Operation Unite is about bringing people together to solve water problems. Chime in and contribute to uniting efforts to solve problems.
“The greatest way to apply technical solutions in the world is through a Public that is engaged and committed to the process and outcome; an honest, we’re all in it together attitude!”
Stephen J. Baker, Founder of Operation Unite®
It is important to get comfortable with the extremes in weather and water supply. Today’s flooding and water excess is the precursor to tomorrow’s extended drought and water shortage. Planning for droughts and floods start now! Build your resilience through community participation, effective infrastructure, planning and shared focus; a vision of safe and abundant resources.
Just because it rains a lot doesn't mean everyone is getting enough water. Building a capacity for abundance means distributing water for all needs while protecting its source and saving for the next dry year.
We will always have water working together and together we plan for today and tomorrow.
Operation Unite® engaged with many people and issues this year. Here are a few highlights:
Water underlies everything that we value. May our communities recognize its value and support efforts to build habits, resiliency, sustainability and accessibility to water in both the environment and for the people on our planet. Wishing each of you a very prosperous and happy New Year.
Operation Unite® believes that good tidings shared during the holiday season are to carry through the entire year. May each of you share continued success in:
Wishing each of you continued good health and a wonderful new year!
Operation Unite®
The strongest strategy for resolving controversial issues is standing on common community values while moving a common community goal forward. Keep it simple, make it clear and keep talking.
The issue may be the Dakota Access Pipeline destroying sacred land and placing environmental risk to the water quality of our rivers and groundwater; the highly controversial proposed peripheral tunnels that will move a portion of the California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water around the Delta or simply a local groundwater well interference problem between a farmer and its residential neighbors. Energy, food and drinking water are high on the list of 21st century “Maslow's hierarchy of needs.”
Availability of these indispensable resources must be addressed in today’s decisions. A litmus test for choosing the best solution is engaging the whole impacted population and listening to the level of applause. Getting it right takes listening with understanding, a vision of the future and discovery of a path that all will follow. Public acceptance is best measured by the overwhelming appreciation and gratitude felt through everyone's recognized common community values.
Witnessing the accumulation of snow in the high country brings a sigh of relief to us westerners as well as a reminder that water that is deposited on our upper watersheds must be managed impeccably. Flawless perfection can only be attained in water resource management when a willing public promotes commitment to the needs of all living things within the watershed.
Achievement of this perfection is realized by building an adaptive behavior in the public that can adjust to Mother Nature’s unexpected delivery of annual water. Everyone gets a piece of this pie. Everyone shares in some of the discomfort. Everyone works together. Operation Unite® believes that public engagement is a critical component of all water management programs.
We have come from the earliest indigenous people living off a huge expanse of our continent centuries ago to a copious network of cities, farms and ranches that leave little land unscathed by today’s society.
Today’s twenty first century water needs place a greater weight on society getting it right on the first try. This is probably because the needs of a world population have never been as high as today. Compounding a growing population is a climate that is changing in such a way that old water infrastructure strategies no longer meet today’s water demand. Water that does exist across our landscape or beneath our feet is only partially available for use due to its degraded water quality from anthropogenic or naturally occurring contaminants. Even our water supply backup plan, underground aquifers, is now recognized in many regions as not sustainable at the current rate of use.
Scientific approaches and technology have helped but we still find ourselves grappling with balancing environmental stewardship while building certainty in our water supply systems. On this Thanksgiving, let us begin expanding our conversation with the Indigenous societies that have a history of successful stewardship in the natural environment. Looking through the lens of scientific and indigenous disciplines would be a marriage of old and new, a discovery of empirical applications that expand scientific knowledge and understanding. The best part is the cultural healing that is attributed to simply sitting down and listening to each other’s stories, recognizing the wisdom that surface and the friendships that result.
The recent presidential election has placed an exclamation point on the level of separation between citizens in our country. Discontent in the integrity of the electorate process was voiced as much or more than differences in political viewpoints. It is the growing diversity in opinion on deaf ears that has subdued our ability as a united people to find our common path and act on it.
Attempting to resolve our water problems has also resulted in many of the same shortcomings; a societal process riddled with the anti values of respect, responsibility and trust and an unclear common community water goal. Innovative thinking and a more flexible ideology would greatly benefit successful projects. Being heard and listened to by others of different opinion will lead to discovery of the common community goal for your water projects. Achieving project success requires maintaining a process that also satisfies common community values, and this is exactly the public engagement process of Operation Unite®.
The combination of 15.9 million groundwater wells active in the United States and the recognition that a great percentage of groundwater is older than 100 years is an indicator that water conflicts are inevitable. Our water needs simply outpace the rate of aquifer replenishment. So, how do you avert water conflict?
