The vast Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest lies in the political territories of California and Arizona and reaches south into Mexico. Its arid landscape is home to human industry and a complex ecosystem full of unique flora and fauna, mesas, canyons, arched rocks and other processes of deep time. It is thus governed by two competing forces: Political governance and natural boundaries.
In the Sonora, just outside of Coachella, California new development plans call for building tens of thousands of new homes on the landscape, converting wilderness to neighborhoods and town squares.
Media reports coming out of the southwest the past few months, however, note the great drought and water crisis gripping the region. Residents wonder where the water for even more sprawl will come from. NASA satellite mapping the region reveals incredible reductions in groundwater across the landscape. The trend is resource depletion, and we are warned it will only get worse.
But, the water shortage is not the crisis gripping the Southwest.
There is water everywhere in desert. Water flows in braided streams and deep channels such as the great Colorado. Water carves out canyons and gorges against quartz rich sandstone, occupies porous rock and nurtures incredible desert plants such as the flowering cacti. As desert enthusiast Edward Abbey writes in his book Desert Solitaire: “Water, water, water … There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount … There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”
What is imperiling the desert is human domination of the landscape.
Planning, zoning and development ultimately seek economic growth. There are of course guidelines and restrictions, town hall meetings and financial statements, but at the end of the day centralized economic regimes will develop a landscape if there’s a profit to be made.
Landscapes have been divided, not based on the sciences of resource management, geology or ecology, but rather to serve political and economic ambitions. States draw fictional lines in the sand for the sole purpose of claiming landscapes as property to enclose, develop and regulate. The political boundary is a marker of centralized economic planning — an institution that sprouts cities, municipalities, lush green golf courses and dam construction in arid lands.
It is a pity that advocates of central planning, in the name of the environment no less continually deny that high-liberalism is a failed dogma. The market mechanism, however, coupled with common governance offers a fresh take on resource management. This adaptive approach allows us to analyze landscapes in terms of watersheds, ecosystems, capacity for food production, resources available for trade, cultural heritage and resource conservation.
Such an order would ensure that vast landscapes will rarely, if ever, be occupied by our bodies.
The market mechanism, free of sweeping land use policy, would naturally cap resource extraction at its maximum sustainable yield. There would be strong economic incentive for water conservation in arid lands, as opposed to the maximum utility we see today. This respect for natural boundaries would in turn limit the amount of sprawl into the landscape. In the commons, land is not a commodity, but a connection — a place of labor and heritage.
I have long admired the desert. In these lands geologic formations readily display the story of an ancient Earth, streams intricately carve new landscapes while deep canyons and alluvial fans speak to the power of time. The desert should not be subjected to the Anthropocene, but liberated from it.
Citations to this article:
- Grant Mincy, Political Governance and Natural Boundaries, Bell Gardens, California Sun, 09/11/14
- Grant Mincy, Political Governance and Natural Boundaries, Before It’s News, 09/06/14
As long as economic activity is driven by the growth imperative instead of being directed by directly-democratic communities, ecological depletion is inevitable. It makes little difference in practice whether this extractivist process is carried out by central planning or your "market mechanism". The only solutions that will ever be effective in the long term are reorganising stewardship of the natural world on the basis of decentralised commons – where the needs of the communities living in a given bioregion are guided by the sustainability and fecundity of the natural environment.
Why is it that we constantly have to frame solutions to ecological problems in terms of what will best benefit a market economy rather than what will benefit the biosphere? From what I can see the solution you're proposing is just a slightly less insane form of green capitalism; it's still rooted in growth ideology and the profit motive.
Re-read this article.
I take special consideration of common governance, decentralization and vast wilderness preservation. I also mock the growth imperative. I also note that we would organize our socieities around the geology, ecology, etc, etc, of a region. The market mechanism does not mean what you think it means: Democracy thrives in the laissez faire.
"The market mechanism, however, coupled with common governance offers a fresh take on resource management. This adaptive approach allows us to analyze landscapes in terms of watersheds, ecosystems, capacity for food production, resources available for trade, cultural heritage and resource conservation.
Such an order would ensure that vast landscapes will rarely, if ever, be occupied by our bodies."
it also means that we must strive together to accomplish what can best
By this do you mean that (1) markets will be subject to the directly-democratic controls of communities as parts of a decentralised system of commons; or (2) local participatory democracies and commons systems can be "allowed" to exist within an internationalised market economy based on competition?
If (1), then I have no quarrel with this. In fact, it would be something I would be fully in favour of.
If (2), my initial criticisms stand.
The very concept of a global competitive market economy, with all social-politcal-economic activity taking place within it, comes from growth ideology. The fundamental flaw in this model is that it sees society and ecology as subsets of the economy, when in reality the economy is a subset of society, which is in turn a subset of ecology.
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