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No. 1
As turn-of-the-century appreciators began to find a new value in the unmastered desert, irrigationists began to celebrate new opportunities for mastery. Large-scale manipulation of water, with federal backing, would at last make the desert suitable for the agrarian life. Unlike emigrants, miners, and appreciators, irrigationists denied the final reality of deserts. They saw them instead as ultimately transformable; they could be remade into farms through the alchemy of irrigation.
Irrigation, it is something of a surprise to remember, fell under the category of conservation. In 1900, constructing reservoirs to hold and redistribute water meant conserving resources for more efficient use. The implications here were striking: a forest, managed by conservationist, sustained-yield principles, was still a forest; a desert, managed by conservationist principles, became something else entirely -- a farm, a garden, even the site of a town or city. The basic fact of low rainfall remained the same; the air might remain dry and clear, but the landscape changed character altogether.
The conditions of deserts thus made the difference between conservation and preservation noticeable from the beginning. On matters involving mountains and forests, preservationist John Muir and conservationist Gifford Pinchot could for a time imagine themselves as allies, until the Hetch Hetchy controversy divided them. In the desert, there were few possibilities for such mistaken alliances. John Van Dyke may have been the best contemporary candidate for the role of "the John Muir of desert"; he knew from the beginning that conservation, in the form of irrigation, only meant destruction of the purity he wished to preserve.
To say that the distinction was noticeable in hindsight and in the eyes of some contemporaries is not to say that everyone perceived it. A publicist like George Wharton James, alternating between praise of irrigation and praise of the untouched desert, evidently felt no sense of contradiction. The explanation lay in the apparent scale of the deserts: in 1906, with such vast spaces of arid land and such a light population, it hardly looked as if one had to make difficult choices of priority. Americans could build towns and create farms, and there would still, it seemed, be plenty of unchanged land suitable for contemplation.
No. 2For all their differences, both manipulators of water and preservationists held one hero in common. In the twentieth century, individuals of either persuasion could use the name of John Wesley Powell with reverence. This is not to say they agreed on the proper spirit in which Powell's name should be invoked. Federal officials chose the name of Lake Powell for the reservoir behind the Glen Canyon Dam; Abbey found such a use of that honored name mortifying.
No. 3A simple model of sequential phases in American attitudes toward nature had limited relevance for deserts. By this model, pioneers initially feared and hated nature in the form of wilderness; nature had them overpowered and they, sensibly, resented it. Then, in a transitional phase, pioneers fought to conquer nature, and the balance of power slowly shifted. In a final phase, pioneers mastered nature; they were, by that very act, no longer pioneers. The completion of the conquest then made it possible to appreciate nature; and in an apparent happy ending, Americans could create national parks, museums for the last stand of a safely defeated enemy.
The first two phases--fear and powerlessness, followed by a struggle for mastery--do in fact correspond to the early phases of desert history. But the existence of a final, resolved state of mastery and appreciation is simply illusory. Mastery remains partial; reckonings with the desert's basic scarcity of water have only been postponed by the mining of ground water and the usual overallocation of the Colorado Basin water. Appreciation also remains partial and conditional. Like George Wharton James, the same individuals might be perfectly willing to find beauty in the exposed landscapes that alarmed people one hundred years before, and also perfectly willing to see those landscapes transformed in the higher interests of agriculture, real estate development, or recreation.
No. 4To add to the irony, technology and war had found new use for vacant space. World War II redirected much of the western economy toward defense industries and military development. The large-scale testing of planes, tanks, guns, and bombs required wide open spaces -- unoccupied land that would be easy to acquire and suitable for simulated attack. The deserts provided ideal locations undeveloped enough so that little in the way of improvement would be lost, isolated so that secrecy could be maintained. Since undeveloped deserts were already by popular consensus vacant and useless, bombing could hardly hurt them. In Arizona's Yuma Proving Ground and Luke Air Force Base, in California's China Lake Naval Weapons Center, Randsburgh Wash Test Range, Camp Irwin Edwards Air Force Base, Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base, and Chocolate Mountains Aerial Gunnery Range, in Nevada's Tonopa Test Range, Nellis Air Force Range, and Atomic Energy Commission Nuclear Testing Site, in New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range and Fort Bliss Military Reservation, and in Utah's Dugway Proving Groundsand Wendover Bombing and Gunnery Range, defense projects made it clear that an "endless sea of nothingness" had its uses.
