now in the same way that this group created a water policy that reflected their perceived challenges of the mid-20th Century?
JOHN SABO: Super interesting. And do you think - you know, it makes me wonder - like, when I read the document I'm, like, wow, some of this is still relevant today.
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Most of it is.
JOHN SABO: You know, and that behooves us to think the same way, like, can we write something that in 75 years will still be relevant or achieved, right? Like one of the two is the desired end point, right? And certainly this one achieved things that we've discussed already. The data piece was a huge outcome I think. You know, just having federal science agencies that are measuring things to make sure that things are going well was a desired outcome, and that's still integral to what we do today, and integral to I think the second strategy as well, like a big part of it.
A: Yeah, and I'd add to that--Newsha brought it up as well--of the idea of natural subdivisions, this regionalization of water management. And one of the outcomes of this policy was the creation of what are called "308 studies." So it's House Document 308, which basically gave funding to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Corps of Engineers, to go and do river basin studies, which then became the science behind, for that era, building big, big dams for managing water. But those were the foundation hydrologic studies of very large river basins that then enabled the federal government to do hydrologic intervention. So I think one of the things that we need to be thinking about for the 21st Century is, right, if we were to do river basin studies, or a 308 study for the mid-21st Century, we're not going to build more dams, so what is the outcome of a 308 study in the 21st Century? Just what are the things that we are trying to achieve? And that pivot is I think a really good mindset change to start adopting.
JOHN SABO: I like that. The context of 308 studies is excellent. And, you know, as I was reading the summary document, I was also thinking about extent, scale, you know, is it the Mississippi or is it a small basin that John Wesley Powell imagined for the scale of governance of water infrastructure, right? And it's probably something in between, or a hit-or-miss of many different scales, right?
DR. NEWSHA AJAMI: Also I think the difference between that era and the era we are in is--and I brought this up before, too--it's like engineers conquering the world, right? We were in (a) totally different time. We thought we can, you know, conquer the world or conquer the nature by building large infrastructure. Again, not thinking about the environment/social consequences of that; not even anticipating it. And I think what we are facing right now--and then going back to the 308 studies that Martin brought up--maybe this needs to focus more on where does nature fit into this discussion? How do we take advantage of what nature gives us versus trying to conquer it? And I think, you know, as an engineer when I look back I always think, you know, engineers learn to do things by looking at nature. It just didn't come out randomly; we sort of saw how nature operates and we said, "Oh, we can actually build a bigger, better, more sophisticated version of this." And I think that mindset was a great one. It really helped us to, you know, come a long way. But we have realized that actually we have to go back to some of the fundamentals and figure out, you know, how can we incorporate nature in this process, how actually sometimes not building a large, massive centralized infrastructure is a good thing, because they have, you know, they have environmental costs, human costs, financial costs in the long run. So I think the challenges we are facing today is kind of, like, very different, and I think being able to lay out a framework that can help us to transition to this new era that we are facing, and learnings we have had in the past 75 years, the new ways of approaching problems we have come up with in the past 75 years, would be a great way of - you know, if we can accomplish it, that would be great. But I think, as Martin said, every one of these documents is built for an era for the opportunities we have or the challenges we are facing and how we approach those problems. And I think we are in a totally different way compared to where we were 75 years ago.
JOHN SABO: Sure.
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Yeah, and if I can pick up on that, John. I think, you know, this is really important. I think that back in the 1950s they identified problems, and they also identified things that they knew needed to be done, but like Newsha was saying, they just didn't know how to do them. And that's critically important. I was just kind of skimming through this, and it's (without) treating the 1951 document as holy scripture. But on page 93 or something it's really interesting--I'm going to just quote from this because it just cracks me up--they basically are articulating the idea of ecosystem services without having that grammar. They say, "The preservation of our forests, our mountain lakes and streams, and our wildlife sanctuaries, has ample justification in providing healthful sport and recreation for the refreshment of human spirit. But it is also an essential part of water conservation and management. In short, if we do not manage and conserve water we suffer losses," and go on from there. But this idea that we need to do environmental conservation in order to get broader societal benefits, including water itself. And it's just interesting, they kind of had this intuition to it, but to Newsha's point, we've developed so much science and technology beyond dam-building, which is basically the instrument that their engineering community had at the moment was building things, building really big concrete objects. And we just have much more technical and scientific expertise. So to kind of close out, you know, this little thought, one of the big things and a new strategy is how do we deploy the newer science and technology, whatever that is, for a lot of problems that have been around for centuries?
JOHN SABO: Sure.
DR. NEWSHA AJAMI: Can I add something to that actually, John? One other thing--and I wanted to mention this earlier too--I think this section that Martin touched on is super important, and you brought it up, John, as well, which this whole connection between land use and water use, which we have always recognized, but we have had a hard time over the past, you know, 75 years to connect them and manage them in a coordinated manner. A lot of the problems we are having today is the lack of coordination between land-use management and water-use management. We have tried to kind of have some remedies and Band Aids to deal with that, but still we have not reached a point that can help us to actually, you know, in a meaningful and strategic way, deal with this issue. From groundwater management in the western U.S. to, you know, Louisiana's land-use management and floodwaters, to, you know, eastern states and their challenge with groundwater depletion or quality issues, all of that has something to do with land use, but we really don't know how - we have not been able to kind of create that connection in a polic- we have not come up with a policy remedy to that issue that works across the board.
DR. MARTIN DOYLE: Totally agree. That's the holy grail for water management is how do you thread the needle between land management and water management? Because we treat them as distinct, completely separate governance entities. But that's one of the grand challenges that they recognize, and it's one that I'm - just about every water scientist recognizes today as well.
JOHN SABO: I want to point out that 1949 was the year of publication of Sand County Almanac, which is not surprising, right? Because I think the passage that you just read is very steeped in that book.
[MUSIC]
JOHN SABO: That's episode one, looking back at America's first and only national water strategy. On the next episode you'll hear the rest of the conversation with Dr. Newsha Ajami and Dr. Martin Doyle. We'll talk about what a modern strategy could look like today from governance and economics, to innovation and the future of water in the U.S.
JOHN SABO: That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you like the show, please rate and review us, and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious Water, and to find in-depth show notes from this episode, visit our website at AudaciousWater.org. Until next time, I'm John Sabo.
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