Feature: All Features of Southwest Desert
Region: Southwest DesertThis page features excerpts from STC-Link's Materials Archive relating to Organizational factors/issues for the Southwest Desert region as a whole. There are many Features in this region, and this document is accessible from them all. At the end of each excerpt, you have the opportunity to visit the abstract of the original paper or article excerpted.
Use "Back" to return to the Feature you came from, or take the Back Arrow button (
) back to the SWD region map.
Who was Powell, and how did he come to be the target of such opposed loyalties? Born in New York, he grew up in Ohio and developed a lifelong interest in nature and a loyalty to the family farm. Civil War service in the Union Army cost him an arm, but nothing in the way of determination. After the war, he organized his own expeditions to little-explored areas in the West, becoming an expert in arid lands. He eventually obtained government sponsorship and led one of the three main civilian surveys. In 1881, he succeeded Clarence King as director of the United States Geological Survey. His 1869 descent of the Colorado River was the first recorded exploration of that river and its canyons. His 1878 Report on the Arid Lands was also unprecedented as a sober assessment of the region's resources and the most sensible approach to using them.
It was no mystery that Powell could appeal to such different groups. Preservationists could admire Powell the adventurer -- the sensitive, eloquent, and courageous explorer of the river. Reclamationists could admire Powell the planner -- the practical forecaster of future uses and value. The wise man of the arid lands worked as a patron for both causes.
For neither group was Powell a smooth fit as elder statesman. Preservationists had to look away from his use of phrases like "the redemption of the Arid Region." The deserts had been lost and were now to be saved, and this was not altogether what the preservationists wanted to hear from Powell. While his Colorado River narrative revealed an individual fascinated by the forms of arid terrain, his stance in The Report was hardly that of an appreciator of deserts in their unimproved state. Powell wanted "the legislative action necessary to inaugurate the enterprises by which these lands may be rescued from their present worthless state." Certain areas were beyond redemption, even for grazing. "In very low altitudes and latitudes, the grasses are so scant as to be of no value," Powell said; "here the true deserts are found. The conditions obtain in southern California, southern Nevada, southern Arizona and southern New Mexico, where broad reaches of land are naked of vegetation." As an explorer, Powell found all terrains of value; as a policy-maker, he was willing to draw a distinction between the valuable and the valueless.
The reclamationists, on the other hand, had their reasons to quote Powell selectively. In a way that would distinguish him from many people who claimed to be his successors, Powell always admitted that water and usable lands were in limited supply. "Within the Arid Region," he said, "only a small portion of the country is irrigable." Throughout his career, according to his biographer Wallace Stegner, Powell insisted "that no more than 20% of the West could ever be reclaimed even with the most economical use of water." Powell also wanted a prolonged and careful survey of reservoir sites to precede any major developments. Congress authorized a major irrigation survey in 1888, and Powell, as the second director of the United States Geological Survey, was authorized to withhold lands in the public domain from settlement until they could be surveyed and classified. Frustrated western congressmen used budget cuts to reduce the effectiveness of the geological survey and recover access to public land.
Powell earned his enemies in several ways, but certainly his prime offense was to insist on the arid character of much of the West, and on the limits aridity would place on traditional western freedom and impulsiveness. He was, on that count, something of an embarrassment to his attempted admirers. At an 1893 National Irrigation Congress meeting in Los Angeles, Powell as the featured speaker disagreed forcefully with his hosts; their visions of utterly unlimited irrigation struck him as folly. William Ellsworth Smythe, placing Powell as "first on the roll of irrigation champions," still showed scars from these battles. Powell "was a soldier, a poet, a scientist, a lover of his kind," Smythe said, "but in no sense a man of practical commercial instincts."
In the twentieth century, for both reclamationists and preservationists, Powell made a less-than-manageable founding father. He wrote his major books at a time when a clash between use and appreciation did not seem inevitable. In Powell's own time, the Colorado canyonlands, the region of his adventuring, were so difficult and remote that their use was not at issue. His landscape of appreciation and his landscape of use were simply different places. When the clash came, appeals to Powell's authority predictably produced inconsistency.
There are, after all, two basic ways of looking at an isolated river canyon -- two points of view comparable to the usual responses to a figure-ground drawing. With the drawing, one can see a vase in the center, or one can see the silhouettes of two faces; with a river canyon, one can see the sculptured space in the middle, an ideal place for physical and visual adventuring, or one can see the two walls of a reservoir, a construction site where nature has done the bulk of the work and humans only have to supply the plug. When flood control, storage of water for municipal use, and, most significantly, the generation of electricity provided the rationale for Colorado River dams, the point of view based on utility became for a time the politically dominant one.
