Drained
Water, Oil, and Environmental Justice in Colonial California
“Man has reclaimed nothing - Tulare Lake has reclaimed her own.”
This report from Orlando Barton, an early California settler, published in the Visalia Daily Times, described a 1906 flood that inundated the San Joaquin Valley and destroyed millions of dollars of crops and equipment. Barton had lived in the area since 1865, when California’s interior was still covered in lakes and wetlands that hosted thousands of migratory birds, fish, frogs, turtles, elk, and antelope. The Yokuts, the most populous of California Indigenous groups, lived in villages across the San Joaquin Valley, using tule boats to steward its astoundingly productive sloughs and lakes. Barton had watched as farmers and land speculators, driven by discourses of “reclamation,” drained the valley’s inland lakes and levelled its rolling hills into flat irrigated agricultural land: what the US Geological Survey has since called the largest human-made alteration of the land surface. Murderous private militias and state-funded troops had forcibly removed the Yokuts from their lands and to reservations in the Sierra foothills. But Tulare Lake, Kern Lake, Buena Vista Lake, and Goose Lake would continue to “reclaim their own,” thwarting settlers’ efforts to remake the landscape, until large flood-control dams were installed at the top of the Sierras in the 1950s.
“The Late, Great, Buena Vista Lake.” Historical Kern County Quarterly Bulletin Volume 59, No 3 Fall 2009
Early ditch-digging in the San Joaquin Valley. From Frank Latta Collection, Huntington Library
Now, those hydraulic projects and their 20th century expansions underwrite the San Joaquin Valley’s two major extractive industries, both premised on exploiting racialized labor and groundwater: agribusiness and oil drilling.
Level of the land in the San Joaquin Valley over the last 100 years. The man standing is Joseph Poland, a geologist who documented widespread subsidence in the 1970s.
While pumpjacks bob within agricultural fields and farmworker towns, water is now so scarce that some farmers use contaminated wastewater from nearby oil fields to augment irrigation supplies. Bakersfield (the valley’s major city) regularly ranks worst in air pollution across the country and its water supplies are contaminated by a combination of pesticide byproducts, nitrates, hydrocarbons, and heavy metals. This book will speak to the manufacture of this landscape, its paradoxes, and its circularities: while the valley’s draining was originally propelled by white fears of contamination from an unruly landscape, the work that turned it from ostensibly “wasteland” to productive farmland also created the conditions in which, today, living in the Valley is actually contaminating to the body, in group-differentiated and disproportionate ways.
Though deeply place-based in California, the book offers a multi-modal and expansive study of environmental justice practice and relations in which the past is not only context but an actor itself. As I show, the San Joaquin Valley’s history and present are instructive for understanding climate change, its origins, and its impacts more broadly. These waterways’ destruction in service of white property and oil extraction is a microcosm of our current global environmental collapse: we are all frogs in a drying pond, though some, always, are more exposed than others. Ultimately, the book shows that the group-differentiated devaluing of human and more-than-human life and relations through drainage is not exceptional, but rather is fundamental to a colonial/capitalist structure.
