Environmental Anthropology

Future Directions

Helen Kopnina, Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Helen Kopnina, Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138952713
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135044121
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume presents new theoretical approaches, methodologies, subject pools, and topics in the field of environmental anthropology. Environmental anthropologists are increasingly focusing on self-reflection - not just on themselves and their impacts on environmental research, but also on the reflexive qualities of their subjects, and the extent to which these individuals are questioning their own environmental behavior. Here, contributors confront the very notion of "natural resources" in granting non-human species their subjectivity and arguing for deeper understanding of "nature," and "wilderness" beyond the label of "ecosystem services." By engaging in interdisciplinary efforts, these anthropologists present new ways for their colleagues, subjects, peers and communities to understand the causes of, and alternatives to environmental destruction. This book demonstrates that environmental anthropology has moved beyond the construction of rural, small group theory, entering into a mode of solution-based methodologies and interdisciplinary theories for understanding human-environmental interactions. It is focused on post-rural existence, health and environmental risk assessment, on the realm of alternative actions, and emphasizes the necessary steps towards preventing environmental crisis.

Health, Risk Assessment, and Prediction

5

Ecomyopia Meets the Longue Durée

An Information Ecology of the Increasingly Arid Southwestern United States

David Casagrande and Charles Peters

Introduction

Let us begin with a metaphor. There is a ghost that haunts the water policy discourse in the American Southwest. Among the iconic images identifying the American Southwest we see haunting photos of the abandoned pueblo cliff dwellings of the Anasazi (e.g., Figure 5.1, Mesa Verde). They are found above the tributaries of the Colorado and the Rio Grande in northeastern Arizona, northern New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, and southern Utah (Figure 5.2, map). These prehistoric structures symbolize both the attempt to engineer stability under systemic stress and its failure. Their abandonment is associated with prolonged, severe drought.¹ This is part of the scientific conclusion that was presented to a public who were recently informed that the Southwest has been characterized by periods of prolonged severe drought throughout most of the past 1,200 years (Kunzig 2008). Such droughts are the norm.² The early twentieth century was the wettest in the past 500 years, an anomaly. The principal industries, the proliferation of private swimming pools, and oasis image of the Southwest are built on an anomaly. The region’s human population is also one of the fastest-growing in the United States. The longue durée of climate (and its extremes of natural variation) is an unwelcome specter in a region where unprecedented economic growth has become dangerously synonymous with the idea of stability. A crash in water consumption or human population seems inevitable.

Figure 5.1 Mesa Verde: Perhaps best known to the public, this ancient pueblo with its spectacular setting and multistoried houses was abandoned in the late 1200s, after a prolonged period of severe drought (it is located in southwestern Colorado; see map, Figure 5.2. Photo source: Wikipedia Creative Commons; photo by Lorax (G. Edward Johnson).

Figure 5.2 Map of the study area with major rivers, dams, cities, and state political boundaries. Mesa Verde is located in southwestern Colorado. The Central Arizona Project transports water from Lake Havasu and the Parker Dam to Phoenix and Tucson. The Colorado River Aqueduct provides water to highly populated counties of the Los Angeles metropolitan area: it ends in reservoirs and local canals just to the east of the metropolis. Cartographic sources: Arizona Department of Water Resources, Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and the World Resources Simulation Center.

There are important differences between the current human ecosystem of the Southwest and that of the Anasazi. The governmental environments of the current human ecosystem include not only a hierarchy of organizational levels from the community to the region but beyond that the federal level of the nation-state. Also, the informational environments of the current system now include some long-term data that could be used to inform an adaptive public policy. But the question remains, how will the current system respond differently? From a theoretical and realistic point of view, how can a highly technical democratic society respond to new kinds of information predicting a high risk of partially avoidable re-occurring crises on a transgenerational time scale? We examine this question from the anthropological perspective of information ecology within a human ecosystems theoretical framework, blending traditional ecologies with cognitive psychology, and propose a method for theory using the “increasingly arid Southwest” as a case study.