By the mid-twentieth century, no standard of utility offered a clear guide to desert policy. The deserts could not sustain unlimited multipurpose use. Eventually, the purposes clashed with each other. It was only in part a matter of utility versus contemplation, hydro-electric dams and mining versus recreation. Recreation, by the 1960s, had no simple meaning; between the so-called industrial tour dependent on access by automobile, and advocates of self-reliance and minimal intervention, there was at most a narrow strip of common ground.
Choosing among conflicting uses of scarce resources is a difficult matter for any government, perhaps especially so for a democracy. Many square miles of the American deserts are still in public ownership; the question of their use is still a subject for public policy and for public opinion. What do the American people want to do with their desert? If few of them are going to use it, or visit it, directly, how do they want it used, and by whom? Is it in the public interest for the followers of William Ellsworth Smythe to continue the program of mastery, or is it in the public interest for the followers of Van Dyke, Krutch, and Abbey to hold the line on the side of preservation? Will the initiative instead stay in the hands of the heirs of George Wharton James, ritualizing a windy form of appreciation that permits, even facilitates, the commercial transformation of the deserts? Eventually, the depletion of ground water and excessive demands on rivers will provide a clearer conclusion to questions about the desert's future. In the meantime, the significance of the desert now centers on one question. By what principle of legitimacy are Americans to claim and allocate the desert's scarce resources?
Turner claimed that 1890 marked the close of the frontier, and yet frontier-like enterprises failed to observe that deadline. To the same degree, the prophets who defined limits on the basis of aridity spoke prematurely. Speculation, boom towns, extractive industries, major population shifts, development of vacant land -- many of the central phenomena of the frontier -- ran continuously past 1890 and past the borders of aridity. Nineteenth-century territorial expansion blended into twentieth-century economic expansion in a way that left few boundaries in time or space. The deserts seemed to draw line, and Americans pushed past it. Can Americans now choose for themselves an appropriate line -- and hold to it?
No. 6In much the same way as concern about health sometimes disguises work-place issues, so the more widely publicized environmental problems may also hide underlying organizational and political questions. C. S. Lewis once remarked that 'Man's power over Nature often turns out to be a power exerted by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument', and a commentator notes that this, 'and not the environmental dilemma as it is usually conceived', is the central issue for technology. As such, it is an issue whose political and social ramifications have been ably analysed by a wide range of authors.
Even this essentially political level of argument can be stripped away to reveal another cultural aspect of technology. If we look at the case made out in favour of almost any major project -- a nuclear energy plant, for example -- there are nearly always issues concerning political power behind the explicit arguments about tangible benefits and costs. In a nuclear project, these may relate to the power of management over trade unions in electricity utilities; or to prestige of governments and the power of their technical advisers. Yet those who operate these levers of power are able to do so partly because they can exploit deeper values relating to the so-called technological imperative, and to the basic creativity that makes innovation possible. This, I argue, is a central part of the culture of technology, and its analysis occupies several chapters in this book. If these values underlying the technological imperative are understood, we may be able to see that here is a stream of feeling which politicians can certainly manipulate at times, but which is stronger than their short-term purposes, and often runs away beyond their control.
No. 7According to Cultural Survival, the Boston-based human rights organization, there are at least 3,000 native nations in the world today that continue to function within the boundaries of the 200-odd countries that assert sovereignty over them. Many wars that our media describe as "civil wars" or "guerrilla insurgencies" are actually attempts by tribal nations to free themselves of the domination of larger nation-states. In Guatemala, it's the Mayans. In Burma, it's the Karens. In the Amazon, it's the Yano-mamo and the Xingu, among others. In Micronesia, it's the Belauans. In Indonesia, it's the peoples of Irian Jaya.
Perhaps the most painful realization for Americans is that in many of these foreign locales -- particularly South America, the Pacific islands, Indonesia, and the Philippines -- the natives' struggles to maintain their lands and sovereignty is often directed against United States corporations, or technology, or military.
No. 8The Indian issue is not part of the distant past. Many of the worst anti-Indian campaigns were undertaken scarcely 80 to 100 years ago. Your great-grandparents were already alive at the time. The Model-T Ford was on the road.
More to the point is that the assaults continue today. While the Custer period of direct military action against Indians may be over in the United States, more subtle though equally devastating "legalistic" manipulations continue to separate Indians from their land and their sovereignty, as we will see from the horrible events in Alaska, described in Chapter 16.
No. 9Control over water has again and again provided an effective means of consolidating power within human groups -- led, that is, to the assertion by some people of power over others. Sometimes that outcome was unforeseen, a result no one really sought but dire necessity seemed to require. In other places and times, the concentration of power within human society that comes from controlling water was a deliberate goal of ambitious individuals, one they pursued even in the face of protest and resistance.
