Water

Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity

Jeremy J. Schmidt

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479892778
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An intellectual history of America's water management philosophy. Humans take more than their geological share of water, but they do not benefit from it equally. This imbalance has created an era of intense water scarcity that affects the security of individuals, states, and the global economy. For many, this brazen water grab and the social inequalities it produces reflect the lack of a coherent philosophy connecting people to the planet. Challenging this view, Jeremy Schmidt shows how water was made a “resource” that linked geology, politics, and culture to American institutions. Understanding the global spread and evolution of this philosophy is now key to addressing inequalities that exist on a geological scale. Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity, details the remarkable intellectual history of America’s water management philosophy. It shows how this philosophy shaped early twentieth-century conservation in the United States, influenced American international development programs, and ultimately shaped programs of global governance that today connect water resources to the Earth system. Schmidt demonstrates how the ways we think about water reflect specific public and societal values, and illuminates the process by which the American approach to water management came to dominate the global conversation about water. Debates over how human impacts on the planet are connected to a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—tend to focus on either the social causes of environmental crises or scientific assessments of the Earth system. Schmidt shows how, when it comes to water, the two are one and the same. The very way we think about managing water resources validates putting ever more water to use for some human purposes at the expense of others.

Part I

Abundance

1

First Water, Then the World

Modern water management has often been characterized as radical. Radical, that is, in the sense that states have often taken the control of water to an extreme. In the mid-twentieth century, Karl Wittfogel developed an influential thesis that this sort of radical management is frequently on display when state bureaucracies control water to achieve a kind of total power over the organization of society, institutions, and industry.1 Since then, numerous accounts have been offered of how previous civilizations attempted to achieve social or political power through the control of water. These attempts often failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, because some key variable was overlooked, such as climate change, or because cultural biases created a distorted view of nature. Some just put too much faith in their own ingenuity. Whatever the reason, the literature on water management is awash with these sorts of cautionary tales. A few recent titles that affirm the need to learn from these failures include Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (2010), Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind (2011), and The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water (2011).2 The thesis behind such accounts is intuitively plausible. Indeed, for the most part, as water goes, so goes society.

Epic stories of water and civilization, however, are not entirely satisfying, especially if they assume that since time immemorial people have been striving to effectively manage water and social relationships to it. This chapter lays the groundwork for a different way of thinking. This alternative also holds that modern water management has been radical, but in a different way. It was radical because it made contingency its basis and, in so doing, undercut other ways of thinking about water and power, especially those that appeal to natural law or metaphysical authority. This form of radical management was not tied to anything necessary about individuals, the state, rationality, or the goods that make certain ends intrinsically worth pursuing. Instead, the contingent facts about water, and the social and evolutionary relationships that depended on it, provided the basis for water’s political, economic, and moral value. Yet this contingency presented a double-edged sword: Although water was necessary for life on Earth, the fact that it actually did support individuals, institutions, or states was the outcome of evolutionary chance. Conceiving of the very idea of water management as the result of chance, and from this premise rethinking how to manage the relationships between water and society, subsequently formed the basis for water management in the United States. This was a radical idea.

Once the idea that water was necessary and contingent was struck upon, the first proponents of America’s philosophy of water management developed a view that could hardly have been grander. Water management was seen as the apex of a unified theory of planetary evolution, social development, and the social sciences required for the self-direction of evolution and society. This philosophy, they claimed, was not only superior to the views of other cultural perspectives; it also corrected metaphysical tropes of western thought that had lingered since the Enlightenment. It was nothing short of a new foundation for science. In the words of WJ McGee, who we will become familiar with as one of the key players in this new take on water, this philosophy came “as no petty plaintiff. If in the wrong, it is a colossal blunder: if in the right, it is a New Organon.”3

