Announcement before I jump in: my friend Bryan and I have been working on a new season of short stories about near-future speculative fiction about climate activism. The stories, which I helped edit, and new site are now online HERE! Please give a read.
I wrote a little bit about acequia systems over a year ago. As a reminder, they are community-owned irrigation ditch systems, typically in New Mexico & Colorado in the United States, but with similar sociotechnical constructions around the world.
Since then, I've read two books (Mayordomo and Acequia Culture) about acequias in particular, and one about water, place, and equity. What interests me most about these systems is how much they embody some different ethics than what I see in my daily life around land and water.
At the same time, I'm still trying to find a new apartment after my time in Chile. You likely already know that affordable housing in California is impossible to find, yet alone on paltry grad student stipend. The big UC Strike has officially ended with an agreement ratified last night. Unfortunately, while wages will go up, they're nowhere close to keeping up with housing costs or inflation. (I'm close enough to the end of my PhD that I don't really think about dropping out any more, but every time I open craigslist to try to find an apartment, I consider leaving again—it was definitely a horrible financial decision to stay at Berkeley for my PhD, and that has damaged other aspects of my life.) UC is, in effect, choosing only to graduate the wealthy students who already have means to stay, and making many students enter a bit of an extractive mode: come to California, get a PhD, and get out as soon as possible. UC's credibility wanes in its ability to serve its mission of giving Californians new opportunities, and supporting people to stay in the state; it's behaving more like a private university, without any of the benefits (or endowment).
I digress. What does this have to do with acequias? It's about land and housing markets. UC, by some actions as well as its inaction, has furthered the Californian housing market to prioritize the landlord and anti-density development, basically protecting the investments of previous generations while amputating the future ones. In the same way that you can use water in a sustainable and cyclical way or you can use water akin to extractive mining, sustainable/adaptive development is possible, or it can be conceptualized as a one-way path to sprawl and rising property values. Sadly, California is a state built on a first-come-first-serve land grab of exclusion and disenfranchisement.
Given this context, what's most interested me in acequias is a logic other than the first-come-first-served, "prior appropriation" logic—something ubiquitous in the waters of the American West. Instead of a system built for those who were there "first", riparian rights (and other forms or mutations of common law norms) consider a system that tries to make space for the newcomers, too. ("First" in quotes because discussion on white settlement is not included here—I don't think I could do the atrocities justice now!)
For acequias, the ability to resolve effective change is partly possible because of their small scale, a few dozen to a few hundred people. As narrated in Mayordomo, much of the maintenance and expansion of the whole system is about basic conflict resolution between specific people. Additionally, the acequia functions as a social unit, able to exert social pressure and mutually-enforceable penalties against use that does not align with the cultivated sense of stewardship. Acequia Culture includes a portion around how, as New Mexico real estate prices have gone up, extractive tendencies have, too: possibilities to "get rich and go" have increased, with no sense of long-term care. Navigating equity is tough at the acequia scale; a shared culture of willingness to sacrifice individual gain for the communal good is even more difficult to maintain at, say, the size of the entire state of California. Acequia Culture has much more to say on these topics, carefully explaining how acequia systems for water distribution are resilient and trusted because they are adaptive, with centuries of histories of expansion and contraction when conditions permit or inhibit. It's easier to steer a small institution and culture than to rapidly change large ones.
I don't mean to needlessly glamorize acequias—I don't expect society to return to family-scale farming as the way forward—but acequias have lessons within them nevertheless. They celebrate a re-localization of governance and the social need for emphasis on procedural equity (sometimes to the detriment of material efficiency), while providing thriving examples of socioeconomic systems not based on prior appropriation. I would love to see more like this applied to larger scales, and to real estate systems.
Back on craigslist,
Lukas
p.s. Both Mayordomo and Water, Place, and Equity discuss how difficult it is for typical economic theories to grapple with water as an economic good, because of its cyclical nature. No surprise: typical economics hardly encourages cyclical systems. I have more to say about this, maybe next Gnamma...
p.p.s. Happy holidays!!!
