Board President & Executive Director

Carolee Krieger

California Water Impact Network Executive Director Carolee Krieger grew up in Hawaii, a direct descendent of King Kamehameha.

“My mother was born on the Big Island, as was her mother, and my great grandmother and great-great grandmother before her,” says Carolee. “My great-great-great grandmother married John Parker, who was one of the first white people to settle in the islands.”

Parker arrived in Hawaii in 1809, eventually establishing a deep friendship with the archipelago’s ruler, King Kamehameha. When Parker arrived, semi-domesticated cattle were ranging across the Big Island, raising havoc with Kamehameha’s fishponds.

“Captain George Vancouver brought the first cattle to the islands in 1793, and they quickly multiplied,” says Carolee. “The king technically owned them, but control was minimal at best – he was really upset at the damage they were wreaking. So he gave Parker direct control over management of the ponds and the island’s livestock.”

Kamehameha also wanted to induct Parker into the royal clan, so he authorized the marriage of his daughter, Kipikane, to the settler. That established a genealogical line from Kamehameha that extends to the present day.

“Parker’s second son, Ebenezar, married Kilia, a full-blooded Hawaiian from Maui,” says Carolee. “And their youngest daughter is my great grandmother. They all lived on a large ranch that Parker started with land that Kamehameha granted them, and they all spoke Hawaiian and followed established Hawaiian customs. They were a traditional –and by island standards – culturally conservative Hawaiian family.”

Those island traditions were still strong by the time Carolee was born.

“I was given a Hawaiian name – Kehaulani, which means ‘the soft mists from heaven.’ It’s essentially a literal translation of the Hawaiian term for ‘rain.’”

But the mid-1940s were also a fraught time for the Hawaiian people – and for a culture that was rapidly fraying under increasing white settlement and land development.

“We felt it in our own family,” recalls Carolee. “Several years before I was born, there was a police case that involved an alleged rape of a white woman by a Hawaiian and several other locals. It turned out to be completely fictitious, but it really caused deep antagonisms throughout the islands. My mother was very affected by it, and it made her afraid, and hesitant to champion her heritage.”

Carolee notes her father was a white businessman who tended to favor the things that her mother instinctively opposed as a native Hawaiian. That carried over to Hawaiian statehood in 1959.

“My father, who figured it’d be good for business, supported it,” she says. “But my mother knew it wouldn’t favor the interests of native Hawaiians, and she opposed it. So there were deep tensions, both in Hawaiian society generally and in my own family.”

Carolee tended to side with the Hawaiian point of view, a perspective that was strengthened by her relationship with her uncle, Pat Ackerman, who was the youngest Attorney General for the Territory of Hawaii ever appointed at that time.

“He was an FDR Democrat and a strong proponent of native Hawaiian rights,” she recalls. “He felt the Hawaiian reverence for the aina – the land – that my mother and I shared. That was something I had first really felt when I was a little girl and witnessed the eruption of Halemaumau, one of Hawaii’s crater volcanoes, in 1952. It was a stunning sight, and it made me realize the power and beauty of the natural world.”

Carolee attended the University of Hawaii, majoring in Asian art history with an emphasis on China. She was strongly influenced by both Taoism and Buddhism, which underlie and inform much of Chinese and Japanese art. And during an inter-island flight on Thanksgiving Day, she met someone who shared her aesthetic and philosophical interests: David Krieger, a student of the Japanese language and martial arts.

“David met his mom at the airport in Kamuela and told her he had found the girl he was going to marry. He ran into me at the University of Hawaii library a couple of weeks later, and two weeks after that – on New Year’s Eve – he proposed to me. We have been inseparable ever since.”

David was in the U.S. Army Reserves at the time, and he was called to active duty in Vietnam shortly after he and Carolee were married. But he was profoundly opposed to the war and filed as a conscientious objector. His case went all the way to federal appeals court before the Army relented, released David’s entire unit from active duty, and provided David with an honorable discharge.

“That showed me the power of the courts,” says Carolee, “and laid the foundation for my own advocacy work. I saw that one of the best ways for citizens’ groups to achieve palpable results is through legal processes, including litigation.”

 David’s opposition to armed conflict remained, and only deepened with the years.  In 1981, he founded the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which worked internationally to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict.