That North Americans now view the Southwest as “increasingly arid” is a kind of ecomyopia. Contrary to popular assumptions, the southwestern climate has never been in a steady state or equilibrium. For over 1,000 years the Southwest has been subject to periods of prolonged severe drought. The most fundamental and important question we can raise is: Will the people currently most concerned or affected create a learning system at the local to regional scale that can preserve much of their infrastructure and population in the face of long-term water shortages, or will they allow a transgenerational emergency to develop that radically alters their human ecosystem beyond recognition? What are their options?

The idea that climate change has had profound impacts on the stability of previous civilizations has been reinforced by recent research in European historical ecology—for example, the rise and fall of the Western Roman Empire (Büntgen et al. 2011). One value of a long-term study of the Arid Southwest as a living system is the opportunity for environmental anthropology to examine pathways of individual and socially distributed cognitions, along with cultural models as shared schemes of reasoning, in relation to the creation of new ecological knowledge and the civil powers of governmental administrative authority faced with the reality of climate change.

Study Area, Methods, and Conceptual Devices

Study Area: Background of the Political Geography, Water Resources, and Water Management Institutions of the Arid Southwest

The Spanish were the first Europeans to explore the Southwest, having established settlements in the early sixteenth century. Los Angeles had developed into a major urban area with a population of 500,000 by 1920; this number has risen to about 18 million today. Phoenix, in contrast, was established after the end of the Mexican-American War (1848), when European-American settlements were developed, especially in the 1860s, to serve Fort McDowell. Its population had grown to 75,000 by 1900 and it grew much more rapidly following World War II. The current population of the Phoenix metropolitan area is about 4.3 million. Los Angeles and Phoenix exemplify the explosive population growth and demand for water that have occurred in the Southwest over the last 100 years.

Our study of the Arid Southwest is focused on the Colorado River watershed and the state of Arizona in particular. The Colorado River watershed covers parts of seven states (Figure 5.2). Major cities in the broader region include Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque. Water is the central theme in the history of the American Southwest. Rainfall in Phoenix averages only 8 inches (about 20 cm) per year. There is more precipitation, especially snow, at higher elevations. Snowmelt is the major source of the water in the Colorado River and its tributaries.

The Colorado River currently provides water for about 30 million people. Humans consume all of its water. Water from the Colorado River has not flowed into the sea for the last decade. Per treaties, laws, and court decisions, the river’s water is allocated between the seven states of the American Southwest and Mexico (Figure 5.2). This is known as “the law of the river” in informal policy discourse. Dendroclimatological studies reveal that the agreements for sharing Colorado River water are historically based on water data that were, as it turns out, collected during an unusually wet period at the beginning of the last century. In-place water-sharing agreements, planning, and development are all based on spurious estimates of the long-term water supply. It is perhaps ironic that much of the impetus for uncovering the new view has come from the region’s water managers. They are in the unique position of being able to promote the funding of new scientific research into the region’s history, the first to consider its implications systematically, and the first to be concerned as both public policy agents and citizens. Some of this part of their story has been told to the public by Kunzig (2008) in National Geographic magazine, which has also featured a number of articles over the years on increasingly human-amplified ecological stress and limits to natural resources. Paradoxically, the region’s decision-makers do not appear to have completely absorbed the implications of the new long-term view of the region’s climate.

All together, the main sources of water in our study area are underground aquifers, the Colorado River, and its tributaries. Water in metropolitan Phoenix, as a case in point, comes from municipal wells, dammed reservoirs on the Salt River in the Superstition Mountains, and the Colorado River. The Central Arizona Project includes a series of canals, tunnels, and pumps that move water from the Colorado River in northern Arizona 336 miles to Phoenix and Tucson (Figure 5.2). Consistent with what we now know about the climate of the region, the Colorado River Basin is currently in the throes of a severe drought more than a decade long. Many reservoir levels are critically low. A looming Great Drought scenario is darkened further by warming temperatures that increase evaporation and water demand but decrease precipitation occurring as snow, which is crucial for recharging reservoirs (Mote et al. 2005). Thus we see in both the tree-ring studies and the climate models a longue durée perspective of prolonged severe droughts as the expected norm for the region. Meanwhile, the growth continues, with the population of Phoenix projected to double by 2050 (Walton, Tomasik, and Anderson 2004).

