Snake Valley Oral Histories of Water
After 30+ years of struggle against a proposed pipeline by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, residents of the Snake Valley in partnership with the Great Basin Water Network achieved a significant political victory to cease the proposed pipeline.
The oral histories of water linked to this site document some of the water relationships and senses of place that this coalition worked to defend.
My hope is that these oral histories of water by current Snake Valley residents prove inspirational for future resistance to additional and ongoing water extraction projects.
Resisting Water Conservation
For curious listeners of the oral histories, in the essay linked, I take a cultural studies approach to these oral histories, forwarding a theory of “water culture.” With this concept, my intention is to understand how Snake Valley settlers resisted a water grab in the American West that had been justified in terms of a dominant discourse of “water conservation.” I notice that these settlers counter with a discourse that constructs water as both a commodity and more-than-commodity. This perspective challenges the usefulness of “water conservation” (and its reliance on efficiency) as a way of critically understanding land-use changes regarding water, and it suggests an alternative cultural approach to water for rural settlers in the Arid American West.
More context on the water grab
Metropolitan Las Vegas has been one of the fasting growing cities in the US, expanding each year into the driest part of the Great Basin and the US. Served by the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), the city has secured its present water needs with cutting-edge conservation programs.[1] For future water needs, SNWA has been working since 1989 to complete the Groundwater Development Project, the largest of its kind in the history of the United States: a 16-billion-dollar pipeline to pump underground water 400 miles from beneath nearly a dozen rural valleys to Las Vegas, NV.[2] SNWA claims this water grab is aligned with their mission of “promoting conservation” as well as ensuring Las Vegas’ trajectory of economic growth and expansion.[3]
One valley of roughly 300 residents, the Snake Valley, which bridges the states of Utah and Nevada, has successfully protested and legally contest SNWA’s water grab, articulating their local right to care for their water sources for over thirty years.[4] Since 1989, in contrast to other valleys threatened by the pipeline that have sold their land to Las Vegas, Snake Valley residents have been at the center of resistance to SNWA’s Groundwater Development Project,[5] attracting media coverage, fundraising, hosting annual parades, and forming the Great Basin Water Network in 2006.[6]
As a case study on a community in the midst of water grab, this essay hopes to contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on water conservation and water grabs by articulating the water dispute in terms of what Vandana Shiva calls “water culture”: the conscious awareness that human life is at the mercy of a healthy and functioning water cycle.[7] From Shiva’s work, I want to explore how to effectively communicate, promote, and preserve global water culture in the face of increased threats to extract and commodify water. In turn, this essay broadly investigates how environmental communication scholars can study the creation and maintenance of existing water culture(s).
To explore this idea, I extend Shiva’s definition of water culture with Raymond Williams definition of culture as a “whole way of life.”[8] Drawing on oral history interviews I conducted, I argue Snake Valley residents’ stories about water show how they consider water to be a distinctive, divine, and partially commodifiable part of their community and valley ecosystem. From this interpretation, I argue the valley’s water culture constructs water as both commodity and more-than-commodity, straddling market and ecological paradigms, as Shiva would say. This dual sensibility allows residents to use water for economic production yet protect water as a material necessity for their whole way of life.
[1] Completed in 2015, an $817 million-dollar “third straw” now draws from Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, which can pump from the reservoir long after Colorado River water stops flowing to California or Arizona. Owen, Where the Water Goes.
[2] “Groundwater Development Project.”
[3] “2019 Water Resource Plan” (Southern Nevada Water Authority, 2019), 30, https://www.snwa.com/universal/pdfjs/?file=/assets/pdf/water-resource-plan-2019.pdf#page=38; Dan Elliott, “Lake Mead OK for Now, but Water Shortages on Horizon,” Las Vegas Sun, August 20, 2018, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/aug/15/lake-mead-ok-for-now-but-water-shortages-on-horizo/.
[4] “Frequently Asked Questions,” Great Basin Water Network, accessed September 15, 2016, http://www.greatbasinwater.net/faq.htm; “Protect Snake Valley,” n.d., http://protectsnakevalley.org.
[5] “Groundwater Development Project.”
[6] Howard Berkes, “Las Vegas Water Battle: ‘Crops vs. Craps,’” NPR, June 12, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10953190; Great Basin Water Is Life (Chair7 Films, 2018), https://vimeo.com/250081081; “Frequently Asked Questions.”
[7] Shiva, “From Water Crisis to Water Culture: Dr. Vandana Shiva an Interview by Andy Opel,” 500.
[8] Culture and Society, xvii.