“He was a genuine pacifist, and deeply committed to world peace,” Carolee says of David, who died in late 2023. “But he was also a fifth-degree black belt in Shito Ryu karate. He valued karate for the self-control and physical discipline it required, and he was a true master. In fact, he beat Chuck Norris in a karate competition in Hawaii. I have a photograph on the wall of David sweeping Chuck. I’m sorry to say Chuck wasn’t a very gracious loser that day.”

Carolee and David settled in San Francisco, and then moved to Santa Barbara after David had accepted a position with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions founded by Robert M. Hutchins to counter McCarthyism.

“That job concluded after a couple of years, but by then our daughter Mara was born,” says Carolee. “We had really fallen in love with the Santa Barbara region, so we decided to stay,” Carolee says.

Carolee and David concerned themselves with the daily obligations of raising a family during their first years in Santa Barbara, but they also integrated themselves with the community and its civic challenges.

“In particular, I became increasingly aware about water issues,” she says. “At first, my concerns were local. We lived in Montecito, and we perennially dealt with water shortages. But Santa Barbara County generally wasn’t much better off. Then I came to realize it was a statewide problem. It seemed that Southern California municipalities were always struggling with water security. But I also found that some people were getting all the water they wanted – namely, Central Valley corporate farmers. They were receiving millions of acre feet of water from the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Worse, they were getting it at rock bottom rates – they were essentially subsidized by taxpayers and urban ratepayers.”

Carolee’s first foray into water activism came in 1989, when she joined the fight to stop the extension of the State Water Project to the Central Coast. She knew that the so-called “Coastal Branch” would be tremendously expensive, and that ratepayers would be saddled with decades of debt from the project.

“Worse, we also knew the SWP’s horrible record of reliability,” Carolee says.  “Given the variability in water supplies and the convoluted and inequitable nature of state water rights, it was clear that the Coastal Branch wouldn’t improve our water security by an iota.”

Carolee and her colleagues lost that fight – barely. But the narrow defeat only whetted her appetite for greater civic involvement. In 1994, she and fellow activist, systems engineer, and avid angler Arve Sojovold were appointed by the Santa Barbara Citizen’s Planning Association to monitor all Central Coast Water Authority meetings.

“I attended all the meetings, and I was the only member of the public present when the Monterey Amendments surfaced,” says Carolee. “This was the sweetheart deal between the Department of Water Resources and private contractors that transferred control of the massive Kern Water Bank – which was established to protect ratepayers during drought – to a large corporate grower: Stewart Resnick.”

The Monterey Amendments also eliminated water allocation adjustments for agribusiness even if water supplies are critically low. And worst of all, observes Carolee, “They removed the safeguard that would allow the contract amounts to be reduced if they couldn’t be delivered on a ‘safe yield’ basis as required by law. This allowed ‘paper water’ promises to remain in the contracts and never be challenged.  At that point, I knew we had to up our game.”

Carolee conferred with fellow activist Dorothy Green, environmental law attorney Michael Jackson, and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. The group established the California Water Impact Network in 2001. The goal: establish true economic and environmental equity in state water policy.

“It was clear from the beginning that we would have to litigate, and that remains central to our fight,” says Carolee. “We’ve won many battles, and we ultimately expect to prevail in the war. Our efforts are based on the public trust doctrine, which establishes through case law that water and its benefits – including fisheries, watershed and riparian habitats, and recreation – must be managed for the citizenry at large. Small, powerful cabals – most significantly, Central Valley agribusiness – have no right to take what belongs to all of us.”

Currently, Carolee is devoting a great deal of her time and energy to securing a public trust analysis from ECOnorthwest, a Portland, Oregon research group specializing in economic and environmental analytics.

“Much of their work will focus on establishing an economic value for our public trust resources, including healthy rivers and fish,” she says.  “We will also quantify the amount of water that’s actually available in California during different water year types and align that data with policies that reflect the primacy of the public trust doctrine. That will give us the definitive evidence we need to prevail in court – any court.”

Carolee still lives in Montecito, her home for 51 years. At this point, she has been fighting to protect California’s water resources for more than thirty-five years. She hopes for a successful resolution in her lifetime – but if that isn’t in the cards, she knows C-WIN and its allies will carry on the battle.

“For me, it all goes back to Hawaii, to the concept of aina, the love of the land,” says Carolee. “Aina and water are inseparable components, and there’s no place where that’s more apparent than California. We must win this fight – and I believe we will. The science, the legal evidence, basic morality, and the public are all on our side.”