Ryan Christopher Jones | Engagement: Federal and State Water Politics in the California Delta
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share a publication in Engagement (the official online publication of The Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association) by Ryan Christopher Jones. Titled "Volatile Waters: Federal and State Water Politics in the California Delta," the piece explores the effects of recent executive orders and their crossover with Jones's current research field site.
On President Trump’s first day in office for the second time, he signed twenty-six executive orders, including one dramatically titled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water To Southern California.” The next day in his first news conference, he was asked about the Los Angeles fires and gave a response that left commentators aghast at its inaccuracy, he said, “They [California] have a valve, and it’s turned like, think of a sink but multiply it times many thousands of times, the size of it—it’s massive. And you turn it back toward Los Angeles. Why aren’t they doing it? Either they either have a death wish, or they’re stupid, or there’s something else going on that we don’t understand, but we want the water that they’re throwing away to be used for California, and that includes the farmers of California.”
To translate: the “sink” he was talking about is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and my doctoral research field site; the “valve” is the series of intrastate infrastructures that divert water from Northern California to central and southern parts of the state; and “putting people over fish” is a dig at California environmentalists that—as some claim—are protecting an endangered fish species called the Delta Smelt at the cost of farmers and cities (Scoville 2024). The president’s response is a complicated set of claims riddled with fabrications, mischaracterizations, and an “incredible lack of understanding of how California water works,” yet it is representative of the high-stakes, historical tensions over California’s competing watersheds...