Acequias are communally-run water systems (aqueducts or ditches) in Iberia and Spain's former colonies. They are most notably present in the American Southwest, especially New Mexico. There are some similar forms elsewhere—levadas in Madeira, indigenous technologies (like puquios) in the New World, and more—but I will use acequias as a bit of a proxy term. Their history seems to be tracked to the qanats of Persia, brought to Iberia through Arab expansion, then to the Americas with Spanish colonization. 


Acequias are coupled hydrologic-economic-social systems, whereby water, a scarce resource in arid and semi-arid climates, is allocated for agricultural use by communitarian societies. The "water democracies" they are related with historically give voting rights to those who use the water on their land, and enforce management and maintenance duties via social contracts between the acequia corporation members. In drought times, the water scarcity is taken as a collective burden, and water is managed to as to balance collective needs, aquifer recharge and the sustainability of the entire acequia system. They are networked, whereby individual plots cannot necessarily be turned off and on without impacting the integrity of the rest of the system, which helps in upholding a collectivist attitude (ref).

That is the ideal at least. Water in arid places is an impure public good: the systems that carry it can become levers of power which exclude, uphold class divisions, and drive unequal labor practices: they are social systems first, technological systems second. And with any social system, broad strokes governance procedures ignore the messy reality of dealing with specific people and roles in an ever-changing environment, exposing how much effective management by people requires emotional intelligence and trust. Equitable service by and maintenance of the system requires it to have memory of the roles of its constituents, and to respond in reasoned ways to the events that affect them, the social context of exchanges between people, and the lands and ditches themselves. The networked infrastructure must be an active, living assemblage: it dies in the absence of social relationships upholding its value (and maintenance). Both of these papers bring up how critical it is for people to have a shared moral fabric to keep systems sustainable in generational time or longer, which may be religious or familial in nature. For my western social class, it is common that neither religious nor family ties are particularly strong: what social fabrics can be woven today to honor good-faith infrastructure maintenance? 

"Within the social and cultural domain of qanats, we cannot find a single motivation as a driver for the existence and functionality of qanats. This is because qanats are more than just economical, technical or even agricultural assemblages. Inside the qanat’s social ecosystem the political, religions, technical and socio-cultural institutions have been faithfully linked together." (ref) 

I have an enormous slew of questions and thoughts on these kinds of water systems. Mostly curiosity: there is very little information I have found on actual governance patterns of acequias or qanats. Things are so vastly different here in California, where the greatest water infrastructure on earth (?) is completely alienated from its users' daily needs and social fabric. I am somewhat curious if I can find a creative grant program to fund me doing some visits and research on these topics. I wonder how much these deeper-time histories of collective infrastructure governance can inform stuff happening today, whether in environmental economics or crypto. (Or, both?) Time will tell. Thanks to my friends AWS and TA for some conversations around these ideas. 

Relatedly, I am giving a Sandbox✦ talk at TRUST next week! It is on Tuesday, November 9th at 11am PST. My talk is called GREEN SPACE AS INFRASTRUCTURE SPACE, here is a blurb:  

Pressing material and political incentives are encouraging wider application of environmental economics to ascribe value to environmental processes. By accounting for the “ecosystem services” they provide, more and more landscapes can be valued, celebrated, and maintained as “green infrastructure”. In California, the state’s terraforming project and water infrastructure are nearly one and the same, but water scarcity threatens the abundance mindset. How far can we abstract a landscape into an infrastructural, economic entity? 

I've just begun preparation for my PhD qualifying exam. In my department, this is the biggest pinch point of the entire doctoral program, and it entails mapping out the nature of my dissertation and providing supporting evidence that I have everything for it all to happen. I'm interested in many things (can you tell?) but ultimately my dissertation will be about salt marshes. 

Marshes are high priority for attention under climate change and environmental collapse because of the myriad "ecosystem services" they provide (sometimes also called "environmental services"). These include: providing crucial habitat for various species which support broad food webs, filtering out toxins as water moves through them, sequestering carbon, and ameliorating flood risk to local areas. Ecosystem Services is a bit of an anthropocentric term in how it positions the environment as subservient to humans, valued only for the typical kinds of civilizational activities the ecosystem can support (ala infrastructure services), but seemingly a necessary designation in order for capitalism to value these places. 



Does a marsh support the GDP? If this wiki page is any indication, it's been an ongoing challenge to assess ecosystem services the way we might assess a new outlet mall—as an investment by its developers and with some kind of revenue per square foot. I believe that a lot of this is due to the intelligibility of benefits by engineered versus natural features on the landscape. A new shopping mall is a planned, designed space with particular measurable physical and economic metrics in mind: a spatial and intellectual parameter space that is articulated in advance by engineers and planners on top of a razed ("empty") lot. At the core of engineering is the drawing of a system boundary around the system, and relative neglect of that which falls outside the system. This approach means that in any system, we essentially only measure that which we anticipate, that which we know how to measure, and that which we follow after the system boundaries have been drawn. All the rest are externalities. As far as metrics go, monetary values of goods and real estate are concrete numbers which are closely monitored and comparatively "easy" to reckon with (sorry, economists). When we want to pin monetary values to environmental metrics and their effects, a lot more complicated work (or a broad set of assumptions) is required to quantify the metrics and their repercussions, given that most ecological processes do not obey firm boundaries in space or time.

What I mean to draw attention to is that it is really quite hard to measure and causally relate all of the things that any given land cover does to the world around it, because hydrologic and ecologic processes are patchy and happen across complicated micro-, meso-, and macro-scales. They defy the typical ways that civil engineering projects are measured as successful or not—as within the bounds of a designed system. It's difficult to say what processes in the world need to be included or not in the accounting. (I am a proponent of afforestation efforts in general, but as I wade into the literature a little bit more, I have learned that the devil is truly in the details when it comes to net carbon budget effects.)


