Ecocide and Class War
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, is drying up. Its destruction threatens the lives of over 20 million people across the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, and is a direct consequence of capitalist extractive processes. The lake itself is an artificial reservoir east of Las Vegas, formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in 1935. It was intended to supply water and hydroelectricity to the rapidly growing urban areas of the Mojave desert which were developed, in part, to help secure the West against the possibility of reclamation by the region’s Indigenous peoples. For nearly a century it has, but climate change and recklessly irresponsible use of the Colorado’s water now imperils the lake’s, and, therefore, millions of the most vulnerable and oppressed people across the whole region’s, continued existence.
The climate naturally goes through periods of drought. Historically, these droughts have been damaging to those who experience them, but the relatively lower density of population and agriculture in the area meant that the threat was more local and of a smaller scale than the danger posed today. The Las Vegas metropolitan area has grown from a population of 708,000 in 1990 to over 2,800,000 in 2022 according to US Census Bureau data.
The drought currently afflicting the U.S. west began in the year 2000, twenty-two years ago. According to a UCLA research paper analyzing soil moisture, this 22-year period has been the driest of any, going back twelve hundred years. Let’s put that in perspective: this has been the driest period in the southwestern US at least as far back as the year 800 C.E., and possibly even farther. 2021 alone, they say, was probably drier than any other year in the last three centuries, and likely ranks 10th or 11th driest since the year 800. While drought is inevitable in such arid regions as the American southwest, their research demonstrates that fully 42% of the soil moisture anomaly of 2000-2021 was caused by anthropogenic — man-made — climate change.
Local and federal agencies have monitored water levels at Lake Mead very closely since the area was first flooded in 1935. The water has fallen over 170 feet between 1998 and July of this year, threatening to pitch the lake over into “dead pool” status, at which point the levels will be too low to extract power from via the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric turbines. In fact, had several of those turbines not been retrofitted between 2011 and 2016, the lake would already be a dead pool today. As it stands, a further reduction of 90 feet from levels recorded in August of this year would make it impossible for the dam to function at all.
Lake Mead supplies drinking water to millions across the southwest, but it also serves another function. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, about 75% of the reservoir’s water outflow flows directly from the lake into Nevada’s and Arizona’s farmlands, fueling an agribusiness sector which focuses on the industrial production of highly water-intensive monocrops. None of these are native: lettuce, kale, almonds, and pistachios rely on the water from Lake Mead, as does extensive dairy farming. Yuma County, in fact, is the country’s largest supplier of iceberg lettuce and Arizona as a whole produces almost 30% of the country’s supply of the winter vegetable despite the incongruous-sounding fact that it’s a desert.
Should water levels at Lake Mead fall, the turbines that provide over 300 megawatts of energy to customers primarily in California and Arizona would shut down. People in those states, as well as those in Las Vegas which recently started drawing energy from the dam, would see a significant hike in energy prices, compounding with already historically high costs associated with natural gas fired energy. The power grid won’t fail, but coal and gas will have to be fired to cut the shortfall.
If the water line falls below that minimum level necessary to keep water flowing through the turbines, all of the Colorado River south of the Hoover Dam will be cut off from its headwaters. That would be catastrophic for communities that draw from the river below the dam, especially in California and Arizona which use the river extensively for both residential and agricultural use. Up to a third of Southern California’s water is drawn from the Colorado south of the dam. If the bourgeois authorities permit the Colorado to stop flowing, the entire environment will be destabilized.
The danger to Lake Mead is disproportionately a threat to the Indigenous people who rely on it. The western U.S. states allocate water rights by seniority; those who had the first allocations take priority. This had the, presumably, unintentional side-effect of working in the favor of Indigenous claimants to water resources, as those claims date back to the 19th century. Collectively, members of the Colorado River Basin Ten Tribes Partnership enjoy the rights to 2.8 million acre-feet of water from the river and its tributaries. Yet, these communities lack the funds and infrastructure to make use of the water Non-Indigenous water users often take the “remaining” water that the Indigenous nations cannot use once the year is out. In a period of tightening water supply and increasingly fierce competition for rights to the existing allocations, this provides a dangerous incentive to attack the remaining rights of the Indigenous peoples in the southwest. The quiet expropriation of the waters of the Colorado and its diversion away from Indigenous peoples to sustain unsustainably large settler monocrop farms is a hidden dimension of this struggle; it’s yet another expression of settler-colonial relations within the U.S. Empire.
Agriculture is by far the largest use of Colorado water by Indigenous peoples. While most non-Indigenous farmland in the basin is devoted to the industrial production of high-profit monocrops like almonds, the majority of Indigenous agricultural land consists of subsistence farms and other small agricultural plots. According to the USDA’s 2017 agricultural census, in Arizona nearly 70% of farmland is owned by Indigenous producers, who collectively account for about 2% of the state’s total agricultural revenue and in that year, 73% of Indigenous operated farms grossed under $1,000 in revenue. USDA figures also reflect that between 2007 and 2017, Indigenous owned land was reduced by over 600,000 acres, though that document cannot offer an explanation for this loss. White farm operators, however, held a small minority of the state’s farmland, only 24%, and collected a truly staggering 96% of the state’s agricultural revenue.
This data paints a picture of an indigenous agricultural sector in Arizona that’s operated primarily by subsistence farmers and people who cultivate the soil to supplement the food they’re able to buy with regular wages. The destruction of the primary agricultural water source would have a distinctly different effect on them than it would for the white petit-bourgeois and bourgeois agricultural operators in other parts of the state. For the Indigenous peoples, already some of the most acutely impoverished in the country, the loss of the waters of the Colorado River represents not just the promise of an unprofitable year or the bankruptcy of individual producers, but an existential threat to their whole communities.