Who are the stakeholders most haunted by the ghosts of the Anasazi and Hohokam? Those who are most haunted are probably the agents who recognize and appear to minimize stress to the current human ecosystem. Paradoxically, they manufacture, promote, or invest in the myopic consensus that metropolitan Phoenix is an oasis in the desert, that unbounded economic growth is sustainable, and that increasing demands for water can be met by more efficient use of existing water resources. It is taboo to question any of these beliefs publicly or to suggest that federal intervention in decision making is needed.

The agents that play various roles in the region’s water management form a partially nested hierarchy of decision making (Table 5.1). Federal agencies provide water through large-scale projects that would not exist without federal legislation, but they have no legislated authority over state and local agencies. Arizona’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act created districts that are charged with managing water so as not to deplete ground water. These districts are subject to the authority of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. The Multi-State Colorado River Compact is a nominally cooperative effort (although often acrimonious) in which the agencies of the seven southwestern states share Colorado River water (the seven states are shown in Figure 5.2). Federal agencies have direct authority over the compact during times of crisis, but agreements about water allocation have been largely shaped by U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Lower-level courts also influence local policies within states. There is also a loose hierarchical structure of Native American governance within which important decisions about water management on tribal lands are made and negotiations with state and federal agencies are leveraged through tribal cooperation. And, as implied by Table 5.1, none of the rapid economic and population growth in Arizona would have been possible without infusions of capital from hierarchically arranged financial institutions from local banks to Wall Street.

Table 5.1 Partially Nested Hierarchy of Water Management and Major Agents of Influence in the Arid Southwest, with a Particular Focus on Arizona

a. The Bureau of Reclamation’s historical motivation for building dams was based in part on hubris. The Sierra Club was originally created to challenge water development in the Southwest. No Colorado River water currently reaches the Gulf of California.

b. Prior to the 1922 Colorado River Compact, rivalries between Southwestern states led to a tragedy of the commons in which each state attempted to build infrastructure and appropriate water before another could. Interstate cooperation is still problematic although increasingly innovative.

c. Native American claims to water are poorly defined or currently in litigation, which creates uncertainty for water managers.

d. Tourism is a major component of the Arizona economy.

e. Rural areas lack the political influence of urban areas.

f. Global capital de-localizes decision-making with cultural models not grounded in the realities of community ethics.

g. Del Webb markets retirement “lifestyles” in several states. They created the planned town of Anthem in the middle of the desert 31 miles north of downtown Phoenix. The Phoenix metropolitan area has been successfully marketed as an “oasis in the desert.”

h. Sense of place, or local identities, are constructed in neighborhoods with little control over water allocation. Homeowner associations exist to maintain home value, often in conflict with individual quality of life and water conservation.

Although few of the agents represented in Table 5.1 are bound directly by the authority of agents at higher levels, they are constrained by decisions made at higher levels by people who are more physically and psychologically removed from local realities. The scope of the worldview on which each of these agents base decisions diff ers greatly (Figure 5.3). While they may share core values (religious values, for example), the values they seek to maximize in making decisions about the Arid Southwest differ greatly. This is probably quite different from the religious/political ecology of the ancient cliff dwellers, if their descendants can be used as a guide.

Figure 5.3 Scope of individual worldviews regarding water resources in the Arid Southwest. Different agents operating at different scales maximize different values. A gap in potentially shared understanding occurs at the level of community.

Method for Theory

Our method ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: Environmental Anthropology of Today and Tomorrow
• Pathways: Reflections on the Self and Society
• Health, Risk Assessment, and Prediction
• Solutions-Based Research, Alternative Methodologies, and Lifeways
• Contributors
• Index