Episode 26: Water Diplomacy and Dialogue
“I can run hearings for a week and not get bored and not stop listening to people. The key thing is seeing each person as an individual, interesting universe. If somebody says something you don’t necessarily agree with, then recognition that it may be that I don’t agree with what I think they said and the value of asking a question rather than reacting.”
A conversation with Felicia Marcus (Stanford University) about facilitation, coalition building, innovation, and community partnerships in California. Released June 25, 2021
guests on the show
Felicia Marcus
Felicia Marcus is the William C. Landreth Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program, an attorney, consultant and member of the Water Policy Group. She most recently served as chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, implementing laws regarding drinking water and water quality and state’s water rights, hearing regional board water quality appeals, settling disputes and providing financial assistance to communities to upgrade water infrastructure. Before her appointment to the Water Board, Marcus served in positions in government, the non-profit and private sector. Marcus also has an extensive background as a private sector and public interest lawyer, as well as a community organizer, most notably as a founder and general counsel to Heal the Bay. She has a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies from Harvard College, and Juris Doctor degree from New York University School of Law. Learn more about her work here and follow her on Twitter @FeliciaMarcus
Transcript
Faith Kearns
Welcome to Water Talk. Thank you for joining us for this second part of our extremely interesting conversation with Felicia Marcus, who is currently a visiting fellow in the Water in the West Program at Stanford University. Our initial conversation with Felicia was so interesting that we decided to break it into two episodes. And for this episode, we are going to be focusing on the topic of water diplomacy.
Mallika Nocco
How do the two of you differentiate the term water leadership from the term water diplomacy? And I do think that there is a difference between diplomacy and leadership though they're related, How do you guys differentiate or think of those two ideas?
Faith Kearns
I personally don't resonate with the term leadership, I find it very top down in this way that I, I don't know…so many people talk about leadership. And I just find it to be this term that's sort of overused and not that well thought out and doesn't give a lot of room to solidarity and more coalitional movements, there's always this sense that it's top down. And I think of diplomacy as being a much more sort of bilateral effort where, you know, you really are in more of a partnership and trying to figure out kind of what works for both people, or institutions, or whatever the case may be.
Sam Sandoval
And in my case I think that there is only one way of leadership and that is service. This is not top down. And I think, unfortunately, the term leadership has been degraded to the point of top down or a follow me, here we are, which is actually like, I can tackle all the obstacles. So you go further. And I think what she did, it was mostly this kind of service. I think she was working on doing a service to the entire state, for the different stakeholders. And that's how she was doing that - people started looking at her as a leader, but I think she was doing a lot of water diplomacy and leadership in terms of service.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, no, that's super, I mean, honestly, that's very useful to me to think about the differences. And I think it'll be useful to those who are listening too. And I've heard of this term called like "servant leadership" as a, I don't know, an idea or a term that gets used. And there's a whole theory behind that. But I think that sounds different from "service leadership", which is what you were talking about, Sam, and that kind of goes more with Faith, what you mentioned with partnership.
Faith Kearns
It's time to get some deeper insights from our guest, Felicia Marcus, for this episode.
Mallika Nocco
So you talked a lot about this paradigm shift, and everything it took to get that paradigm shift with the wastewater. And I was curious, what do you think is the next big paradigm shift that we need to make and what's it going to take to make that paradigm shift to happen?
Felicia Marcus
Well, I think one of the key problems we have is that water is under appreciated, it is taken for granted. And it's a miracle in modern history, let alone modern social history, you have so many not have to worry about where their water comes from. It's incredible. Even as we talk about the small percentage, there is still a big number of people that can't count on clean, safe, and affordable water. You know, modern engineering and sanitation has created a situation where it's not that people just think water comes out the tap, but they can take it for granted.
Just like when you take energy and electricity for granted, both of which are a miracle, that the lights stay on. And instead if the lights go off, everybody gets pissed off, when in fact, it's like whoa, if you know the physics of it, it's incredible, right? Especially as we're trying to change it out to cleaner and renewable. It's just miraculous. But water I think is consistently undervalued. And by that I don't just mean economically, and it is economically undervalued. I don't think the answer is just to make it more expensive. But it's undervalued as the important life force that it is, the economic driver, all those other things. So I think we really actually need to raise water literacy in order to also help the urban water agencies to go out and tell their stories. They're proud, it's that silent pride that I found so humbling when I got to public works, which is they're proud of the fact that people don't have to worry about it. That is cool, actually, right? But they've got to tell their story more in order to get the political will to invest the resources to retool for this next wave. And the next wave has got to be integrating nature based solutions.