When the scientists at Los Alamos needed a place to test the first atomic bomb, the New Mexico desert met the job requirements. The place called Trinity on the old Jornada del Muerto connecting El Paso to Santa Fe was, as Lansing Lamont wrote, "the perfect place to test the bomb." It was "isolated," "flat," "so uninhabitable that the nearest signs of civilization were a pair of abandoned coal mining towns, Troy and Carthage.... If disaster occurred, few besides the scientists at Trinity would be victims." Even Joseph Wood Krutch commented on the fit between place and purpose: "There must be very few places in the United States so suitable for such an experi-ment; few, that is to say, either so remote or so devoid of anything to be destroyed." It was almost providential -- the way in which aridity had reserved certain regions from settlement, and therefore left them suitable for bombing.
No. 5To the north and west of Trinity, twentieth-century enterprise revealed other ways of making use of deserts. When mining proved a changeable and unreliable base for prosperity, the state legislature of Nevada entertained other routes to revenue. In 1931, the legislators added wonderfully to the resources of Nevada by legalizing gambling. Here was a sensible and practical way of capitalizing on uncertainty; gambling followed symmetrically in the traditions of Americans in deserts. Overland emigrants had been gamblers, staking their lives on the uncertainties and risks of desert traveling. Prospectors had been gamblers, staking their resources and sometimes their lives on the chances and hazards of desert treasure-hunting. Irrigationists were gamblers, staking their enterprise on the unlimited extendability of desert water sources and on the changing currents of national politics. Tourist and town promoters were and are gamblers, staking their businesses on the uncertain capacity of the deserts to sustain heavy settlement and use. The eager crowds who flocked to the tables and slot machines of Las Vegas were well within the tradition of travelers in, as John W. Audubon described it in 1849, "a doubtful country."
No. 6Originally I planned to write two books. The first was to be a critique of technological society as we know it in the United States, a kind of sequel to Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Instead of concentrating on TV, though, it would have focused on the new technological age: "the information society," computerization, robotization, space travel, artificial intelligence, genetics, satellite communications. This seemed timely, since these technologies are changing our world at an astoundingly accelerating rate. Thus far, most people view these changes as good. But are they?
That our society would tend to view new technologies favorably is understandable. The first waves of news concerning any technical innovation are invariably positive and optimistic. That's because, in our society, the information is purveyed by those who stand to gain from our acceptance of it: corporations and their retainers in the government and scientific communities. None is motivated to report the negative sides of new technologies, so the public gets its first insights and expectations from sources that are clearly biased.
Over time, as successive generations of idealized technical innovations are introduced and presented at World's Fairs, in futurists' visions, and in hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of advertising, we develop expectations of a technological utopia here on Earth and in great domed cities in space. We begin to equate technological evolution with evolution itself, as though the two were equally inevitable, and virtually identical. The operating homilies become "Progress is good," "There's no turning back," and "Technology will free humans from disease, strife, and unremitting toil."
Debate on these subjects is inhibited by the fact that views of technology in our society are nearly identical across the political and social spectrum. The Left takes the same view of technology as do corporations, futurists, and the Right. Technology, they all say, is neutral. It has no inherent politics, no inevitable social or environmental consequences. What matters, according to this view, is who controls technology.
I have attended dozens of conferences in the last ten years on the future of technology. At every one, whether sponsored by government, industry, or environmentalists or other activists, someone will address the assembly with something like this: "There are many problems with technology and we need to acknowledge them, but the problems are not rooted to the technologies themselves. They are caused by the way we have chosen to use them. We can do better. We must do better. Machines don't cause problems, people do." This is always said as if it were an original and profound idea, when actually everyone else is saying exactly the same thing.
As we will see, the idea that technology is neutral is itself not neutral -- it directly serves the interests of the people who benefit from our inability to see where the juggernaut is headed.
I only began to glimpse the problem during the 1960s when I saw how excited our society became about the presumed potentials of television. Activists, like everyone else, saw the technology opportunistically, and began to vie with other segments of society for their twenty seconds on the network news. A kind of war developed for access to this powerful new instrument that spoke pictures into the brains of the whole population, but the outcome was predetermined. We should have realized it was a foregone conclusion that TV technology would inevitably be controlled by corporations, the government, and the military. Because of the technology's geographic scale, its cost, the astounding power of its imagery, and its ability to homogenize thought, behavior, and culture, large corporations found television uniquely efficient for ingraining a way of life that served (and still serves) their interests. And in times of national crisis, the government and military find TV a perfect instrument for the centralized control of information and consciousness. Meanwhile, all other contenders for control of the medium have effectively fallen by the wayside.