No. 10Such in essence is the argument made by Karl Wittfogel, a twentieth-century scholar of Chinese civilization and architect of the controversial "hydraulic society" thesis. Where the scale of water control escalated in the ancient desert world, he maintained, where larger and larger dams and more and more elaborate canal networks were built, political power came to rest in the hands of an elite, typically a ruling class of bureaucrats. Those were the "hydraulic societies," and in their most extreme forms they became despotic regimes in which one or a few supreme individuals wielded absolute control over the common people as they did over the rivers that coursed through their territory.
No. 11Having restored nature to a more pivotal role in historical materialism, Wittfogel was ready to tackle the problem of Asia and its peculiar development. What had been the mode of production in that part of the world, he asked, and what ecological forces had been involved in the emergence of that mode? In two key works he undertook to lay out some answers. The first was an essay, "The Theory of Oriental Society," which appeared in 1938 after he made a trip to China; it served as a trial run for the second and larger work, his magnum opus of twenty years later, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957). The thread connecting the two writings was running water. The Oriental mode of production, he explained, "first arises when waterworks must be undertaken on a larger scale (for purposes of protection and irrigation)." During the four thousand years before Christ, in the great river valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, the state took on the function of building grand hydraulic works, which in turn required centralized managerial bureaucracies to operate. Whoever controlled those means of production -- in such cases it was a group of agromanagerial experts -- became perforce the effective ruling class. The common techno-environmental basis in all those ancient Oriental civilizations, giving rise to similar social structures in them, was water control, mainly a program of irrigation made necessary by inadequate or unseasonal or undependable rainfall. In the case of China, there were both irrigation for its rice paddies and flood-control works to tame the Huang Ho raging down from the soft, eroding loess highlands. Together these forms of water manipulation made that country, along with its neighbors, very different from Marx's Europe.
After he emigrated from Europe and came to know his New World home better, Wittfogel realized that large-scale irrigated agriculture had been an ancient American as well as an Asian phenomenon. Consequently, by 1957 he was usually substituting the phrase "hydraulic society" for "Oriental society" to indicate that water-controlling mode of production and its attendant social order. Wherever it was found, its outcome was always a repressive use of power and the defeat of all change. Crises, whether brought on by overexpansion or by invasion, might come and go in such systems, but so long as irrigation continued, no real movement, no revolution, could occur in the social system. Whereas in a more fortunate Europe, Wittfogel believed, a decentralized agriculture under feudalism and abundant rainfall had allowed the commencement of capital accumulation and the rise of modern industrial capitalism, "the centralized structure of the highly productive Oriental agrarian order worked in the opposite direction, namely towards the reproduction of the existing order, towards its stagnation." Big irrigation thus created a bondage of inertia.
No. 12Like the taxonomy of butterflies or liverworts, irrigation societies may be lumped together and split and lumped again, until the essential question of how power evolves in them gets completely lost. The splatters are the ones who do most of the obscuring. Admittedly they are, in their devotion to finding differences, right to a point: no two water systems are exactly alike, either in natural setting or social anatomy. Some develop in narrow mountain valleys pierced by ice-cold torrents, others in broad alluvial plains drenched by monsoon storms, and still others in deserts where the streams evaporate away much of the year. Irrigation may supplement a hunter's diet with a few tubers, or it may support an agribusinessman's crop of pistachios traded all over the world. The irrigators may throw their babies into the water in sacrifice to their river gods; then again, they may worship at the altar of modern hydraulic engineering and throw away their money. The quality of uniqueness must be respected, as the splatters insist, but it should not be used to defy all generalization, for generalization is what makes critical inquiry possible. In this case, we first need to do some lumping together, locating a few unities among the varieties of irrigation societies. We can follow several criteria in that lumping: the scale of waterworks involved in each instance, the kind of managerial authority needed to operate them, and the goals pursued by the irrigators. The lumps resulting from that analysis may not suit the most inveterate splitters, but they will help focus our minds on the basic historical issues, especially the issue of how one mode of water control develops into another.
Three broad modes of water control have appeared so far in history. Each of them has had, as we will see, its own set of techniques and apparatus, its own pattern of social relationships, its own arrangement of power. There was the local subsistence mode, the agrarian state mode, and the capitalist state mode, this last found in the modern American West.