The whole “one water” movement, which was started largely by wastewater people, I love my wastewater people. The folks in the One Water movement or people from the wastewater industry and the drinking water industry who've come together to figure out as a movement, and they're getting bigger and bigger all the time. And Radhika Fox is just awesome to try and promote Integrated Water Management that brings together all the things we care about in a community. You obviously want our wastewater treated so that it doesn't pollute or get anybody sick, we want our stormwater treated and taken care of so it doesn't foul our waterways, down to the other end where the cumulative impact of all, I’ll call it urban slobber, but all the motor oil and pesticides and dog droppings, and you name it, even just sediment that ends up going down waterways will choke out freshwater and marine life and look at it together in a way that does things like create more urban water courses where water can seep into the ground to be able to recharge groundwater basins, etc, and allow places like LA to be less dependent on imported water from the Delta, or from the Colorado River. I mean, there's just huge win wins there.
So a piece of where we need to go is at the mega scale, a greater understanding of that and literacy about it in the public, largely to drive politicians. And in LA, I think that's all continued. I mean, Heal the Bay work has been joined by many other organizations, you have a political culture that's very evolved, and it's Met and Mayor Garcetti, who really does get it and has now, you know, proposed to reduce the city's reliance on imported water by 70% by 2035. And recycle 100% of the city's water, I mean, that's where we actually need to go. And you'll have urban resilience in large urban communities, even in a place like LA which is so far from where the water comes from. But dealing with this more integrated thing, I think, is the real way to go. So that puts the stormwater capture just right behind recycling in my Pantheon for hierarchy of needs. And it's all coming together in places all over the country.
It's been fun to have the time to actually learn about more of it. I always knew a lot about it, because I would be the one state person brought to a lot of national conventions, because I'm sort of the cheerleader for doing stuff at the local level. But now you've just got folks in state, federal, and local government really trying to make something happen, which is kind of exciting. And if we can apply some of those same principles in the more rural arena, I think the analog is floodplains and upper watershed management and forestry, which have gotten way more uptake in the last few years in the media and the public discourse, we need to do that they're in more rural areas. They're just win wins. So I really think the next place we have to get is comfort with the complexity of dealing with nonpoint and multiple benefits projects, as opposed to we’ve got to build a big pipe, or we've got to build another treatment plant or add another filtration unit. I mean, we have to do some of that. But it's not the only way to go.
Sam Sandoval
So I do have a question, well, I have way too many. But one of the ones that I do want to pick your brain is how do you see the current policies for protecting rivers properly protecting what’s living in the rivers? And how those can be improved? Or what will be your guidance on how those need to be improved?
Felicia Marcus
That's a really good question. It's another thing I'm looking at at Stanford, I think the tools we have are adequate in theory, but not in practice. Right? So if you look at California law, or public trust doctrine, through the courts, or even Porter Cologne, which is one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, on most fronts in the country, in terms of dealing not just with water quality, but also with issues of flow.
You know, in contrast, for example, Nevada, where they just said that the loss for a person in water rights to those who extract trumped the public trust doctrine, which actually makes no sense if you think about what the public trust doctrine is, which is something that doesn't just come out of statute and or constitutional or regulatory approach. It's something that is inherent and embedded in our court system. Like since Byzantine times, they seem to have missed that point. I don't mean to disparage them, but I just didn't understand their reasoning.
But even if you look at a place like California, we have the tools in theory, but in practice we don't because the procedures that we have for implementing them are so laborious and so time consuming that it's very difficult to do anything on the timescale that it needs to be done and the politics are so fierce that it becomes very difficult to make decisions and changes, and so I feel like we've got a bunch of good tools, but it's not clearly not enough. So we need to find better ways to balance all the competing interests on our watercourses before we lose a lot of their value.
Faith Kearns
Thank you, I really appreciate the complex way that you've navigated your professional life. There's just like these lots of different sort of tools in the toolbox. And so while you're saying on the one hand that your role was to play the 800 pound gorilla in the room, at the same time you are really known for being conciliatory for being somebody who's really focused on listening to people and to hearing them out even when you might disagree with them. And I'm just wondering for you how listening came to be such a deeply held value, and even more importantly, how you practice that skill? How you stay present during the very contentious situations that you have often found yourself in?