Putting aside whether or not this philosophy has been a colossal blunder for the moment, this chapter outlines this book’s approach to the philosophy of water management and its grandiloquent self-presentation. This explanation is necessary because, while the contemporary intellectual milieu eschews master narratives and totalizing stories, the philosophy of water management presents itself as just this sort of account. Further, because I am claiming that this philosophy has resonance and influence today, I need to show how I came to this conclusion without reproducing a sort of total history. This is because I agree with critiques of master narratives: They reflect, and often reify as historical fact or canon, one perspective on phenomena—whether individuals, social relations, institutions, events, or environments—that are in fact more accurately characterized as diverse, evolving, and full of heterogeneous actors, societies, and institutions.4 As many counternarratives have demonstrated, there are almost always subtending and subaltern stories that go untold or unheard. Since we cannot exhaust these, it is unwise to presume we will ever get a complete picture. In short: There are no total histories.

This presents a conundrum. On the one hand, the philosophy of water management presents itself as (quite possibly) a New Organon, the next step in scientific progress since Francis Bacon. On the other hand, and as we will see, this totalizing account is chock full of idiosyncratic assumptions about one nation’s water experience (the United States) and, at that, one story about that experience. Yet even though this philosophy was not actually the kind of master narrative it claimed to be, it has now passed through multiple iterations in the United States and has had profound effects on twentieth- and now twenty-first-century geopolitics. Somehow the New Organon went global. The challenge, then, is to not simply discount master narratives while also gaining purchase on how this philosophy of water management worked in many non-global ways to bring vastly different individuals, social relations, and institutions into its evolving fold. As the anthropologist Catherine Lutz puts it: Empire is in the details.5

Remarkably, it was often the ideas on the losing side of intellectual debates that ended up having greater effect on water management. In the case of American anthropology, for instance, these losing ideas have been almost completely purged from the disciplinary canon. This makes the loss twofold: First, the ideas that informed the philosophy of water management have been lost from view in social sciences that have long been concerned with relationships between people and planet, notably anthropology and geography. Second, there has been a failure to see how these losing ideas found their way into key political institutions that have shaped common ways of thinking about water and, often, the categories academics use to study it.

Compounding our lack of understanding of how these losing ideas affected policy is that contemporary studies of water management tend to be read against broader theories of modernity. These theories make and defend assumptions about things like state power, scientific rationality, technology, and divisions of humans from nature. Some employ Wittfogel’s ideas of water and total power. Others draw on James Scott’s influential work Seeing like a State in which he argues that a period of “high modernism” used scientific rationality and certain institutional formations, like state bureaucracies, to make previously chaotic things (e.g., forests, water, and cities) legible to the state while pushing others out of view.6 By putting these chaotic things onto state ledgers, they became the sorts of things over which states could gain high levels of control. High modernism was radical because it ordered chaotic phenomena within a relatively narrow vision and took that vision to an extreme. Applications of Scott’s analysis to water management are often combined with other accounts of modernity, such as that of Bruno Latour. Getting a sense of these accounts serves to both introduce some widely held ideas about water management and to situate this book among others. After introducing other accounts of water management, I outline my approach so a clearer assessment can be made of how the American social sciences shaped a view of the planet that fit with a particular social world.

Water Meets Modernity

In the literature on water management, there is a common refrain about what we should learn from the follies of previous civilizations. With various modifications, it goes something like this:

“From time immemorial water has been unmanageable, but through science, technology, and the grand projects enabled by human ingenuity, great feats have been achieved. But the outcomes of those accomplishments—mega-dams, irrigation systems, industrial processes, and municipal waterworks—are having unintended consequences. Mastery over nature is pushing rivers, lakes, and entire ecosystems off balance. Indeed, it has pushed hydrologic systems to the point where the very idea of “natural balance” is in question. Now we must rethink water management itself, particularly the idea that there will be grand solutions to the challenge of managing water.”