No. 13In the first and simplest type of irrigation society, based on the local subsistence mode, water control relies on temporary structures and small-scale permanent works that interfere only minimally with the natural flow of streams. The needs served by that simple technology are basic and limited: water is diverted to grow food for direct, personal consumption. Little if any of that food ever leaves the community. It is, in a sense, water flowing directly into the mouths of those who have diverted it from nature -- who have dug ditches with their own hands, thrown up their own brush or rock dams, and watched the vital liquid soak into the earth around their plants. In such cases authority over water distribution and management remains completely within the local community, with those who are the users. They have within themselves, which is to say, within their vernacular traditions, all the skill and expertise required to build and maintain their water system. They are self-reliant, self-sufficient, and self-managing as individuals and as a community, though nature still sets in the main the terms on which their lives are lived.
Within this primitive agricultural economy, where production for direct use prevails, the organization of power remains loose and unconsolidated. To the extent it exists at all, power follows the lines of family and kinship. There is no centralized seat of command, no stratification of people into social and economic classes, no large accumulations of private wealth, no elaborate division of labor, no state. Men may have their separate jobs, women have theirs, and those distinctions may hardly be egalitarian. But the individual, whether male or female, like the community itself retains substantial autonomy. On men and women alike the task of water management sits lightly, demanding little regimentation, involving few orders from above, and proceeding essentially by informal consensus and engrained habit rather than by imposed demands. Where everyone in the community knows roughly as much as anyone else about the process of irrigation, where the work is within everyone's sphere of competence, and where the ends of water use are elemental human nutrition, there is no compelling reason for much hierarchy or discrimination. Power is diffused, elites are inchoate.1
No. 14Enter again the Wittfogel theory of irrigation society. The social organization required of the Hohokam was substantially different from that needed for ak-chin farming. The latter was a self-contained village or family operation, where individuals of more or less equal standing came together to do a common job. But with the Hohokam, as among the Rio Grande pueblos, local self-management very soon did not suffice; downstream villages had to establish control over those living upstream if they were to get any water at all. The outcome was a more efficient utilization of rivers if efficiency means complete, total use -- and a more elaborate legal framework to resolve conflicting interests. Pushed far enough along, the big-scale irrigation system, according to Wittfogel's theory, must replace local community control with a supravillage regime.
The Hohokam did not in fact have the full infrastructural base, nor perhaps did they have the intention, to go that far toward the consolidation of power. We have no firm evidence that they ever set up an elaborate bureaucracy to manage their Salt River waterworks. But were they on the way to concentrated rule when fate cut them down? Lacking supporting written evidence on precisely how the system was governed, reading on from the works themselves, archaeologists have reasoned their way to contradictory conclusions. Emil Haury and Richard Woodbury, two of the leading authorities on the Hohokam, maintain that the system could have been constructed and preserved by spontaneous, informal cooperation sustained over several hundred years. Village elders up and down the river could have worked out their peoples' differences in times of emergency without yielding local sovereignty to a central command.11 This reasoning, however, is unconvincing, based as it is on the dubious assumption that the Hohokam were able to work with a single-mindedness and long-term harmony that other societies have not shown. A second and more credible argument comes from Bruce Masse, who has recently looked again at those Hohokam traces and concluded, "Some form of coordination or control was necessary not only within single irrigation systems but among all the systems in the Salt River Valley," especially for dealing with periods of savage, unpredictable floods or droughts. Another scholar, D. E. Doyel, has gone further to insist that one village must have come to wield economic and social power over all the others.12 We will never know much about the actual distribution of power in Hohokam times, and what we know will always be uncertain, but that last conclusion has common sense on its side. The Hohokam, then, are an example of what can happen when a people outgrow the local mode: of the political and environmental consequences of bigness.
No. 15This second type of irrigation society involved, in social terms, a radically disparate coupling of the humble and the grand. On the one side, there were those older villages where peasant agriculture went on much as before -- local subsistence communities still trying to live as tiny worlds apart. On the other side stood a state, incipient or well advanced, with a bureaucratic organization to design and administer the water system. The state provided an adequate and dependable supply of water to the village, and in turn demanded a payment of tribute in the form of money or crops. A new redistributive economy thus appeared, wherein wealth flowed from the outlying village to the capital city and then, as expenditures for water engineering and maintenance, back outward again. Always, however, a large part of the wealth stayed in the capital city, where it paid for luxurious homes for a new ruling class or for standing armies to defend the irrigation society against its enemies, usually marauding nomads. Given enough tribute, which conversely meant given enough water supplied to the villages, the rulers could create an empire. And that is precisely what many of them did. Each time they extended their canals into new territory, they added to their domain, and, in turn, increased their tribute, until at last their domain extended well beyond any conceivable gift of water. In those desert empires, the shape of power, therefore, was like that of some primitive marine animal: a vast amorphous tissue of villages, weak and disorganized, dominated by a more highly evolved central nervous system. Wittfogel called this animal a hydraulic society. But to make matters clearer, since I will argue that hydraulic societies come in more than his one variety, we can call this second type the agrarian state.