Now we have the frenzy over computers, which, in theory, can empower individuals and small groups and produce a new information democracy. In fact, as we will see in Chapter 4, the issue of who benefits most from computers was already settled when they were invented. Computers, like television, are far more valuable and helpful to the military, to multinational corporations, to international banking, to governments, and to institutions of surveillance and control -- all of whom use this technology on a scale and with a speed that are beyond our imaginings -- than they ever will be to you and me.
Computers have made it possible to instantaneously move staggering amounts of capital, information, and equipment throughout the world, giving unprecedented power to the largest institutions on the earth. In fact, computers make these institutions possible. Meanwhile, we use our personal computers to edit our copy and hook into our information networks -- and believe that makes us more powerful.
Even environmentalists have contributed to the problem by failing to effectively criticize technical evolution despite its obvious, growing, and inherent bias against nature. I fear that the ultimate direction of technology will become vividly clear to us only after we have popped out of the "information age" -- which does have a kind of benevolent ring -- and realize what is at stake in the last two big "wilderness intervention" battlegrounds: space and the genetic structures of living creatures. From there, it's on to the "postbiological age" of nanotechnology and robotics, whose advocates don't even pretend to care about the natural world. They think it's silly and out of date.
This first book was intended to raise questions about whether technological society has lived up to its advertising, and also to address some grave concerns about its future direction. Until now we have been impotent in the face of the juggernaut, partly because we are so unpracticed in technological criticism. We don't really know how to assess new or existing technologies. It is apparent that we need a new, more holistic language for examining technology, one that would ignore the advertised claims, best-case visions, and glamorous imagery that inundate us and systematically judge technology from alternative perspectives: social, political, economic, spiritual, ecological, biological, military. Who gains? Who loses? Do the new technologies serve planetary destruction or stability? What are their health effects? Psychological effects? How do they affect our interaction with and appreciation of nature? How do they interlock with existing technologies? What do they make possible that could not exist before? What is being lost? Where is it all going? Do we want that?
In the end, we can see that technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative implications.
No. 7But the assertion that technological society is something higher than what came before, and that it is bound to bring us a better world, has lately fallen open to grave doubts. The Industrial Revolution is about a century old, and we have had ample time to draw a few conclusions about how it is going. It is not too soon to observe that this revolution may not be living up to its advertising, at least in terms of human contentment, fulfillment, health, sanity, and peace. And it is surely creating terrible and possibly catastrophic impacts on the earth. Technotopia seems already to have failed, but meanwhile it continues to lurch forward, expanding its reach and becoming more arrogant and dangerous.
The next questions become: Can we expect the situation to improve or worsen in the future? And what of the people who always told us that this way could not work, and continue to say so now? Finally, which is the more "romantic" viewpoint: that technology will fix itself and lead us to paradise, or that the answer is something simpler?
No. 8Irrigation at this most fundamental level, it has been suggested, began on dry steppes many thousands of years ago, most likely around water holes where game animals gathered to drink. There they could be easily killed by primitive hunters -- too easily killed, in fact. The hunters, when they had exhausted their meat supply in those places, when they began to feel hunger, experimented with a new stratagem, scratching channels in the soil with their digging sticks and leading rainwater off to clumps of wild plants. Though many anthropologists would argue that agriculture appeared long before there was any irrigation, that farmers and not hunters invented it, the origins remain disputed and obscure.2
In the prehistoric Owens Valley of California, the Paiute people apparently did practice just such an irrigation without agriculture. According to Julian Steward, they did not plant, till, or cultivate the earth but cleverly watched how nature waters the grasses and bulbs, then followed suit. Eventually they learned how to throw a temporary dam of boulders, brush, and mud across a creek where it debauched onto the valley floor. Above the dam, they cut shallow ditches to divert water toward their favorite wild food species. Quite possibly this practice was a completely indigenous invention, though duplicated by gatherers living in other parts of the earth. So irrigation may have begun in some places even in advance of horticulture.3
Elsewhere in the American Southwest, the control of water was an idea that journeyed northward from what is now Mexico and adapted itself to local farming needs. The Pueblo societies had long been skilled irrigators when the Spanish conquistadors came in the sixteenth century and found them watering their corn, squash, and melons. The Zuni, for example, had built canals to carry the snowmelt from the mountains to their fields, and they also scattered their crops to take advantage of any springs bubbling to the surface.4 With them, as with the nearby Hopi, decisions about water rested in the hands of the family groups or clans that made up the pueblo. But farther east along the Rio Grande, the pueblos faced a more difficult environmental challenge. The river was too powerful for any small clan, or even single pueblo, acting alone, to tame. Therefore, writes Edward Dozier, extra village lines of coordination began to emerge, leading eventually to a more centralized system of governance. Many pueblos were united into a broad regional authority that, once perfected, could be turned to the practice of war against foreign peoples as well as to the control of water. When that happens, the local mode begins to disappear.5
The most extraordinary achievement in surviving the arid Southwest belongs to the Papago, the Bean People. They have dwelt for millennia in the Sonoran desert, a land that gets an average rainfall of less than ten inches, where saguaro, paloverde, and the Gila monster are among the flourishing forms of life. It was an unlikely place to take up farming, but they made a stunning success there until the white man's technology entered and destroyed their way of life.6 Papago agriculture, supplemented by hunting and gathering, was a mobile affair, touching the desert lightly. From April to September they collected cholla buds, wild greens, acorns, and fruit from the saguaro and prickly pear. For their protein they killed bighorn sheep, mule deer, peccary, and rabbits. But it was particularly in farming that they showed the most remarkable ingenuity. Whenever and wherever the rain fell, they rushed to get a bean crop raised. The bean on which they thrived was the tepary, a fast germinator. It had to be fast given the short growing season in the desert, where erratic rainfall may cause rivers suddenly to rise only to be followed in a couple of months by soil that is bone-dry again.
