Socio-Culture Implications of Irrigation-Based Agriculture
"The American West is . . . more consistently, and more decisively, a land of authority and restraint, of class and exploitation, and ultimately of imperial power." [From, Rivers of Empire, by Donald Worster]
“The human being, in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of the world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself. Domination becomes ‘internalized’ for domination’s sake.” [From, The Eclipse of Reason, by Horkheimer]
“Rivers of Empire is a social historical analysis of irrigation in the arid West. It is a long unflinching and disquieting look at the alarming disparity between what irrigation technology promised and what it delivered. Donald Worster, … resurrects and revises the thesis of sometimes Marxist scholar Karl Wittfogel regarding ancient "hydraulic societies." These societies, located around the great rivers in arid places, developed highly centralized and authoritarian political systems as they increased the scale of water use and control. No scholars have applied these ideas to the American West, Worster says. Indeed, the growing body of literature on western water has tended to ignore the larger world experience, ancient or modern…Worster fills this important gap by making clear that the control of water, not land, has been the determining factor in the development of the arid West. In so doing, the darker implications of irrigation culture and its ancient precedents are brought into American history.” [The Journal of San Diego History, Fall 1987, Volume 33, Number 4; Raymond Starr, Book Review Editor; http://search.blossom.com/geturl?&o=0p&i851&KEY=rivers+of+empire&URL=http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/87fall/br-rivers.htm]
The following is an excerpt from Donald Worster’s book, Rivers of Empire, which discuss the social/cultural implication of hydraulic cultures:
Wittfogel, Marz and the Ecology of Power. The idea that nature has had something to do with the shaping of cultures and history is an idea that is both obviously true and persistently neglected. Maybe that is because there have been so many absurd versions of it, so many laughable claims: for instance, hot weather has been supposed to make peoples passionate and volatile like the Italians—or is it metaphysical and speculative like Plato and the Hindus? The fatal temptation in this line of thinking has always been to fasten on a single factor of nature, like climate, and proceed to discover its influence everywhere. A more credible strategy would be to regard nature as participating in an unending dialectic with human history, seeing the two, that is, as intertwined in an ongoing spiral of challenge-response—challenge, where neither nature nor humanity ever achieves absolute sovereign authority, but both continue to make and remake each other…
…Wittfogel's ecological interpretation of ancient irrigation societies has come to have a certain familiarity—though it has often been more a notoriety—among historians and anthropologists, particularly those who style themselves cultural ecologists or cultural materialists. But his theory, though it exemplifies to a remarkable degree the ecological approach to history, has older origins than the recently popular science of ecology. It had its taproot in the work of Karl Marx and his dialectical approach to history, more specifically, in those ideas of Marx, though he addressed them only fragmentarily, about the role of nature in social change and how that role might account for the peculiarities of many Asian cultures. And Marx was not the only source for Wittfogel's theorizing; it owes a great deal also to the intellectual milieu of Weimar Germany, to the sociology of Max Weber, and to the nascent Frankfurt School of radical social thought, which took as one of its main themes the study of power and domination, including the domination of the earth which derives from modern technology. What all these various influences converged to say to Wittfogel was that the most telling history is not to be found in the chronicles of kings, generals, wars, and politics; it is written in the book of nature.