The reality of human existence in the agrarian state was that the many did the sweaty labor while the few gave directions and took away much of the product. To get a more reliable water supply or better flood protection than their single village could provide, peasants had to pay something besides tribute; they had to perform immense, backbreaking physical labor. They found themselves not only dredging heavy loads of dirt from canal bottoms but also tugging along ornate equipages on which their new masters rode in fine style. The price paid for more intensive, ambitious irrigation, in other words, was loss of autonomy to an entrenched, extrafamily or clan authority, creating a rigid hierarchy based on the division of labor into workers and managers.
Undoubtedly there were practical economic reasons why the mass of people put up with this loss of autonomy, this heavy toil. The chief one was no doubt the need for increased food production. There may, however, have been other kinds of reasons why they were unable to protest vigorously and throw off their chains, reasons having to do with the ecology of irrigation. Both the warm climates typically found in the arid lands where irrigation was invented and the abundance of shallow waterways there created ideal conditions for the proliferation of human parasites. Often the peasant would stand all day long in a flooded rice paddy, exposed continuously to an exploding population of pathogens, and no one was, until recently, aware of the danger. The most serious of these disease organisms associated with irrigation (both in ancient times and today) was the blood fluke. It causes schistosomiasis, a chronic, nasty, debilitating ailment, which today affects as many as 100 million people. The fluke lives part of its life in the snails that thrive in irrigation ditches, the rest of its life in the human body. Adding to the health problems was the use of feces as fertilizer in countries like China. Tapeworms spread from the excrement through the water and into the peasants, until as much as 90 percent of the population was infected. One historian, William McNeill, suspects that "the despotic governments characteristic of societies dependent on irrigation agriculture" owed something to the degenerating effects of these diseases on the common people, who became too listless to resist or revolt.2
The rulers in this more advanced irrigation regime were, for the most part, not owners of the land itself. Land remained the possession of the peasants, acting as individuals or in common, or it was placed in the abstract hands of the state. Nor did the rulers actually claim to own the water they delivered. Instead, their power came from the technological control they exercised over the rivers; they were a managerial elite.3 Better than the peasants, they understood when the river currents would rise and fall, how a ditch could be constructed so it would not silt up with sediment, and what the river gods wanted from humans. This group of rulers, Wittfogel points out, sponsored the first professional studies in hydraulics, astronomy, and mathematics. In fact, much of modern science and engineering has its distant foundations in water-control efforts. Religion too came within the purview of the directing elite, as priests took charge of leading the peasantry in worshipping such river gods as Isis, Osiris, Hapi of the Nile, Ninurta of Mesopotamia, and Ganga, the ancient Hindu deity who sat in Siva's wavy hair. The priestly branch of the ruling echelon reminded peasants constantly that they were to respect and obey their superiors and be thankful for their benevolent control.4 The village may still have owned the land, but the mandarins owned authority.
No. 16In many agrarian states, irrigation helped bring to power not only a bureaucracy buttressed by priests but also a single, autocratic sovereign at the head of things He might have been called an emperor, a king, or a pharaoh, but in any case to dominate nature was his special personal mission, his proud, egocentric boast. The fabled Assyrian ruler Queen Semiramis reputedly had inscribed on her tomb what may stand as the dominant ethos of the advanced hydraulic civilizations: "I constrained the mighty river to flow according to my will and led its water to fertilize lands that had before been barren and without inhabitants."5 Nowhere in Papago Indian culture do we find so self-inflating an expression, so unabashedly aggressive an attitude toward the earth. It was in the larger water-control systems of the Middle East, not among the Papago, that humans first began to take the world forcefully into their own hands. They did so by setting up a representative person as a god and giving him or her absolute dominion over the desert, to redeem it and make it yield riches where before there was scarcity.
A set of high public officials, a grandiose sovereign, a program of conquest -- and there you have the archetype of the ancient irrigation state. Scholars have not yet agreed which came first, the state or the heavy waterworks, and it is likely that they will never resolve the question. Do chickens make eggs, or eggs make chickens? It hardly matters when we sit down to dinner. A massive irrigation apparatus obviously could not appear in advance of the finances, planning, and technical direction of a power complex. At the same time it is clear that all of the early states emerged in arid or semiarid landscapes, all relied on irrigation.6
In Wittfogel's defense, it must be said that he never claimed that every state emerged initially from the single task of water control, though he did believe that irrigation must always have had a significant consolidating effect on political power.