Felicia Marcus
Well, it's a really good question. And I don't want to go into too deep into psychology, but I'll do a little bit of my childhood and then mostly it goes back to that Heal the Bay epiphany that opened up seeing it's when you learn something all of the sudden you see it everywhere in other contexts. Also changing jobs, so often you realize that every job is a different universal reality, which is sort of freeing as is even going to school, you know, a diffeon rent coast, it's that you realize there's not one way to be, which makes it really interesting, because then you realize how different everybody is rather than just being irritated that everybody isn't you.
I feel sad for people who seem to go through life not interested in other people and how differently they see things. And instead, anybody who disagrees with them, their friends, their self reinforcing circle as Robert Greenfield calls it, is either evil, stupid, you know, or something to vilify the other. For me, a lot of that came from, I won't get into all the details of strange childhood, let's just say where I was left to myself a lot, I would say I was raised by wolves. But you know, with people around me being sick and having just horrendous things happen to them. And me always realizing that I was pretty lucky. Fortunately, I was loved, but pretty much having to fend for myself. So I was very observant. And despite how garrulous I am now, I was actually very quiet for many years and a really good listener, I'm sort of more of a Margaret Mead.
Even as a young lawyer, I was a person who would listen and then sum it up at the end of the meeting and explain where I saw some deal or some agreement because I was, and it was only in having to run these agencies and being pulled into these management jobsnone of which were my idea, that I learned that I had to speak. And now it's hard to turn it off. I think I can do either. I just find people really interesting, you can always learn something. And so that kind of leads to some of the tools I use during those hearings.
I can run hearings for a week and not get bored and not stop listening to people. The key thing there is really seeing each person as an individual, interesting universe. And if somebody says something you don't necessarily agree with, the recognition that it may be that I don't agree with what I think he said, or she said, and the value of asking a question, rather than just reacting. And you know, it doesn't happen all the time. But I'd say more than half the time the person I'm internally having a reaction to didn't mean what I thought they meant, you know, and again, I can tell you stories, breakthroughs in smog check negotiations with the state when I was at EPA, for example, that really came down to a single conversation with one person who thought they were explaining something or thought that EPA wanted something that actually wasn't what we wanted. And I had to spend the time making clear that it wasn't what we wanted. And that would be the breakthrough in negotiation.
So I've just had enough experiences where by asking the question, I find out that actually there was a method to their madness, and there was something they cared about, maybe they didn't express it in the best way, but approaching it to figure out what is it that this person is worried about and trying to say, versus what did those words sound like to me at that moment, and that's not easy to do. I can preach a good game, I do it better than the average bear. And partially because I like people. And I think they're interesting, which helps and makes it easier to do, if you don't like people, you should not be in these jobs, because it's just going to be painful to you, when in fact, I find people delightfully interesting, even when I disagree with them.
But there have been times as you're alluding to, where these hearings are very fierce, where you have very good people, whether farmers, or folks from EJ or from Tribes or from urban areas, I mean, all of them, where they fervently believe something is being done, not just that they disagree with, but which is unfair to them, or mean to them. And so they come back with a lot of energy. That's like negative energy. And I'm pretty empathic about these things. So it's not like I don't feel them, I feel them all. So I have to protect myself. So the tools I've used, I make great use of post its on the bathroom mirror. Not like all the time but at one at a time, at most 2, to remind myself of something either about humility or about compassion for people, sometimes compassion for myself. Because if you're not feeling good about yourself, it's much harder to be gracious to other people. So you do have to take care of yourself and not too hard on yourself so that you know, people bring their issues to a microphone, where I sometimes wish I could just give them a hug or you know, get them some counseling, whether from a family friend or professionally because you can see their pain dribbling out at a microphone, and you have to be compassionate about it.
But I still have to remind myself, sometimes the post just says ask questions, because it's always better to ask a question than to react to find out A: Did you really understand what they meant to say, and B: to let them know you were actually listening to what they had to say. And you want to know what they meant to say, which a lot of times people just sort of take turns, or they have arguments with what they think the other person's gonna say versus what the other person said, I mean, it's such a waste of human life force. But even then, sometimes the post its aren't enough.