Monopoly capitalists, the engine of the U.S. Empire’s economy, perhaps sensing blood in the water, have descended upon the southwest hoping to collect on the peoples’ increasingly desperate situation. According to the New York Times, such giants of finance as MassMutual, a conglomerate based in Springfield, Massachusetts, are buying up water rights in rural agricultural towns in the region and selling them at a staggering profit to fast-growing urban centers like Phoenix and its suburbs. Panic is setting in among circles in the major cities, and a savvy capitalist can leverage that fear and uncertainty to promote bidding wars between cities for the rights to water allocations appropriated from the poorer, economically and politically weaker, rural communities. In their wake, they leave isolated towns and counties full of workers and petit-bourgeois landholders struggling to pay water bills that have skyrocketed over the span of just a few short years. This is not an unexpected, accidental byproduct of the commodification of water — it’s an intentional decision made by the vultures who nest on Wall Street half a continent away.
Volatility in this newly emerging water market (which the New York Times compares to the energy bubbles of the 1990s, made infamous by the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001), the steady and uninterrupted escalation of prices, and the vice-like squeeze on the people of the southwest make this a prime target for capitalists looking for profitable opportunities for investment in the face of looming recession and economic crisis.
As the lake starts to run dry, as the flow of water slows and the power provided by the Hoover Dam falls off, the negotiators for the states that draw from the Colorado River Basin seek to protect agribusiness that produces revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars annually at the expense of the most vulnerable in the region. In June, the federal Bureau of Reclamation gave seven states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah – a deadline to determine how they would draw 15% less water from the river in 2023, or else have a plan drafted and imposed on them. That deadline is fast approaching, and, at the time of writing, negotiators representing the concerned states are locked in increasingly bitter disagreement over who among them should shoulder the brunt of the cuts. States in the upper basin argue that those in the lower basin should suffer the most drastic cuts, owing to the fact that they draw the majority of the water. Lower basin states retort that the upper basin should instead have its ration cut, considering that those states usually don’t make use of all the water they have negotiated for in the past, and because their contention that they need to keep the extra to accommodate future growth is a secondary priority in such a time of crisis.
We need to be absolutely clear on this point: this conflict is among and between the ruling classes of those states, not the workers. The figures they manipulate and throw at each other like hand grenades and the stakes at play during these negotiations are measured not in lives or the peoples’ health, but in future profit estimates for the richest residents and business owners. At the end of the current negotiation cycle, even if the federal government has to step in and impose a rationing plan upon them like a referee separating violent players on the field, whatever plan is agreed upon will still see over 70% of the Colorado’s waters diverted for an unsustainable agricultural industry. It will still see rising costs for the workers and the continued expropriation of Indigenous property (along with the revocation of the few rights the bourgeois state still pretends to recognize), and will still invite the barons of capital to descend with ever-increasing ferocity upon this suffering region.
James Eklund, formerly the head of Colorado’s water management, stands as a shining example of the priorities of the capitalists. Speaking on the developing water crisis, he says “I have seen time and again the wisdom of using incentives that attract private sector investment and innovation. Dealing with the threat of climate change to our water requires all sectors, public and private, working together.” Eklund isn’t unaware of the predatory nature of capital’s creation of, and intervention into, the water market. In declaring that the only solution to this crisis is to open the floodgates to capital and the commodification of water itself, Eklund says, without shame, that he stands on the side of the vultures and robber barons who would sharpen a humanitarian catastrophe for the promise of healthy profits in the futures markets. Here, he speaks not as an individual but as the representative of the entire bourgeois class and the government they’ve erected to defend their class dictatorship. These are the jackals who are negotiating for 40 million people’s access to water. They have every intention of leaving the people of the Colorado River Basin and every community that draws upon it to a slow, choking death; just as the bourgeois government has turned its back on the suffering caused by COVID.
This period, when public awareness of the water crisis is at its peak, when the nature of the ruling class’ nihilistic and reckless disregard for our health and the health of our environment is the most plain for all to see, offers the working class an opportunity to take advantage of the cracks in ruling class unity and to push for a more sustainable, humane solution to the water crisis. We can only make that happen if we act together. Educate yourselves and your neighbors about the destruction being intentionally visited upon us by the extractive policies of the rich. Build bridges with the communities most affected by the new plan for ecocide being negotiated by the State governments, especially the Indigenous peoples of the region and the many, many exploited migrant workers who are forced to toil in inhumane conditions in the southwest’s agricultural fields. March against the unjust and unsustainable deals made between those who’s only conceivable risk in all of this is the loss of profits, and announce to them that the working class rejects as a matter of principle the notion that the richest exploiters have the right to bargain away the peoples’ future in exchange for profits.
It is crucial that the workers take for themselves an independent seat at the negotiating table. Direct organization of the working class, and its exercise of political power, is necessary to protect not only the white working class communities of the southwest, but to help secure the very existence of the Indigenous peoples under attack.
If a deal is agreed upon by the states without the direct input of the working class, or imposed upon them by the federal government, the workers must demand its repeal and replacement by one written entirely by our class, without the input of the exploiters. The working class and the oppressed are the only groups in whose interests it is to build a sustainable, just future. The capitalists are willing to sacrifice every tomorrow for today.
We must seize the opportunity, today, to begin crafting it or else resign ourselves to a future of ever worsening environmental disaster and poverty.