No matter whether traditionally nonhydraulic leaders initiated or seized the incipient hydraulic "apparatus," or whether the masters of this apparatus became the motive force behind all important functions, there can be no doubt that in all these cases the resulting regime was decisively shaped by the leadership and social control required by hydraulic agriculture.7
He may have been in his early years too narrowly an ecological and technological determinist, but Wittfogel was not simple-minded in thinking about how history is made. Irrigation and the state, he indicates here, grew up synergistically, each supporting the other. And that is where we too must let the issue rest.
Standing before the massifying complex of water control, the ordinary peasant must have felt himself to be very feeble, without organization or arcane knowledge. Back in his own village, however, he lived much of the time as his ancestors had lived, a quasi-master at least of his fate. With his family and neighbors he continued deciding when to plant and harvest, how to raise his children, and what to do about strictly local affairs. The over-arching state was only "semimanagerial," which is to say it was far away most of the time, lacked modern communications (canal barges and human runners being its main methods of sending orders and gathering information), and could establish only a very limited control over peasant thinking.8 When the crops were all in, villagers remitted to the capital city the taxes they owed, then withdrew to themselves once more, enjoying their beggar's democracy for the greater part of the year.
The most important challenge to that lingering, remnant individual and community autonomy was the corvée, a drafted army in which unpaid laborers from the peasantry had to serve at the state's demand. In the absence of advanced machinery, central planners relied on drafting human muscle to do the work of constructing and keeping up the waterworks. It was another kind of taxation, imposed in the name of the common good but further enriching the state.9 One of our best accounts of how the corvée operated comes from Julien Barois, a nineteenth-century French hydrologist, who observed the system in Egypt on the eve of its abolition. Every December the government's agents prepared an estimate of labor needed along the Nile: the number of fellahin (peasants) needed, the number of work days required, the irrigation repair jobs to be done. From mid-January to the end of July, men assembled in camps, along with their wives and children, to work under the supervision of trained engineers. Theoretically, all able-bodied males between fifteen and fifty years old, except for city dwellers who owned no land and the desert Bedouins, who scorned agriculture, had to come along if called. In reality, the few rich farmers with large landholdings got exemption for themselves and their field hands by paying a sum of money. To build the Mahmudiyah Canal for the city of Alexandria's water supply, from 1818 to 1820, about 300,000 men toiled under the broiling sun. Irrigation projects could call on similar armies. The workers' only tools were short-handled hoes and baskets made from the stems of palms. They would loosen the earth in the ditches, often working in water up to their ankles, a slippery, miry, steamy chore. Men, and sometimes children, balanced the loaded baskets on their heads and climbed as much as thirty meters up the embankment to dump them. This was, in Barois's words, "a true labor of Sisyphus, because each year this same earth slides to the bottom of the bed in high water and has to be removed with the same trouble and fatigue."10 The standard tool of the supervising state official was the whip, laid hard on the bare backs of lagging peasants. In all of the major irrigated regions of Asia, Africa, and America, the corvée existed for thousands of years, constituting the most vivid experience the common people had of what Barois termed "despotism."
Once conscripted and taught to obey, the hydraulic army could serve the ruling class in a number of ways. Besides keeping the water flowing, it could lay down roads from the provinces to the capital city. It could improve inland water transportation. It could build ornate palaces, surrounded by lush green gardens symbolizing the rulers' command over arid nature. And it could erect pyramids, ziggurats, hilltop temples, and cold marble tombs where the dead elite could be laid out in style. Because irrigated affluence led to envy among outsiders and threats of invasion, strong fortifications had to be built. Though the peasants did not make good warriors -- their diseases left them too weak to fight -- they could construct the state's defenses. During the Sui dynasty, for instance, over a million workers toiled on the Great Wall of China to defend against invaders coming across the Mongolian plain. The agrarian state thus watered the drylands and raised a crop of gargantuan monuments not only to its self-esteem but also to its fear.11
No. 17Though it was by modern technical standards primitive and relatively benign in its riverine impact, the old Egyptian basin plan still required a high degree of coordinated control. A network of river watchers kept their eyes on the "nilometers" (depth scales engraved on stone pilings) that measured the water level at Memphis, Cairo, and other settlements. Up and down the Nile other officials stood ready to divert the rising current as it reached them. Laws and regulations to ensure an orderly apportionment of the flood had to be established. A program of water and agricultural planning, including food storage for drought years, helped give the capital city and its long succession of pharaohs a great influence over local people. In their book Egyptian Irrigation, William Wilcocks and J. J. Craig concluded that "the authority of the Government in an absolutely rainless country like Egypt becomes gradually . . . autocratic," as dispersed tribunals are more and more "forced to admit its absolute supremacy." Agreeing with that conclusion, Gamal Hamdan writes: "The efficient running of the basin system depended entirely on a strong, centralized government, for every upstream basin could endanger the riparian rights of those downstream." Egypt, throughout most of its history, resembled one of its pyramids: there was a lofty pinnacle where the rulers sat and a broad base where an anonymous, voiceless peasantry toiled. Irrigation was the main factor, the means of production, creating that pyramid.21
One of the few dissenters from that consensus view is the America archaeologist Karl Butzer. The basin system, he claims, was naturally compartmentalized, at least in its earliest phase, and could have been operated under completely decentralized management. The rise of the pharaohs, he goes on, must have had other causes than irrigation, though he does not suggest what they might have been.22 But even if one grants his argument, or simply puts it aside as unresolvable with the evidence available, there is plenty in Butzer's own work to show how the subsequent elaboration of irrigation could have necessitated political centralization in Egypt. When it was lacking and the water or food supply failed, the society collapsed into violent civil war, starvation, rotting corpses in the Nile, cannibalism, roving bands of marauders, and civil chaos that left the country vulnerable to outside aggressors. Governments, no matter how strong, could not always avoid such calamities, but it stands to reason that most of them tried desperately to do so and that they justified their power accumulation on the premise of preventing them.
