Moving the Rain: Settler Colonialism, the Capitalist State, and the Hydrologic Rift in California’s Central Valley

Abstract

Agricultural development and water infrastructure constitute the central features of California’s Central Valley. Marxist ecological theory has examined the development of capitalist agriculture in the Central Valley, while decolonial scholarship has critiqued the disproportionate impact of California’s water resource management on Indigenous communities. We bring together Marxist ecology and critiques of settler colonialism through an examination of land reclamation in California, culminating in the development of the Central Valley Project (CVP) in the 1930s. Reclamation combined the twin logics of capitalism (accumulation) and settler colonialism (elimination) to produce landscapes conducive to capitalist agriculture. Faced with ecological limits to accumulation, colonial‐capitalist expansion required state intervention in the form of infrastructure projects to secure water for agricultural production. The CVP generated a rift in California’s hydrologic cycle, causing significant declines in water quality and fisheries and giving rise to forms of resistance and restoration that challenge colonial‐capitalist water development in the Central Valley. The reciprocal restoration of salmon fisheries offers a method to begin mending this hydrologic rift while disrupting ongoing settler colonial violence in California.

Geographies of storage

“…But the spatial impacts of storage sites often extend well beyond such facilities' boundaries, as signaled by their characterization as infrastructural ecologies (Banoub & Martin, 2020). In the case of reservoirs, the inundation often creates the necessary conditions of possibility to rationalize the surrounding landscapes for profit‐driven development (Claire & Surprise, 2022). Likewise, large‐scale distribution centers have been shown to not only rework the local landscapes adjacent to the warehouses themselves, but also to exacerbate local environmental degradation along associated trucking corridors (De Lara, 2018a; De Lara, 2018b).…”

Infrastructure of Vulnerability, or, How the Fraser Valley Flooded Twice

“…Dike infrastructure has also been a favoured tool of settler colonialism, often in the direct service of accumulation. They have been used, as in California's Central Valley, to advance the settler‐colonial project by simultaneously producing land for capitalist agriculture and disrupting the traditional ecological world of Indigenous communities (Claire and Surprise 2022). New land was brought into production through conversion to what Whyte (2018b:135) calls a “settler ecology”: an environment amenable to the goals of settlers and hostile to the survival of Indigenous people.…”