You may have heard me tell this story, I always wore a big Tibetan bracelet, you know, and when you think about the Dalai Lama, who has patience for everybody, he and Nelson Mandela, if they can be compassionate towards the people they were compassionate for, none of us have any right to be irritated with another water user, for God's sake, or a fish. It's hard to wear that with a watch, and it would just do a tinkle thing to remind me, and then I'll end with this, I will admit that during the contentious Bay Delta hearings, and again, this is painful to me, because you have people coming up, farmers who have been told that we just want to take their water away to hurt them, which is not true. And I love farmers, and they feel so deeply, and they're angry. Some of them are angry at me. I actually bought two bracelets that each had like 15 versions of Guadalupe on them. And I added those to my wrist because I needed a little bit of extra chill and tp be compassionate. The goal of the hearing is really to hear everybody and take in their concerns and see how to make the world better. Again, long answer. But that's basically what I do. That and try to get enough sleep.
Faith Kearns
I appreciate that answer. Because it's like you're taking it from this philosophical zone, which I think, especially these days, people are sort of like, we just have to listen to each other. Right? And there is this philosophical commitment, but then there's also these layers to actuallyhow you do that.
Felicia Marcus
That's much easier said than done. You're exactly right.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, much more complex. And it's great to get some tips from you on it. And that kind of leads well into another question, which is just, you know, we're obviously at a really challenging time in our country, there's no two ways around that. And, as somebody who's now again sitting slightly outside of the government, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it's like to have spent a career in public service, what the ideal role of government really is in protecting the lives of residents and resources, which is sort of what we're here to talk about today. Things as basic as water.
Felicia Marcus
This is where that weird childhood plays in. Because I was such a Literal Louis, as they said, I remember my Uncle Saul always telling me I was a Literal Louis, but he'd smile as he said it, I sort of have the mindset of a 10 year old, being open to everything. But actually learning rules and things, like I thought the golden rule was really a rule, it was like lightning would strike you or something really horrible would happen. I just thought you really had to do that or you spontaneously combust, like in Spinal Tap. And I carry that with me, you know, we all have our inner 10 year old or whatever year it is that some of our moral, ethical fiber was sort of put together.
I also literally took the whole fourth grade civics thing about what government was, which is that it's an expression of the collective so that we don't have anarchy. It's not that government is a separate thing, and some people definitely view government as some separate overlord that they hate, or that they expect to do more for them than it was set up to do, either way, you know, people in government get vilified. But in fact, it's our collective expression of what we think as a group ought to happen. You see it as the sort of philosophical, although the divide is much greater than the theoretical philosophical one these days, divide between folks who think government should be limited and government should do more. It's not that some are good and some are bad. It's just a philosophical sense of as a collective what should we put in the hands of government? What shouldn't we?
I mean, those kind of Democratic/Republican debates, I long for those now, because that's not part of the discourse. But if you think about it, that's actually an interesting conversation to have if you could still have the interesting conversations. I thought of public service as in some ways a noble thing to do. My parents who I lost pretty early on were both public servants. So my mindset wasn't anti government. But as I got older, I started seeing government not doing what I thought it should be doing. Hence, the thought that I need to go to law school so I could sue government to get stuff done. But then, of course, my experience of going in and working with these amazing humble public servants at the local level in public with those guys, they're like the coolest, they got no credit from anybody. And they just got beat up in the outside world, by me for a while, by others, and by the City Council, people down the hall. And they just knew they were there to do the right thing. And they just let it wash over them. And sometimes it pained them, but they were amazing. And so I was really inspired by them.
I found the same thing. And the federal and state government, although it differed at times, I think the federal government, as much i love the EPA people, suffers from being too many steps removed from the real world. So my approach to public service has always been to open the doors and windows to the people we serve, whether they're in ag or in business, or in EJ communities, or Tribes, or environmental community or their local government, or whatever, it's a we, you know, government's not an it, it's an expression of we. So I think the ideal role that folks in public service play is to try and facilitate the common good through engaging with others. And sometimes that means you got to be the 800 pound gorilla. Because sometimes people need you to be that, they don't want to be a jerk.
I mean, it's sort of like in the SGMA example that I was fond of telling that, you know, at coffee shops and bars, people in agriculture would come up to me, because I worked a lot with agriculture at EPA on some innovative air and other issues and say, look, you guys have to make us do this, just don't say I told you so. Because the political culture was to be anti government and anti regulation. So them saying yes to regulation would have had them voted out of office, if they were in office, or just ostracized in their community. But there were a lot of folks who understood that they needed a backstop to give them the ability to do what they needed to do so they didn't drain their aquifers dry. In fact, some of whom spoke at microphones ultimately, like Myles Ryder and others towards the end. But I think what government needs to do is to be a little more sophisticated than we see at times and think of themselves as a strategic partner and use, not just the regulate from top down tool, a more strategic set of tools to try and move societal benefit for the most people kind of ahead.