Where virtually an entire country relied on a single grand river and the irrigation from it, as in Egypt, the flow of power to the center was simple, unambiguous, and straightforward. But in the second subspecies, the model of the agrarian state, the connections were more subtle, the Wittfogel theory more problematical. China is the prime test case, and a very complicated one it is, where generalizations are not easy to come by.23 In addition to the familiar bureaucratic apparatus and teeming peasant class, there was from an early point in China's history a large group of private landowners, the gentry, who, along with city merchants, exercised considerable clout. Much of China, especially in the south, is temperate and well watered. Irrigation was not everywhere a necessity, nor were agromanagerial bureaucrats. Was China then a hydraulic society or not? Did river control there promote despotism? Was China more like Japan or Europe -- a feudal world with diffuse governance? Was its evolution into empire the result of factors other than water management?
No. 18Water became in China the profoundest symbol for understanding nature, human affairs, and the right principles for governing both. In contrast to the modern mind-controlling regimes Wittfogel knew, in China some diversity of opinion was allowed on these matters. The two most important schools of water thought were the Confucians, who dominated official circles, and the Taoists, a dissident group. In the Tao Te Ching, from which the philosophy of Taoism primarily derives, water appears as the essence of nature and a model for human conduct. It is a substance that does not strive or resist, yielding easily as it does to any obstacles in its path, yet in the end it wears down the most determined opposition. A great river, it was said, runs lower than any of its tributaries, receiving into itself "all things under heaven." From this model in nature Taoists drew lessons for their rulers. They should govern with the least show of force, seeking to protect their people from violent passions and acquisitive urges; they should not become arrogant or seek to impose their will on village affairs; they should abolish the brutal corvée. The philosophy of naturalism, quietism, and humility behind such moral lessons for leaders had implications also for water engineering. l'u wei, the idea of moving with the flow of a stream and doing nothing contrary to nature, meant opposing structures that too rigidly confined rivers or wholly diverted them from their course. The connection between engineering and political strategies was put concisely by the Taoist engineer Chia Jang, of the Han period: "Those who are good at controlling water give it the best opportunity to flow away, those who are good at controlling the people give them plenty of chance to talk."26
Confucianism, in contrast, taught a more domineering stance toward water and the common people alike. Rivers must be disciplined -- a favorite word of this school -- by constructing strong, high dikes to pinch the water in, forcing it to move more rapidly toward the sea. Rivers too must be made to do hard work for the common good, as defined by sages and rulers. Though Confucian scholars could also talk enthusiastically about living a contemplative life on the banks of a stream, typically they advocated a more active, commanding attitude toward the natural environment. Pursuit of virtue and social welfare, respect for status, and reverence for one's elders were higher principles than following, with the Taoists, the way of nature. Operating mainly by this Confucian point of view, China's leaders transformed their country into a wealthy, powerful, hierarchically organized empire, one of history's greatest.
