Legal processes shape how water resources are allocated, regulated, distributed, and governed. This paper examines the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that addresses the state's role in governing natural resources by requiring states to manage certain bodies of water and their shorelines for the good of the public. The paper focuses on how the public trust doctrine has been used--with varying degrees of success-to protect water bodies by contesting the diversion and transfer of water in California. The paper compares how the doctrine was applied in two cases: Mono Lake and the Salton Sea, two California lakes that have been threatened by water diversions and transfers. Advocates at Mono Lake successfully used the public trust doctrine for environmental protection, while public trust was an unsuccessful strategy at the Salton Sea. The paper examines issues of nonequilibrium ecosystems, natural versus artificial ecosystems, and wasteful versus reasonable uses of water.By investigating why one case was deemed eligible for public trust protections while the other was not, this paper examines how discursive constructions of nature are embedded in and enacted by legal institutions and how these constructions of nature impact the implementation of legal protections of natural resources. In examining the use of the public trust doctrine in California, the paper examines both the potential and the limitations of the public trust in practice, showing how legal processes and institutions can be used to protect public interests in natural resources but also how particular environmental narratives are reinforced through these institutions.
California's state constitution prohibits the “wasteful” use of water; however, waste is subjective and context dependent. This paper considers political, biopolitical, and material dimensions of waste, focusing on the role of legal processes and institutions. The paper examines a case involving legal accusations of “waste and unreasonable use” of water by the Imperial Irrigation District in Imperial County, California. The determination that water was being “wasted” justified the transfer of water from agricultural to urban areas. However, defining these flows of water as a waste neglected water's complexity and relationality, and the enclosure of a “paracommons” threatens to bring about negative environmental and public health consequences. The paper shows that the project of discursively labeling certain material resource flows as waste and re‐allocating these resources to correct this moral and economic failure relies upon legal processes, and carries political and biopolitical implications.
Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.
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