Recognize that the answer is not a “zero sum game.” Limitation of water will intermittently occur with greater frequency in years to come. The answer is the mutual gain approach. Develop a process that emphasizes responsibility, respect and trust with everyone involved and accompany scientific opinion with the uncertainties attached to the opinion. The perfect answers grow from dialogues that are rooted in relationship and joint fact finding.
Western states, especially California, spend a lot of money funding emergency response to lost domestic groundwater supply wells. Porterville, California is an example of this tragedy. Bottled water, mobile sanitation and shower stations, temporary tanks and water deliveries generate some of these costs. The greatest cost is the daily household dysfunction created in our communities by a domestic well gone dry.
It may be better to give groundwater users the ability to see the vulnerability of their wells early so they become motivated to take action before the emergency happens. No dysfunction, cost is less, community is stronger, unreliable water resources do not become stigmatized in the community, governance has one less headache and mitigations are voted for, financed and implemented without emergency aid and with the support of the voting citizens. A real success story!
Call us and ask about the Know Your Water® and Neighborhood Water Alliance programs. Operation Unite® works in your community to reduce vulnerability to depleted groundwater resources. We build a community wide attitude that brings people together to solve problems before they ever happen.
Drought and limitation challenge the most prepared societies. Many times, a united society takes a limited resource like water and distributes the available resource across the land in order to do the most good.
The first challenge is to prioritize water uses according to common community values. The second challenge is assuring the availability of a distribution system that can deliver that water to those that need it.
Pro-active actions can really make a difference.
The public, many times, is confused by public messages that address limited water conditions. If the message is "Rain is coming", the public's response is, "Great, I don't have to conserve anymore."
The truth is, drought conditions are different when compared with the climate changes that are now occurring. This is important because drought preparation is an acute, temporary response to immediate or seasonal conditions. Preparation for a changing climate is a slower, more incremental set of changes that become permanent as we go into the future. That being said, the climate change message to consider is this:
“We have now entered into a drier period of time, in the long run. It's time to reduce your water use, permanently.”
Operation Unite® is helping northern Californian’s write their water To-do-lists and reinforce doing everything on that list. Putting into action any combination of groundwater monitoring, rainwater harvesting, grey water management, groundwater recharge and irrigation practices will contribute to avoiding the terrible experience of a lost water supply. Rural domestic and agricultural water users now have an answer to their worries, the Operation Unite® Outreach programs.
This is what Lake Tahoe and the Truckee River (between Tahoe City and Truckee) look like after five consecutive years of drought. Everyone feels the impacts of nature and our response to drought conditions; water supply shortages, price hikes and inconvenience, farm and ranching restrictions, recreational limitations, fish and riparian impacts, influences on tourism and reduction in groundwater recharge, to say the least.
Lake Tahoe and the upper reaches of the Truckee River are examples of the superposition of man's response over top an extreme natural condition. The drought is definitely real and our response to drought can be distilled down to this, “an opportunity to recognize the importance of community.”
Groundwater and aquifers is a subject of conflict for a lot of reasons. Which causes of conflict are you experiencing?
Poor communication and negative behavior at all levels;
Disagreements or misinformation by the experts, stakeholders and public;
Unequal power in decision making and geographic area;
Ideology; and
Historic cultural history.
Operation Unite® believes these conflicts can be resolved by working together on the same platform. Call us to discuss the details of a platform that will change your future, "IN A GOOD WAY."
Solving groundwater issues means knowing and understanding existing conditions across the management area, being honest in evaluating the capability of the stakeholders and public with respect to technical and political landscaping, pursuing the motivated passions of the region and finally, identifying what must be done.
Operation Unite® has the program, tools and persistence and you have the will and resources to move forward.
Yesterday, the California Water Quality Control Board shared the new water right measurement and reporting requirements to water right holders of California. A clear understanding and fair enforcement of prior appropriative and riparian water rights requires accurate information on historic and current water use, flow rates and volumes at diversions and storage locations through time. It will cost some money and it adds to an already busy life of water users, but it creates benefits that are realized when drought denies us the water that we need.
Some people feel this data will never be used by the regulating community. Others feel it will be used against them. I consider the generation of monitoring data as an opportunity to identify water solutions that help us by increasing the certainty that we will have water when conditions are limited. We want to protect our water rights and optimize water’s use in a fair and equitable manner. Without accurate data, we find it difficult to maintain certainty when drought hangs over our land.
When dealing with a water resource, information is critically important. See the benefits and start collecting water data. In fact, exhaust the usefulness of all your monitoring data, groundwater and surface water. You will come out better than you realize.
California is in its 5th consecutive year of drought.
Myopic views yield an unconnected understanding of the whole problem. Water issues are multi-faceted and operate co-dependently with many other terrestrial, biologic and atmospheric conditions. Don’t oversimplify. Articulate a clear, concise goal. The best solutions are found by looking at the whole.