Versions of this refrain abound.7 Many begin by identifying how water started off, in pre-modern times, as entirely Other. There are many potential places to start this kind of account: Over twenty-five hundred years ago, Pherecydes of Syros thought of Chaos, the mythical Greek figure, as water. Formless and disordered, Chaos called forth Gaia to establish order. Among the pre-Socratics, Thales of Miletus famously held that in the beginning was water and the world was full of gods. In the Abrahamic religions, the spirit of god hovers over the waters (à la Chaos) before land and life are called forth (à la Gaia). Similar accounts are found in secular variations where water is “life’s matrix,” to use the words of Paracelsus.8 Of course, water has long been central to many religions and beliefs, from the Vedic texts in India to New Zealand’s indigenous peoples.9 Beginning with water as Other, the triumph of the modern age was not just that it subdued water but also that it harnessed water’s symbolic power such that that we no longer interpret floods or droughts through appeals to the capricious acts of gods or nature. The flip side of the story—the cautionary part—is that modern water managers were too optimistic in supposing that the rudimentary sciences that many state institutions were built upon are sufficient to handle the complex social and ecological systems that water courses through. So although water has been brought into an ordered fold, many modern management practices have, like the collapsed civilizations we must learn from, gone too far.

Counterpoints to the above refrain are often found in the verses that link each instance of water management to the context in which it is applied. These show the nuanced ways that, despite technological and scientific achievements, water never wholly succumbs to modernity. Rather, some water and some ways of relating to it always remain ungoverned in the push for rational forms of management.10 Further, the rejoinder goes, the water that is governed is not subdued in a wholly, or even primarily, rational way. Rather, control over water is accomplished through power relationships that oppress “others” and perpetuate inequity based on gender, class, religion, or ethnicity.11 So water management was hardly an exercise in emancipating us from the burdensome chains of metaphysics and myth. Moreover, the idea that this supposedly rational vision is now under threat due to mismanagement is more accurately viewed as a crisis for those who are benefiting from the current, unequal arrangement. In short: Water problems do not fit linear accounts about the rational control of water and the march of human progress. Rather, water management’s common refrain refracts a host of social and political relationships, and relationships to water, that are all open to contest.

In this book, I do not adjudicate these debates. I wish only to note that both sides generate one picture of the world from within another. This is not a slight. It is a generic claim about the sited production of knowledge. As Nelson Goodman put it: “Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.”12 As I show here, the idea of situated conceptual development is itself a key part of what has given the philosophy of water management such staying power and what distinguishes it as modern in its attempt to internalize the contingent ways in which knowledge is produced. On the one hand, it is to make up the world with no macro Other—no source of original chaos that is beyond comprehension. On the other, it is to make the ethnocentric claim that the Earth is contingent in a way that opens it to self-direction, even enhancement, once social institutions are situated within a scheme of unrepentant contingency. To begin, it is worth situating my view in contrast to the predominant water-meets-modernity story.

High Modernism

James Scott’s Seeing like a State is a frequent point of departure for many water-meets-modernity stories. Early in that book, Scott refers to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States as the “granddaddy” of state-planned regional development. Scott’s actual essay on the TVA appears in a different volume where he describes both top-down and bottom-up ways that the TVA was administered.13 In Seeing like a State, Scott’s thesis of high modernism is that, concomitant with the rise of the modern state, there were techniques that drafted disorderly dimensions of society and nature into terms that made them legible to new forms of governance. In this transition, “pre-modern” understandings of things like water came under the calculating eye of the state through bureaucratic systems that standardized measurements and instituted new forms of accounting based on scientific rationality. In short, out went water sprites and multiple ontological kinds of water, and in came chemistry, physics, and engineering.14 The result was a stripped down, rationally governable kind of water: H₂O. Moreover, high modernity razed all that came before it. It was not only a fresh start where rules of rationality governed what is possible. It was the beginning: a form of governance emancipated from traditional sources of authority altogether.

One of Scott’s enduring ideas is that high modernism transformed nature into “natural resources.” This has made the claim that the TVA was the “granddaddy” of high modernism quite intuitive because the TVA was created in the context of ...