This difficulty comes to a head in carbon markets as well as what I will broadly call "green infrastructure." By the EPA's definition, green infrastructure only means when grey (i.e. concrete) flood control infrastructure—storm sewers and flood control channels—can be replaced with more green space. Soils and plants are, generally, good at absorbing water and playing this role, but they may not function within a narrow parameter space that is preferable to engineers. I think the denomination "green infrastructure" deserves to be at least a bit more expansive: there is solid evidence that green coastal margins (beaches, marshes, mangroves) provide more effective, resilient, and dynamic flood protection than concrete seawalls. In the near future, as technocratic carbon sequestration projects will grow to a scale similar to our water and energy infrastructure (optimistically???), I hope that natural carbon sequestration will also be considered a part of "green infrastructure." 

For us to position the lifecycle of a marsh as if it were a grey infrastructure project requires improved quantifying of its infrastructural roles, which requires a lot more research! (I hope that my dissertation can contribute to this.) We still have a lot of big questions around how a marsh even "works." How does water flow through a marsh? hard question, incredibly. How fast does it sequester carbon? Uhh, this we can actually measure with some careful assumptions and cores, but it may come with wide error bars. How many species does the marsh support? Good luck counting butterflies. 

But we also don't really grasp all the impacts of paving over a marsh to build on top. Maybe the local flood risk will skyrocket, maybe the dandelions will love it. A wonderful conversation with AWS this past weekend also pointed to how the greening of grey spaces will often come with interest in "redevelopment" or up-zoning, and various good and bad and complicated repercussions will follow. The eco-utopian in me wants to believe that efforts towards replanting and ecosystem restoration (or, more generally, degrowth with its landesque repercussions) will come plush with unanticipated benefits that may be good for environmental health, and that we can ease through this awkward instrumentalization of ecological processes to justify their care. But some systems are complex to the point where we don't know what is good or bad for them a priori. And, through some logic of ecosystem services, good or bad for humanity. 

Producing revenue,
Lukas

Hi Folks, it has been a while. I probably do need to hold myself to one post per month! 

I'm in the meat of my Master's thesis, wrapping up the methodology and beginning to dive into the analysis and interpretation. I already wrote about what my thesis is, actually: seeing how ocean wind/swell/tide energy disperses through Tomales Bay. I'm interested in these processes out of sheer curiosity, but I am motivated to push on them because they are related to the resiliency of the landscape and the potential opportunities for habitat restoration along the shore. Highway 1 goes along the East side of the embayment, and Marin County is concerned for how erodible that shoreline is. Perhaps creating marsh habitat or installing oyster reefs can attenuate that erosion? Perhaps it can attenuate future flood risk? 

This kind of work is getting called "natural infrastructure"—recognizing that many natural processes achieve goals that humankind has often addressed with "hard" infrastructure. It can be a strategic tool to define the value of ecosystems in economic terms. I've most often seen the term applied to coastal erosion/flooding and watershed filtration. (e.g. the watersheds that serve most of NYC's municipal water are well-protected, allowing the soil to scrub the water as it moves through the watershed; this allows the city to worry less about expensive, intensive water treatment plants.)

"Infrastructure" is an expansive word. At first pass, what do you imagine? roads? rail lines? water treatment plants? landfills? power lines? potable water? what if we include local ports? cold-storage trucks? cellular networks? health care? housing? Do you consider flood control channels? sewers? catchment basins? In casual conversation, I find myself using "infrastructure" as a shortcut to say something along the lines of "systems that support some ongoing civilizational function." Infrastructure prototypically supports essential human services—perhaps things that allow people to live (and/or the economy to function). In a conversation with Pierie, we considered that "infrastructure is that which supports basic human needs" may be a useful description; that infrastructure should support food, water, shelter, health (sanitation), education, communication (and more...). In this sense, food deserts, lack of affordable housing, and subpar schools can be framed as infrastructural problems. I like this framing because a lot of prototypical "infrastructure" work falls on my field—Civil Engineering—but these are problems that won't be solved by "hard" engineering works (i.e. concrete and steel). They are complex social problems, and the engineer may likely not be the most qualified person in the room to steer the projects. This interview, with Dr Monica Smith, had a huge impact on framing this for me, some years ago. 

I went to a series of talks two weeks ago, and Caroline Chen said that "infrastructure is that which creates future conditions for construction," inasmuch as it "plugs" a parcel of space into the services that can make it useful, in an architectural sense. (A place for a building.) I think this line of thinking supports what most of us think too, that infrastructure is not an "individual" thing—you don't have "your" infrastructure: infrastructure is a tool for network service, a way to participate in a broader system. We typically assume that by participating in a network, we reap some benefits of a distributed system—that it will be resilient. We assume that by mass of collective buy-in, it will respond to collective needs (and possibly emergencies). We often assume that large scales for infrastructure permit efficiency and ease for the end-user, by becoming invisible (thanks Dan) and allowing the governance to be outsourced to a small, highly-informed group. (For better or for worse.) Obviously, there are exceptions of various scales. 

I feel I am outgrowing an old, more rigid sense of what infrastructure means, and am seeking to find the value in viewing other systems as "infrastructure" too. Intellectual infrastructure, perhaps? I do not want to stretch the term unnecessarily, but its use may help bring urgent and collective-minded thinking to a broader scope of topics. 

Serving,
Lukas