The Papago and other Sonoran groups perfected a technique called "floodplain irrigation," which was confined to a few river edges and arroyo mouths. Here is how it worked: A flash flood comes roaring down the sandy riverbed on a July day. It surges into a temporary catchment basin, where it immediately soaks into the soil or forms a pond for later diversion. Cottonwoods, willows, and burrobushes, some of them artificially planted by the Indians in fencerows along the watercourse, slow the current, spreading the water over a broad, flat surface and trapping the suspended silt for fertilizer. Then, in the mud left by the flood, the Papago plant their seeds, expecting to harvest them before the earth turns bricklike again. The fields irrigated in this way are small, irregular patches -- two acres here, three or four there. This technique, at which they were so skilled, was also called arroyo-mouth, or ak-chin, farming.7 The traditional Papago had little margin for error or complacence, yet they can be described as a people of abundance, at least in the sense that everyone among them had enough to eat and enough leisure to spend, when work was done, on stories, games, and tranquillity.
Guiding floodwater as the Papago did required a communal effort, for no solitary individual could handle the flood torrents. In 1895 an admiring white observer, W. J. McGee, called the system "the economy of solidarity," adding that no creature, human or otherwise, could get along in the desert without it.8 Besides cooperation, Papago agriculture demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the desert ecosystem, stream hydraulics, and agronomy. But theirs was not a science devoted to the technical conquest of nature; rather, it aimed more modestly at achieving a secure coexistence and a thrifty subsistence.
Before the Papago and the related Pima Indians appeared in the desert, their Hohokam ancestors (the "finished" or "gone" people) built far more ambitiously, and they suffered for it. Between A.D. 300 and 900, the Hohokam constructed the first large-scale irrigation works in what is now the United States. Excavations carried out from the 1930s on have gradually laid bare an advanced canal network along the Gila River near Chandler, Arizona, as well as on the site of Tempe and Phoenix, threading out from the Salt River.9 The Hohokam dug those canals over a period of centuries, until at last they had created a spiderlike web that could tap the entire spring runoff, drawing it off upstream and taking it to their fields high above the riverbeds. The largest of their canals was 30 feet across, 7 feet deep, and 8 miles long; it was capable of bringing enough water to irrigate 8,000 acres. Rawhides and baskets hoisted on Indian shoulders were the engines that carried away the dirt dug from that and other trenches. But at last the Hohokam overreached themselves. Intensive irrigation has everywhere led to increasing concentrations of salts in the topsoil, poisoning the farmer's fields. That nemesis came to the Hohokam too, and they were forced one day to abandon their agriculture completely, leaving behind them whited fields and dust-drifted canals.10 It was their children's children who then had to learn how to get along in the desert with a lighter touch.
