Thomas J. Graff, an Expert on West Coast Water Use, Is Dead at 65
Matthew Kruk
Thomas J. Graff, an Expert on West Coast Water Use, Is Dead at 65
By JESSE McKINLEY
SAN FRANCISCO - Thomas J. Graff, a leading environmentalist who
championed the idea of offering financial incentives for environmentally
friendly behavior, an approach that had far-reaching impact on state and
federal policies, especially on water use in the drought-prone West,
died Nov. 12 in Oakland, Calif., where he lived. He was 65.
The cause was thyroid cancer, his family said.
Mr. Graff, who founded the first California office of the Environmental
Defense Fund and led it for 37 years, dealt with a host of environmental
issues, including AB 32, the first-of-its-kind legislation, adopted in
2006, that sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions in California. But he
made his biggest impact in the realm of water use, a constant source of
vexation in the West.
Mr. Graff's early support for using market forces to encourage
environmentally friendly behavior was a somewhat radical idea at the
time. But it has since become increasingly common in environmental
negotiations nationwide and has echoes in "cap and trade" policies
around the world involving things like airborne pollutants and carbon
emissions.
"If a resource is scarce, we ought to put a price on it that reflects
its value," Mr. Graff said in an interview in 2008. "Otherwise there's
an incentive to over-consume."
Mr. Graff's theory was put to wide use in 1992, when he cajoled federal
lawmakers into passing the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, a
landmark bill that established a new accounting system to assure that
diversions of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, whose waters
help irrigate millions of acres of farmland to the south, would not
outstrip the delta's own ecological needs.
The bill also established a groundwork for a so-called water market,
which allowed agricultural interests to sell excess water to cities and
other users for a profit. This process rewarded farmers for conservation
and simultaneously helped protect the delta, where salmon and other fish
are sometimes endangered by giant pumps and low water levels in
tributaries.
"On the Central Valley Improvement Act, no person was more important
than Tom Graff," Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said in
a statement after his death. "It wasn't just his knowledge of water. It
was his knowledge about the stewardship of the environment and what this
state had to consider if it really thought about its future."
Mr. Graff also played a major role in Project 88, an influential,
privately financed 1988 report to President-elect George Bush, which
focused on ways to use market forces to protect the environment and led
to the development of market-oriented controls on acid rain.
Born in Honduras to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and educated in
law at Harvard, Mr. Graff learned the art of politics and persuasion in
Washington and New York, serving as a clerk for a federal judge in the
capital and a legislative assistant to Mayor John V. Lindsay of New
York. In 1970, a private law practice drew him to San Francisco, but his
love of the environment quickly led him across the bay to Berkeley.
In 1971, Mr. Graff established the first California office of the
Environmental Defense Fund in Berkeley, near the law library of the
University of California campus. He was joining an organization that had
staked out a science-based middle ground in the growing and often
polarized environmental movement.
Mr. Graff's own philosophy combined equal parts pragmatism and personal
charm. In Berkeley, he used economists and computer analysts to break
down energy and water issues, believing that hard data were a singular
tool for winning arguments, whether in boardrooms or courtrooms. (His
obsession with statistics was also personal; he kept a running tally of
his free-throw percentage during his down-time basketball games.)
While corporations and public utilities had long been viewed as the
enemy in the environmental movement - an early motto at the defense fund
was "sue the bastards" - Mr. Graff showed a willingness to work with
potential combatants.
Indeed, last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California hailed Mr.
Graff's accomplishments even as he signed a new state water reform law,
calling him a friend to "even those who would normally be considered
adversaries."
Mr. Graff is survived by his wife, Sharona Barzilay of Oakland; two
daughters, Rebecca Graff of Cambridge, Mass., and Samantha Graff of
Oakland; a son, Benjamin Graff of San Jose, Calif.; a sister, Claudia
Bial of Fort Lee, N.J.; and two grandchildren.
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