The Capitalist State Mode. Only fragments remain today of those intricate Old World hydraulic complexes that had such decisive consequences. Today, most of the systems lie in ruins, buried in "the lone and level sands" like Shelley's statue of Ozymandias, all but vanished on the ground and visible only from the air. Water may still gurgle through a stone-embanked Chinese ditch dug over a thousand years ago, and village farmers in Madras may still wait for the annual monsoon to fill a tank hollowed out by a legendary maharajah, but fragments do not make systems. Where water control is carried out comprehensively these days, it is by means of modern technology—electric pumps that can lift an entire river over a mountain range or mammoth concrete dams that create artificial lakes over a hundred miles long. The early hydraulic societies, organized along agrarian state lines, have now all disappeared along with the apparatus they operated. In their place stand the new modern hydraulic societies, the most developed of them sprawling in the arid American West, and these societies express the reigning mind of the marketplace men, the technological wizards, and the ubiquitous state planners…
…Interestingly, free-market liberals like Fuller and anticommunist ideologues like Wittfogel, along with some technocratically inclined radicals, have all refused to acknowledge how the fate of humans is inextricably linked to that of nature—in the present and in the past. However, like many of the most important facts in our lives, this cannot be easily proved or dismissed in the way we would handle a scientific proposition—one which says, for instance, that heating a candle will cause it to melt. Instead, we must strive to find and test a historical truth that has consistent, observable, and demonstrable expressions. When that very wise Englishman C. S. Lewis wrote, "What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument," (he had that kind of truth in mind. And when the contemporary French social theorist Andre Gorz declares, "The total domination of nature inevitably entails a domination of people by the techniques of domination," he too is talking about a general historical truth, not a chemical reaction.3 A historical truth cannot be nicely calibrated or made exactly predictive without being reduced to triviality. In the case of the human implications of intensified water control, it is not possible to argue that this particular dam or that aqueduct will have precisely and in every place the same social impact. Establishing historical truths involves a looser, though still demanding, kind of analysis. It is not a strict determinism of cause-and-effect but rather an imaginative grasp of subtly interacting relationships. Only by that higher approach to historical explanation can we determine, Wittfogel and Fuller to the contrary notwithstanding, whether the fate of the hydraulic cycle in the ancient desert regimes has any modern echoes. (From: Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster)
The following is and excerpt from, Two Rivers, Two Nations, One History:
The Transformation of the Colorado River Delta (Evan R. Ward); "Seeking Southern Help" [45]: Immigration and Ecological Change in the Delta
The two nationalistic economic revolutions that collided in the Colorado River Delta not only created agricultural strains on the water supply, but also encouraged large-scale immigration to the region. Viewed as an economic frontier by people of all classes throughout both nations, farmers, laborers, and their families descended on the region in a chaotic frenzy. Immigration was heaviest in the Mexican Delta, clearly reflecting the asymmetric politico-economic relationship between the two nations. With the decline of agribusiness growth in the region (1960s), the maquiladora factories renewed U.S. corporate and Mexican working-class interest in heading to the Delta…
…American officials recognized that the Delta's farming frontier encouraged massive immigration to the region.[63] The inability of government agencies to "enforce" legal immigration stemmed from several factors. Understandably, the sheer number of undocumented immigrants forced the U.S. Border Patrol to "discontinue its action looking to the arrest and return to Mexico of Mexican nationals" from time to time.[64] The Border Patrol and Immigration Service, however, often winked at undocumented immigration due to labor shortages induced by World War II. For example, in 1944, farmers in the Delta faced a labor shortage during the fall harvest. Philip Bruton, Brigadier General of the United States Army and Director of Labor, assured U.S. Senator Carl Hayden that his people were doing "everything possible to facilitate the handling of this problem on a practical basis." "Handling" problems often meant taking a hands-off approach. This is clearly reflected in the telegram of Albert Del Guercio, District Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to Brigadier General Bruton regarding the resolution of the Delta's labor woes in 1944. He reported, "Personnel Adequate[,] prevent all illegal entries or to apprehend those residing illegally [in] border areas. Ranches [in] Yuma and Imperial Counties not being checked while perishable crops being harvested." Such a policy, while helpful to local farmers, revealed the ambivalent approach American officials took to undocumented entry to the Delta region. This only encouraged Mexican immigration to the Delta and placed greater strains on domestic water supplies.[65] [From: The San Diego State University, Center For Inland Waters website; Two Rivers, Two Nations, One History: The Transformation of the Colorado River Delta, Seeking Southern Help [45]: Immigration and Ecological Change in the Delta]