No. 9In other parts of the world there still survive a few examples of the local subsistence mode of irrigation, all of which seem, where details are available, to conform roughly to the lineaments of power described here. The societies trying to hold on to that mode are commonly of very ancient origin, defying the growing pressures of modern states. Unlike the Hohokam, they cause little ecological disturbance, and for that reason they are as stable as the hills from which they take their water. Some of them are found in Bali's rice-paddy country, where the farmers long ago organized themselves in subaks -- -a form of "pluralistic collectivism," as Clifford Geertz terms it.13 Others may be Japanese irrigation cooperatives; there are over 100,000 of them in that nation, posing what some ambitious planners see as outmoded obstacles to a more scientific and profitable water management.14 Still others are the surviving remnants in Valencia, Spain, of feudal irrigation communities where originally there was only single-canal coordination, a very limited technology, and minimal intervillage consultation.15 Then, with at least a faint resemblance to these older varieties, there are those scattered communities in the American West made up of Hispanics, Mormons, or Montana ranchers, who continue to hang on to some part of their self-determination in the face of federal bureaucratization and external market pressures. What all those water communities have in common is that their technology, like their economy, is the handiwork of the water users themselves; it is an indigenous, not an exogenous, artifact. There is not much need for capital or for specially trained experts in their creation. Typically a river in such communities continues to run largely on its natural way, giving up only a little of its substance to human demands, answering to the need for sustainability more than for efficiency. When such communities fail, and they sometimes do, it is usually the result of bitter, persistent disputes that no one locally can resolve, or it is the result of an invasion by outside armies or progress-makers. Where such communities endure, on the other hand, the water flows and flows through history, as nature and the human community join together in a single circle.16
No. 10Irrigation on a limited scale did not disturb that insularity. In such cases, a river might flow through a string of villages down to the sea, sustaining and protecting their autonomy to a point. But wherever there was further development of irrigation works, that discreteness could not survive. Newer and bigger canals were built to flow, as it were, uphill to a commanding central authority. Out of such concerted efforts came a second kind of irrigation mode, the chief characteristic of which was that it interfered on a massive scale with the natural flow of the watershed, forcing water miles and miles out of its path of least resistance, running ever more complex risks of environmental degradation, requiring as a result of that danger a constant, intense vigilance. Reorganizing the fundamentals of nature in such a way demanded in turn the consolidation of the loose mosaic of villages into a broader, more powerful instrumentality. That process took place during the four millennia before Christ in some of the great desert landscapes of the world: in Arizona, as we have seen, in China, in India, and above all in the Middle East, where the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers rolled down from the mountaintops through wide, fertile, but extremely dry valleys.
No. 11Following a similar logic of discontent, Egypt in the nineteenth century converted to a perennial irrigation system that required expensive storage reservoirs, more canals and headgates to regulate the passage of water, artificial fertilizers to replace sediment trapped in the reservoirs, and considerable disruption of rural life. In its favor, the new system made possible several crops a year, including cotton for exporting to the world markets. So Egypt abandoned its time-tested ways and became rich -- or at least some of its citizens did. It shipped its products abroad until it no longer raised enough food to feed itself. And step by step it came to confront a mounting ecological backlash: salinity poisoning, degraded fisheries, and higher levels of schistosomiasis than ever before.20
No. 12"The Chinese people," declares Joseph Needham, "have been outstanding among the nations of the world in their control and use of water."24 Hydraulic engineering, or shui li, was more advanced there than in any other premodern society. Historical records going back to the eighth century B.C. mention irrigation. Like Egypt, China was never an avid builder of dams and reservoirs; its expertise lay more in flood-control works and in elegant canals, carrying both taxes to the capital city (mainly in the form of rice) and, especially in the semiarid north, water for crops. Its early triumphs include the Cheng State Canal (completed in 560 B.C.), the Cheng-kuo Canal (246 B.C.), and the Grand Canal (begun in 581 B.C.), which eventually ran the full 1,100 miles from Peking to the port of Hangchow. The rise of Imperial China, commencing with the Han dynasty of the third century B.C., owes much to some forty major water projects carried out to control "China's Sorrow," the Huang Ho, or Yellow River, which has wreaked more havoc on humankind than any other.25 Clearly, this agrarian state did practice large-scale water manipulation and can accurately be called a hydraulic civilization. But it was not necessarily, as Wittfogel would have it, a totalitarian one.
No. 13By the 1940s, the American West could boast of managing water better than any other region on the planet. Its showpiece was Hoover Dam, completed on the Colorado River in 1935, immediately ranking as one of the engineering wonders of the twentieth century. Under construction were even more ambitious projects in the Central Valley of California and at the Grand Coulee in the state of Washington. In praise of those works, J. Kip Finch, dean emeritus of Columbia University's engineering college, hailed "the increasing mastery of man over nature which has made possible our continuing progress toward a better life." "Nature," he went on, "has been harnessed to meet man's needs on a scale that not so long ago would have been regarded as completely visionary and impossible."16 What the Frankfurt critics would have pointed out to the dean, had they not been thinking about other matters, is that such projects, like the greater project of dominating nature of which they are a part, always carry a human cost, no matter how sweet the virtuosity or how sunny the motives of the dominators.