I wrote a little bit about acequia systems over a year ago. As a reminder, they are community-owned irrigation ditch systems, typically in New Mexico & Colorado in the United States, but with similar sociotechnical constructions around the world.
Since then, I've read two books (Mayordomo and Acequia Culture) about acequias in particular, and one about water, place, and equity. What interests me most about these systems is how much they embody some different ethics than what I see in my daily life around land and water.
At the same time, I'm still trying to find a new apartment after my time in Chile. You likely already know that affordable housing in California is impossible to find, yet alone on paltry grad student stipend. The big UC Strike has officially ended with an agreement ratified last night. Unfortunately, while wages will go up, they're nowhere close to keeping up with housing costs or inflation. (I'm close enough to the end of my PhD that I don't really think about dropping out any more, but every time I open craigslist to try to find an apartment, I consider leaving again—it was definitely a horrible financial decision to stay at Berkeley for my PhD, and that has damaged other aspects of my life.) UC is, in effect, choosing only to graduate the wealthy students who already have means to stay, and making many students enter a bit of an extractive mode: come to California, get a PhD, and get out as soon as possible. UC's credibility wanes in its ability to serve its mission of giving Californians new opportunities, and supporting people to stay in the state; it's behaving more like a private university, without any of the benefits (or endowment).
I digress. What does this have to do with acequias? It's about land and housing markets. UC, by some actions as well as its inaction, has furthered the Californian housing market to prioritize the landlord and anti-density development, basically protecting the investments of previous generations while amputating the future ones. In the same way that you can use water in a sustainable and cyclical way or you can use water akin to extractive mining, sustainable/adaptive development is possible, or it can be conceptualized as a one-way path to sprawl and rising property values. Sadly, California is a state built on a first-come-first-serve land grab of exclusion and disenfranchisement.
Given this context, what's most interested me in acequias is a logic other than the first-come-first-served, "prior appropriation" logic—something ubiquitous in the waters of the American West. Instead of a system built for those who were there "first", riparian rights (and other forms or mutations of common law norms) consider a system that tries to make space for the newcomers, too. ("First" in quotes because discussion on white settlement is not included here—I don't think I could do the atrocities justice now!)
For acequias, the ability to resolve effective change is partly possible because of their small scale, a few dozen to a few hundred people. As narrated in Mayordomo, much of the maintenance and expansion of the whole system is about basic conflict resolution between specific people. Additionally, the acequia functions as a social unit, able to exert social pressure and mutually-enforceable penalties against use that does not align with the cultivated sense of stewardship. Acequia Culture includes a portion around how, as New Mexico real estate prices have gone up, extractive tendencies have, too: possibilities to "get rich and go" have increased, with no sense of long-term care. Navigating equity is tough at the acequia scale; a shared culture of willingness to sacrifice individual gain for the communal good is even more difficult to maintain at, say, the size of the entire state of California. Acequia Culture has much more to say on these topics, carefully explaining how acequia systems for water distribution are resilient and trusted because they are adaptive, with centuries of histories of expansion and contraction when conditions permit or inhibit. It's easier to steer a small institution and culture than to rapidly change large ones.
I don't mean to needlessly glamorize acequias—I don't expect society to return to family-scale farming as the way forward—but acequias have lessons within them nevertheless. They celebrate a re-localization of governance and the social need for emphasis on procedural equity (sometimes to the detriment of material efficiency), while providing thriving examples of socioeconomic systems not based on prior appropriation. I would love to see more like this applied to larger scales, and to real estate systems.
Back on craigslist,
Lukas
p.s. Both Mayordomo and Water, Place, and Equity discuss how difficult it is for typical economic theories to grapple with water as an economic good, because of its cyclical nature. No surprise: typical economics hardly encourages cyclical systems. I have more to say about this, maybe next Gnamma...
p.p.s. Happy holidays!!!