skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Against settler sustainability: California’s groundwater as a vertical frontier
California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1912361
PAR ID:
10414474
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
ISSN:
2514-8486
Page Range / eLocation ID:
251484862211104
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, TechTrends)
    Michael Lachney and Aman Yadav, Special issue (Ed.)
    This article offers Ancestral Computing for Sustainability (ACS) to dismantle the logics of settler colonialism that affect accessibility, identities, and epistemologies of computer science education (CSE). ACS centers Indigenous epistemologies in researching CSE across four public universities in the United States. This paper describes Ancestral Computing for Sustainability and explores reflections of two students engaging as researchers in ACS inquiry. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and Participatory Action Research, they share their reflections as co-researchers in ACS through storywork. These critical reflections include their relationship to computing, observations of the interdependent work within ACS, ethics and sustainability, and their experiences within the focus groups. The article ends with recommendations for furthering ACS as a decolonial approach that centers Indigenous epistemologies in CSE. Recommendations for CSE education include Ancestral Knowledge Systems and adding sustainability as a topic within computing education pathways and building student-faculty relationships based on trust is recommended to foster students’ academic and personal growth within CSE education and research. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, Environmental Research Letters)
    Abstract The rapid depletion of US groundwater resources and rising number of dying wells in the Western US brings attention to the significance of groundwater governance and sustainability restrictions. However, such restrictions on groundwater withdrawals are likely to generate spillover effects causing further environmental stresses in other locations and adding to the complexity of sustainability challenges. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the implications of growing global food demand for local sustainability stresses and the implications of local sustainability policies for local, regional, and global food production, land use, and prices. We employ SIMPLE-G-US (Simplified International Model of agricultural Prices, Land use, and the Environment—Gridded version for the United States) to distangle the significance or remote changes in population and income for irrigation and water resources in the US. Then we examine the local-to-global impacts of potential US groundwater sustainability policies. We find that developments in international markets are significant, as more than half of US sustainability stresses by 2050 are caused by increased commodity demand from abroad. Furthermore, a US sustainable groundwater policy can cause overseas spillovers of US production, thereby potentially contributing to environmental stresses elsewhere, even as groundwater stress in the US is alleviated. These unintended consequences could include deforestation due to cropland expansion, as well as degradation in water quality due to intensification of production in non-targeted areas. 
    more » « less
  3. ; (, Sustainability)
    Indigenous understanding of sustainability is embedded in close relations to land and environment, Indigenous Knowledge systems, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and Indigenous languages. However, the sustainability of Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods is significantly affected by various global change drivers. In the Arctic, Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods are impacted by environmental, social, and cultural changes, including climate change, environmental pollution, economic processes, and resource extraction. This paper aims to review and synthesize recent academic and gray literature on the sustainability of Indigenous communities in Sakha Republic, Northeast Siberia, Russia in the face of global change with a particular focus on land- and water-based traditional activities, native language, and the Indigenous Knowledge system. 
    more » « less
  4. (, Urban anthropology and studies of cultural systems and world economic development)
    null (Ed.)
    A growing body of literature has argued for the reconceptualization of Latin America as a settler colony. Contrary to the self-proclaimed decolonization of Latin American states upon their independence two centuries ago, the settlers who came to Latin America stayed and preserved the structure of settler colonialism to the present day. This article analyzes the case of Nicaragua through the conceptual frame of settler colonialism and examines an apt case study: the Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities of the Rama-Kriol Territory in southeastern Nicaragua, where I have conducted activist ethnographic research since 2014. The ongoing colonization of the Rama-Kriol Territory exhibits not only failures of the state to enforce legal protections of multicultural rights, but also the extension of a colonial logic of dispossession and elimination. The case of the Rama-Kriol Territory demonstrates the entanglements of Nicaraguan settler colonialism with international institutions, development banks, multinational corporations, and settler colonial projects around the world. I conclude that social science researchers should attend to continuing and emergent forms of Indigenous sovereignty in Nicaragua. Amid the fading backdrop of liberal multiculturalism in Latin America, these assertions of sovereignty pose a political horizon of decolonization and an end to settler violence, dispossession, and domination. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Earth's Future)
    Abstract Groundwater extraction in the United States (US) is unsustainable, making it essential to understand the impacts of limited water use on irrigated agriculture. To improve this understanding, we integrated a gridded crop model with satellite observations, recharge estimates, and water survey data to assess the effects of sustainable groundwater withdrawals on US irrigated agricultural production. The gridded crop model agrees with satellite‐based estimates of evapotranspiration (R2 = 0.68), as well as survey data from the United States Department of Agriculture (R2 = 0.82–0.94 for county‐level production and 0.37–0.54 for county‐level yield). Using the optimistic assumption that groundwater extraction equals effective aquifer recharge rate, we find that sustainable groundwater use decreases US irrigated production of maize, soybean, and winter wheat by 20%, 6%, and 25%, respectively. Using a more conservative assumption of groundwater availability, US irrigated production of maize, soybean, and winter wheat decreases by 45%, 37%, and 36%, respectively. The wide range of simulated losses is driven by considerable uncertainty in surface water and groundwater interactions, as well as accounting for the many aspects of sustainability. Our results demonstrate the vulnerability of US irrigated agriculture to unsustainable groundwater pumping, highlighting the difficulty of expanding or even maintaining irrigated food production in the face of climate change, population growth, and shifting dietary demands. These findings are based on reducing pumping by fallowing irrigated farmland; however, alternate pumping reduction strategies or technological advances in crop genetics and irrigation could produce different results. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email