It akes a little bit of intellectual thinking to do that. But it also takes having a very human and humble sense of what you're doing in government. The career folks, although there's plenty of discussion about folks just punching a timecard, I certainly didn't experience that in any of the agencies I worked in. Rarely, I mean, occasionally there were folks who didn't get it, but teeny, teeny percentage. More, I found people who were public service oriented, who liked the fact that they got none of the glory, but they work every day, they went to work to kind of do good, and didn't get paid as much. But they felt better about what they did every day, I think they just sometimes needed a little more respect for people on the outside who had to make a paycheck or had to do the same in the environmental world. You know, there aren't that many nonprofit environmental jobs. So plenty of people have to go into government or business to put food on the table. So you shouldn't be judging. Government as convener, I think is a really important undervalued role.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, that's super helpful. And I guess a big part of our listeners are usually researchers and academics. And you're one of the best suited people to address a question that all of us are very interested in, which is the role of science and just research more generally in water management in the state and the kinds of advice you might have for students and researchers who want to do policy relevant work.
Felicia Marcus
Well, Ithink, although we're California and we appreciate science, more than the current national administration appears to, I always say appears to, we're not that good at elevating it. I'm not like, oh, we do a lot of great science around the Delta. I've been at so many great Delta science conferences, or the policy conferences or Delta Council meetings, I see a lot of good people doing really good work. I think it's important to do a little cross talking. And that's not just going to seminars, that's individual effort to go talk to people to follow what's going on in a different language than the language of talking to each other.
There are some academic institutions and other institutions that encourage that, but more often, you've got folks kind of focusing more inward on what they need to do to succeed within a narrower world and I don't minimize how tough that is, if you're trying to get tenure that you're somewhere on that path. I still don't quite understand - I've been doing my Margaret Mead thing to try and understand what it's like, what it feels like to actually be in an academic institution, because of the first time I've been there. So it's really, it's actually pretty interesting. But I do think really not turning a blind eye to what's happening in the outside world, or what policymakers are struggling with, is really important.
I also think learning to communicate, which is why I'm a fan of yours, is learning how to communicate in a way that non scientists can understand, is really important to allowing your good scientific work to be useful in the world - it doesn't mean you have to step outside your lane. But it does mean being aware of it and aware of where it might be helpful. And in conveying things in a way that isn't so much in academic language as to be impenetrable. I mean, in some ways, I have been over the years to tons of retreats between scientists and policymakers. So Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, it was called the Estuary Project at the time, we spent two days on the Queen Mary locked on a boat, trying to figure out how to do a report. And finally, I just said, let's just do it both ways, because we want scientists and policymakers to understand it. And I think a little bit of that cross training goes a long way.
The other area that I want to flag is innovation. I don't mean all the papers written about what makes an innovation, I mean, just doing those papers that make what's out there accessible to people, you know, a menu, a shopping list, policymakers can handle a shopping list. They probably don't have the time for the analysis of which item is better than the other item, which in academia, I have found people feel the need to do quite a bit, which I just observe, again, from an anthropological perspective, as opposed to just put the menu out there with some stories, and then let a policymaker look.
So let's think about it in the field of technology, there has been a complete revolution in technology, in sensors, in telemetry, in remote sensing. All of a sudden, we could actually trust but verify and that totally changes how we might regulate things, right, because there are now sensors that are going to be able to tell us in real time versus a monthly grab sample, that you're figuring out how to average over something and how to deal with excursions, we can just have monitors that tell us in real time whether requirements are being met. I mean, that's going to save a lot and that will give us much more information too if we get a network of those out there.
Similarly, we can figure out how to deal with aging infrastructure more efficiently so that everything doesn't cost so much. So you don't have to be on a whatever it is, a 50 year replacement cycle, say for your pipes, you can actually put in equipment that can listen and tell which parts of the pipe are most likely to break so that you can fix the parts that are most likely to break because it's not uniform, because the geology around them is different. There are communities who have saved 90% of the budgets that they had planned for, and they're not just pocketing the 90, they're using that savings to replace their infrastructure faster, but doing it more intelligently. So a lot of nature based solutions.