The Chinese landscape and society, however, were both too large and too complex ever to be brought under an unrelievedly despotic rule, whether one instructed by Confucianism or not. Wittfogel realized as much when he described China as a loose type. Undeniably there was despotism there, so that from time to time emperors compelled men to kneel and kiss their feet, mandarins may have held life-and-death sway over local populations, and peasants on irrigation projects may often have felt the lash stinging their backs and legs. But in contrast to Egypt, China's ruling class was a diverse, divided, multicentered agglomeration. The emperor had constantly to mobilize support from a wide spectrum of the population in order to stay in power; coercion alone could not work in the face of the centrifugal tendencies among the country's far-flung regions and the internal bureaucratic disputes over social goals. As S. N. Eisenstadt points out, the Chinese emperors, at times finding themselves caught between rival Confucian and Taoist forces, tried to recruit allies among both groups or to play one off against the other. And through all the cycles of dynastic rise and fall, the landed gentry maintained a position of some independence. China was, Eisenstadt admits, a centralized state, but there was not an altogether unchecked, simple power complex running it.27
But if Wittfogel was wrong in seeing too much of Brave New World in Old China, in finding "total power" where there was only a powerful center, he was right to this extent: water control did enable the state partially to overcome diffusionary tendencies. By developing an irrigation economy in a critical geographical area, the state could dominate a wider territory than before, strengthening its hand against other internal forces. Intensification of agriculture in that core area produced grain tribute for the emperor and his underlings, the bureaucrats and army officers. Ch'ao-ting Chi shows how such "key economic areas" have appeared again and again in Chinese history, becoming instruments of control over surrounding, subordinate lands where rainfall farming persisted, much as setting up a string of forts can secure a claim to a frontier. Thus irrigation development repeatedly became "a powerful weapon in social and political struggles."28 By extending this mode of production, the central government waxed stronger, though in a relative, shifting, not absolute, sense.
No. 18This third and latest mode of water control (it may not be the last, of course) is one created by the modern capitalist state. In this mode there are two roughly equivalent centers of power: a private sector of agriculturists and a public sector made up of bureaucratic planners and elected representatives. Neither group is autonomous. Both need each other, reinforce each other's values, compete for the upper hand without lasting success, and finally agree to work together to achieve a control over nature that is unprecedentedly thorough.
The agriculturists who constitute the private sector have become in recent times too rich and well organized, when compared with the archaic peasant class, to be cowed into submission by any state. Instead of serving in an involuntary corvée, they pay taxes to the state, often complaining of the high, extortionate rates, or they succeed in compelling others to pay the taxes for them to build and maintain their waterworks. In the world's labor markets they hire an anonymous human army, which they use to turn the arid spaces into green fields. In the West, those workers have come from Mexico, China, Japan, the Philippines, and India, as well as Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi. Those hired field hands, not their landowning employers, are the men and women who have constituted the wage-based answer to the corvée, sweating every bit as much as the Egyptian fellahin did. They also have felt the lash of an overseer or the club of a policeman, but they have had no land or village of their own to which they could escape when the season was ended. Consequently, they have been perpetual movers, with a tent or automobile in some cases serving as their only home, a city welfare office their only off-season means of support. With these wage employees, the modern domination of water becomes most vividly and unmistakably translated into hierarchy. Those who rule in that situation are not only those who hire and pay but also all those who take part in designing and controlling the hydraulic means of production. Workers serve as instruments of environmental manipulation; rivers, in turn, become means of control over workers.
The other power center emerging from this mode is the state, which furnishes as it did in archaic times the capital for big-scale engineering and the technical know-how to make it run smoothly. One of the most familiar laws of power is that he who has the capital commands. In the American West, the federal government through its Bureau of Reclamation has put up most of the capital. It therefore exerts enormous leverage over local destinies. When that same government also came to supply most of the hydraulic expertise, it gathered into its hands another means of control, one that has taken on increasing significance as the scale and complexity of water manipulation has grown. Furthermore, the state has asserted, through its various levels and agencies, the authority to settle conflicting claims, to decide which users can tap public resources, and to define what projects are worth undertaking. There is no pharaoh in that arrangement of power -- no single despotic ruler who personifies human control over the environment. In the new mode, power becomes faceless and impersonal, so much so in fact that many are unaware it exists.
No. 20The American development of that new mode of water control provides the chief substance then of the chapters that follow. To understand more thoroughly the broad theoretical issues involved, however, we might briefly do here what Wittfogel failed to do: go back to his original post-World War One milieu in Germany and to some of the social philosophers with whom he was early associated. In particular, we can find much that is relevant to understanding water and the capitalist state in the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Wittfogel had been one of its first members, then drifted away; had he remained in touch with his Frankfurt colleagues, they might have opened his eyes to the contemporary relevance of his irrigation work. The common theme of those critical theorists was that domination, not the freedom promised by progress boosters, is the lot of twentieth-century humans, in the so-called democracies as well as in the unmistakably totalitarian nations. Furthermore, human domination derives from the incessant modern drive to remake nature.