Thinking about Drought, Crisis, and the Waterscapes of the American West
How to solve the enduring water problem?
What will become of our waterscapes?
What does water mean to our society?
(Image taken on August 30, 2019 from the banks of the Colorado River running along the Emerald Cove resort community, “population drunk”)
January 10, 2020 - The Los Angeles River outside the city limits.
Unfortunately, meeting these questions head-on is less of a distant speculation than an immediate concern these days.
Today (June 14, 2022) a hearing in Congress on the state of the Colorado River and the crisis of the region’s water supply in the American Southwest was held by the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. These happen every so often. But, this particular hearing (“to examine short and long term solutions to extreme drought in the Western U.S.) felt more serious and sober than those previous that I have read about and followed since I first began take a rigorous interest in these topics. You can find some of the past archived hearings on C-SPAN. See also for example here. There is a wealth of resources circulated on these topics. High on my list of in-depth journalistic accounts of the water issues in the American West is the series from ProPublica that began several years ago.
And so, today, as I listened, I heard many familiar, perhaps rather tired remarks. Some familiar leitmotifs that come to mind immediately were about the resilience of the Western American people, about how America will suffer if farmers don’t have the water to grow their food. About how we are in need, of sustainable and reliable water supplies that will provide jobs, economic growth, and support for families. Indeed, all this sets the stakes quite high, and rightly so.
Still, one of the things that has always fascinated me about unpacking the debates about water in the American West, and one of the things that drew me to the subject in the first place, is that it seems to be a never ending well of all of America’s anxieties - of the constitution and sustainability of the family, of the cohesion of of the economic and moral principles, attachments to land and places, and to the future of society itself, of an American democracy, in all its flaws.
January 19, 2020 - Tucson, Arizona, a city reliant on water from the Colorado River, but also an intricate evolution of water management policies and groundwater storage, and conservation practices.
October 19, 2019 - Near Firebaugh, CA
As I listened to the hearing today, the members of Congress listened rather intently to a number of different federal agency experts, farmers, and other state municipal water professionals.
In general, the states and the Bureau of Reclamation’s ask were clear, that they needed more money and that what money they have received they have been putting to good use. And they are not wrong for asking for it - I’m glad someone is. Of all the things we could spend federal dollars on, it would seem that attempting to ensure the basic survival of the state’s subjects would be of interest. And yet, in the same moment that these agencies begin to speak of what they will do with this money, it gives me pause. While they do mention conservation practices and demand management, it always appears to come back to supply management in the minds of many officials (here I will note my own lack of knowledge about all the measures the Neavda has taken on demand management in the past decade, which deserves closer examination and perhaps an update to what water historian Robert Glennon [and my former professor] wrote not so long ago). The supply options are fairly clear. Can we build more dams? Can we build more desalination plants? If the money goes to more R&D on this, or other such things, this is where my cynicism creeps. It continues to strike me as unfortunate that it is only for obvious technologically driven projects for which political support can be gained - a domestic techno-politics ensues.
And so, now more than ever, I continue to come back to the work of sociologist John Walton in his book Western Times and Water Wars on this, as water is never just about water, but about the complex workings of the state and its relationship to nature, civil society, and justice:
“It is a paradox of modern democratic societies that the state is considered both the cause and the cure of injustice. The state is believed to foster social ills directly by conferring privilege on certain powerful constituents and indirectly by failing to serve the less coherent public interest. To ensure justice, citizens must then confront authority as outsiders, either by mobilizing in protest or by withdrawing their approval from the state. Nowhere is this presumed opposition of state and society so strongly maintained as in the United States. Indeed, it is striking that this question remains and that America in particular maintains a deeply ambivalent relation to the state (1).
I often wonder if in the end this is actually not resolvable in any traditional sense, but it seems clear that we must critique and act within this critical tension.
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Moving to Arizona later this month, all of these things will be even more on my mind and I will be paying even closer attention. Stay tuned for my dispatches from the Valley of the Sun.