We can figure out whether doing some green infrastructure to do treatment, as opposed to always having to buy ever increasingly expensive treatment systems with their attendant, increasing energy use to solve a problem. And you can do win wins, like they're doing in urban stormwater, in a lot of places like LA where now they've got a whole county wide effort that's gonna have $300 million a year to deal with not just pollution, water supply, and flood control, but urban green space and equity. I mean, to do that, and monitor it, you can do that now. So it opens up whole new worlds. I'd love to see more writing about that. And assessment, you know, because there's a lot of marketing, obviously.
A lot of these technologies need to have folks with scientific and technical expertise, who can actually write about, you know, what are the most promising things they're seeing, so that, you know, whether it's a water agency or a regulator has some access to something that seems overwhelming. That's one of my big things where I see there's a tremendous upside up there. But we need to help people with scientific and technical skills, because it can sound good to me. But I know enough to know that I don't know whether something's good marketing, or it's actually a game changer.
Faith Kearns
That's great. It's actually nice to hear such specific advice on such specific topics, and I could probably go on asking you questions for like another couple of days. But I'm going to go ahead and start to wrap up. And so I want to ask you the last question that we like to ask all our guests, which is if there's anything that you would like listeners to know that we haven't been able to address yet, and most of all, how can all of us including Sam, Mallika, and myself and also our listeners support your efforts and your work in this world.
Felicia Marcus
I just think you know, it's funny, I'm giving you specific answers. Because I'm more of the implementation geek or a mechanic. Someone once told me I had the heart of a construction worker when I was in public works. I was so honored, I like doing this stuff and seeing things happen on the ground, that's what I get a charge out of it, as well as seeing an individual realize they can do something that they didn't realize they could do. As a manager, I always really loved that. But also somebody whether they're at a podium or somewhere else, realizing that somebody heard them that they didn't expect to hear them, I really feel good about that.
I think if there's anything I would sort of commend to anybody, it's to have a little more compassion towards people that aren't in your field or in your circle, because there are such good people in every walk of life, it's just painful to watch them collide or miss each other. And the places I've seen people come together focused on a real world result, they have been just miracles. That's why I went to land conservation for about seven years after the Bay Delta work in the 90s. Because I was so frustrated having to have the same conversation over and over again with my colleagues in the water world who seem to not be able to do that internal leadership thing of what you have to do to reach across the divide that people almost anywhere else I've been do. But in land deals, you're working across landowners, sometimes ranchers, sometimes farmers, sometimes industrial people, I mean all kinds of people in the urban to wilderness context, environmentalists, philanthropists, government, people at all levels, who don't normally get along together. But they end up being able to get along to make a really cool thing happen on the ground in their community.
So to me, whatever that magic is that gets people to try to figure out what another person really cares about or needs, as opposed to just running around being hurt that their needs aren't being met and being mad at everybody, or trying to win. It's not all you know, in the headlines, it's just the decisions people make when they walk into any meeting or any gathering about do I really want to hear from everybody, do I really want to try and move things forward. If more people did that, we would get a lot more done. And it to me, it really happens between your own ears.
It's not a decision to make once, it's not a one and done, it's post its on the bathroom mirror, it's tinkling bracelets, it's whatever it takes to to make the decision that you're going to walk into a room to try to make something constructive happen for yourself, but for other people, too. And you need to see how well people respond to that, they really, really do. So that's the main thing I think people should do. I think people steal victory from themselves all the time. I could talk about the tunnels, you could talk about any number of issues that haven't come to fruition, and I can take ownership. And I could tell you what I could have done differently on the Bay Delta plan, that in retrospect, I think we would have gotten further faster had I followed my own advice.
So I just really think people need to prioritize how to be constructive together, particularly as we're hopefully coming out of an era where it seems like the forces of division have gotten a megaphone and divided us not just at the national level, but especially at the national level. And look at how some of these traumas, whether COVID or Black Lives Matter , and everything that came before for many years, has actually brought out the better angels out a lot of people and some real epiphanies about our roles and privileges and stuff that I think can bring out the best in each other. I think it's not just about yourself. It's about an intention of trying to help everybody else, which can't nobody can do it all the time. I mean, nobody's a saint, if everybody tried to do it a little more than they do, we would be a damn sight better than we are.
Faith Kearns
Thank you, Felicia, we've all got our charge now moving into the next few weeks and months!