The year was 1964. It was a year the United States was embroiled in Vietnam. It was the year of the British Invasion before the Beatles played at Shea Stadium. And it was the year that Lyndon Baines Johnson who embraced the civil rights policies of his predecessor John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964 after Congress passed it by a 2 1/2 to 1 margin in the House of Representatives and 3 to 1 in the Senate that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, in the workplace, and in schools. And it was the year that presidential historians agreed democracy began not in 1776 but in America just 60 years ago.
It was the year in 1964 that a clean environment and science was the popular preference of Americans. It followed from the space race in 1955 when the Americans and the Soviets raced to the moon and Dwight David Eisenhower pushed for a change in the way that kids were educated in America in math and science. It followed from the quest for science and engineering when Ike in 1956 pushed to build the Interstate highway system that linked America from coast to coast and put engineers to work on building America’s biggest public works project ever. And it followed from Silent Spring in 1962 when oceanographer Rachel Carson wrote the book about chemicals in society as a best seller and John Fitzgerald Kennedy read it and embraced it because he was a sailor who cared about the environment. That’s how JFK became interested in cleaning up our nation’s waterways and he followed up on a 1959 report from Senator Mike Mansfield from Montana that said water was the biggest problem in the American West, a 1961 report he commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences recommending more water research and jobs training by our nation’s universities, and a 1963 article in the journal Science that recommended strengthening our nation’s institutions of higher learning to train engineers and scientists.
Building on JFK’s water initiative, on July 17, 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Water Resources Research Act (WRRA) passed by a healthy majority of the Congress that established a network of “water resources research and technology institutes or centers…” at the 54 land grant institutions that stretch from Maine on the Atlantic to Micronesia in the South Pacific. The 1964 WRRA was based on the 1862 Morrill Act that established land grant colleges and the 1887 Hatch Act that established state agricultural experimental stations and was reauthorized in 1984 and reappropriated in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We are authorized by Congress and have the authority of Federal laws passed during the administrations of Abraham Lincoln in 1862, Grover Cleveland in 1887, Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, Ronald Reagan in 1984, and Joe Biden in 2021. Our Congressionally chartered land grant institutions in the mid-Atlantic at Delaware, District of Columbia, Cornell, Penn State, Maryland, Rutgers, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, and our peer universities out West at Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue, Montana, Tennessee, and Washington State are authorized to assist the Nation and the States in augmenting their water resources science and technology as a way to: (1) conduct research into the nation’s water matters and challenges and (2) train and educate future scientists, policy specialists, and engineers for careers in water resources. When LBJ signed the act into law he said that “abundant, good water is essential to continued economic growth and progress…and Congress has found that we have entered a period in which acute water shortages are hampering our industries, our agriculture, our recreation, and our individual health and happiness.”
The 1964 Water Resources Research Act with an appropriation administered by the Department of Interior and U.S. Geological Survey has been successful over the last six decades. One of the first NIWR research students supported by the WRRA was Elinor Ostrom, a UCLA graduate student who researched regional planning (not popular in LA) and the water wars in Southern California and when she moved to Indiana University was one of the early scholars in game theory and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The WRRA Program invests in water resources that support a trillion dollar economy in the U.S notably clean water that supports fishing ($42 billion), hunting ($23 billion), and bird watching ($46 billion) and outdoor recreation totaling $140 billion nationally for boating, paddling, and sailing. River basins feeding the Delaware River contributes $22 billion in economic activity and 600,000 jobs, the Chesapeake Bay as the nation’s largest estuary supports a trillion dollar tourism, fishery, and agriculture economy, and the Colorado River supports drinking water for 40 million Americans, a $1.4 trillion economy,16 million jobs, and 12% of the U.S. GDP. The 54 WRRA program institutes at our nation’s colleges with over 10 million alumni have trained and supported the research of over 25,000 student water research projects that have paid off in protecting the health, safety, and welfare of the American public.
Water research in the U.S is a national priority. The drought in the East continues after it hadn’t rained in over two months, a record stretching back to the first National Weather Bureau rain gauges in 1894. Unprecedented catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Ida in September 2021 and Hurricanes Helena and Milton this year drove Americans away from their homes and jobs in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina. Out West we saw the worst drought in 400 years since the Indigenous people and then the Spanish lived on the land and then atmospheric rivers flowed from the Pacific and flooded LA, San Francisco, and Seattle and more recently NOAA reports there is a concerning snow drought in the Sierra Nevada in the water towers of the west.
In 1965 the Board of Trustees established the University of Delaware Water Resources Center on campus in accordance with the WRRA and it was set in law by an act of the Governor and Delaware General Assembly. This year we are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Water Resources Research Act and next year in 2025 we will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the UDWRC on campus. In Delaware, the UDWRC has offices in Newark on the main campus with origins in 1743 as the 8th oldest institution of higher learning in the U.S. and Lewes campus at the mouth of the Delaware Bay by the Atlantic Ocean. With a cost sharing approach from Federal, state, local and philanthropic sources, we support dozens of undergraduate and graduate students at Delaware, Delaware State University, and Delaware Technical and Community College in their water research concerning PFAS in drinking water, coastal and riverine flooding, harmful algal blooms in lakes and reservoirs, water based recreation such as hunting and fishing and boating, water economics, and drinking water quality which are issues of utmost importance to Delaware and surrounding states in the Delaware Valley and along the Chesapeake. And these students, many who graduated from and are excellently educated at Delaware high schools, go on to get good jobs in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, consulting, leading, and advocating for clean and plentiful water. That is, these graduates who conduct water research supported by funding from the WRRA and our state, county, cities, and foundations get good jobs and become the future leaders of our nation, that’s what LBJ and Congress had in mind when they passed the Water Resources Research Act in 1964.
So this year as we reach the end of 2024 as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Water Resources Research Act and go into 2025 for the diamond anniversary of the University of Delaware Water Resources Center it’s important to remember that modest investments in our youth and teaching and research about water science and policy in our nation is paying off with huge dividends in protecting our water supplies. At the UD Water Resource Center and the 54 National Institutes for Water Resources at the land grant schools that stretch halfway across the world we are here to assist the public to address and solve water problems because that is our core mission by law. It is in our nation’s schools, our elementary schools, junior highs, high schools, vocational, trade schools, apprenticeships, community colleges, universities where we have opportunities to learn and get good jobs and earn a livelihood and provide for our families and make ourselves better and make the nation better. This is actually what the WRRA and NIWR and UDWRC are all about. As we look back to 1964, we also look ahead cogently to the next 60 years of good and civil water science and policy in the United States.
Dr. Gerald Joseph McAdams Kauffman, Jr. is Director of the University of Delaware Water Resources Center in Newark, Del., Associate Professor in the Biden School of Public Policy & Administration, and the 60th President of the 54 National Institutes for Water Resources (NIWR) chartered by Congress in the 1964 Water Resources Research Act at the 54 land grant institutions in the United States, District of Columbia, and island territories of Guam/Mariana Islands/American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands.
