“Fanciful Visions of Power” but Not a Drop To Drink

Water and Arizona’s election season

Parched earth in my backyard

Across my nearest intersection, a nondescript stucco building displayed a giant banner saying, “Harris / Walz / Obviously / 2024.” It disappeared after a few days, perhaps torn down, which didn’t surprise me. In October in Arizona, it’s not obvious. In 2020, Biden won the state but he was the first Democratic candidate to win since Clinton in 1996, and only the second since Truman in 1948. I see Trump and Harris, Gallego and Lake (and so many more) signs in seemingly equal measure. The vast majority of homemade signs, though, are aggressively Republican. Some blare “One day! No machines!”, insisting that counting the vote electronically is the problem. Other signs say that child molesters vote for a certain local Democratic candidate. In my more liberal social bubble, folks agonize over whether to vote Harris or third party as a protest. A 60-year-old acquaintance told me that someone knocked on her door to ask who she was voting for and she nearly slammed the door in their face. “I don’t even tell my friends that,” she confided.

I’m getting used to opening up non-local news outlets and finding my home state making headlines. Like in Grist a few days ago: One issue will decide Arizona’s future. Nobody’s campaigning on it. The issue is water and it’s no longer nonpartisan in the state, often lumped in with the cynicism and doubt around climate change on the right. Jake Bittle writes, “The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability.” 

Abortion, immigration, and taxes or inflation are the big topics hammered in the political ads that filter into my brain as I wash dishes, my hands wet and soapy. But Grist’s article makes a good point: Why aren’t politicians and us regular folks talking more about water? If there isn’t enough water, people can’t live here, and the grand visions of both the Democratic and Republican parties are moot. Water is contentious and complicated. Whoever gets to decide about water has power and everyone wants that. 

In the desert, water has always been a tool of empire building. After reading the Grist article, I opened Arid Empire by Natalie Koch. She writes, “Since U.S. colonization of the Southwest, settler farmers have appropriated surface and underground aquifer (or fossil) water for commercial agriculture, often in grossly unsustainable and negligent ways.” This part of the conversation is missing, or more accurately, avoided. Centuries of water management by Indigenous people was seen as not taking full advantage of the desert’s potential. Now the 7.17M people who call Arizona home deal with our precarity and potential ruin. Koch continues, “If anything, controlling the water was explicitly acknowledged to be about establishing absolute control of the land. An 1885 publication on the Salt River Valley makes this explicit: ‘In desert countries like the valleys of Arizona, water is king, and he who owns or controls it becomes dictator, and rules even the cultivator of the soil.’”

La Paz county is mentioned in both Bittle’s article and Koch’s book. It’s the second-to smallest of the state’s 15 counties by population, and middling by land size. But, the county is home to “a massive Saudi farming operation [that] has drained local aquifers.” Wells are dry and the ground cracks. Yet, in 2020, La Paz county supported Trump by almost 40 points. As Koch writes, the farm in La Paz is part of a tradition of Arizona-Saudi Arabia collaboration, going back to the 40s: “If the US could build an arid empire across North America, what would stop it from applying the same lessons to distant desert lands? The scope of arid empire may have once been limited to the American West, but it was quickly transformed into a much grander force as decision-makers in Washington and its foreign embassies started to grasp its potential power beyond North America.”

I also reached for The Desert Smells Like Rain by Gary Paul Nabhan, a prolific writer and ethnobiologist. He wrote (in 1987!), “Concomitant with the resurgence of interest in rainfall and floodwater harvesting is a new appreciation of the value of desert-adapted crops. Yet many of the traditional drought-hardy crop varieties fell out of use and became extinct when commercial agriculture based on pumping and hybrid crops was initiated earlier in this century. [​​The O'Odham people], leaving their floodwater fields to work for wages in irrigated fields, lost many of their bean and corn varieties as the life of their remaining seeds expired while they were away.” In this context, whenever I read “lost” I replace it in my mind with “taken” or another word that puts appropriate responsibility on the forces involved in the ‘losing’ of traditional crops.

When I read about politicians warring with each other for power, I’m left with the distinct understanding that they care most about their goals and refuse to see or reject the larger consequences of their power grabs. Bittle writes, “Another reason for the relative campaign silence on water issues is that the regions where water is most threatened — areas where massive agricultural groundwater usage has emptied household wells and caused land to crack apart — tend to be represented by the politicians who are most dismissive of water conservation efforts, and vice versa.” Politicians and their partners push for more and more development, all while the states relying on the Colorado River “use more water than there actually is in the river.”

Arizona Agenda reported yesterday that “Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Arizona Department of Water Resources have begun the process of designating the Willcox Basin as an ‘Active Management Area,’ which will limit groundwater pumping in the area.” Local farmers and vintners were quoted supporting the action, while a politician complained vehemently. Everyone has an opinion about “their” water.

But, as Koch writes, “Nationalist anxieties about ‘our’ water forget the fact that the US itself appropriated the water rights of Indigenous communities in the region not long before. Insofar as they obscure settler colonialism, the ‘water grabbing’ stories extend the broader structure of arid empire. They also overlook a much longer history of US-Saudi ties, which actually gave rise to the very source of the problem: fanciful visions of power and profit from unsustainable desert farming.”

Politicians and developers tell people to move to Arizona, to build a life here, to invest in the state. The chorus of progress, left and right, trumpets glorious visions for the state. Yet the land that is now called Arizona thrived for a lot longer than the explorers, settlers, and colonizers have been here. And the so-called progress has wreaked havoc in ways that are becoming increasingly clear as our water supply dwindles. I’m paying attention to who keeps telling me to not worry about water, and who puts their worry to action.

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The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays and shorter updates. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks.