Making Extraction “Resilient”: Expertise, Infrastructure and the Politics of Ecological Restoration in California’s Delta

Caleb Scoville, Tufts University

California’s largest metropolises and millions of acres of irrigated farmland rely on distant water resources, often hundreds of miles away. This vital link is strained by climate change and environmental regulations. Classic historical accounts of Western water politics demonstrate the pivotal role played by hydraulic engineers in the building of California’s mammoth water conveyance system. However, a more recent focus on “ecosystem management” has emerged in response to the environmental effects of this infrastructure. Biological expertise has now assumed a crucial role in California’s political economy of water. In this paper I analyze important preconditions and consequences of this shift. I use the term “resilient extraction” to point to a surprising new synthesis that has been forged between resource extraction and ecological restoration to manage California’s water dilemmas. Focusing on the delta smelt, a contentious endangered species of fish endemic to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (“the Delta”), the center of California’s water delivery system, I analyze the mutually reinforcing strategies to save the species from extinction and to continue extracting water from its habitat. Regulations protecting the species threaten to interrupt the flow of water to farms and cities. However, rather than minimally complying with legal requirements, agencies have made additional investments in support of ecological restoration. This has come with a significant transfer of land ownership in the Delta to distant water agencies, which local advocates frame as a “water grab.” I argue that these developments should not be understood through the lens of a simple dichotomy between the naked pursuit of profit on one hand and environmental conservation on the other. Instead, I use this empirical site to track how ecological restoration has transitioned from being the opposite of economic development to being fundamentally constitutive of securing access to natural resources in an uncertain and unstable world.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 98. Expertise I: The Politics Of Environmental Knowledge