“reclamation”
I notice two usages of reclamation in the arid West. Although, in earnest, I do not hear “reclamation” in everyday discourse. It is still used in institutional and legal settings about water in the West (hence the Reclamation Act of 1902 and the US Bureau of Reclamation), and it points to the philosophies of water use and “civilizational development” that are invoked in many present-day usages of “irrigation.”
In the first usage, reclamation is synonymous with irrigation. It becomes a stand-in in the arid West for decreasing aridity. [1] Reclamation, like irrigation, improves the productivity of land. Both involve supplying water to crops, moving water from one place to another. This first usage makes both reclamation and irrigation seem like a neutral practice. Roosevelt uses them interchangeably when promoting the Reclamation Act of 1902. The distinguishing factor, if any, would be scale. A farmer irrigates land, but government institutions “reclaim” land on a much larger scale, hence the US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). The farmer makes cropland out of local arid land with ditches, wells, and pumps, but the USBR creates cropland out of entire watersheds through the damming and canalization of rivers and entire water systems, transferring water between basins and watersheds.
The second usage of reclamation is a practice that incorporates irrigation but is not only irrigation. In this second use, reclamation is the transformation of wasteland into cultivable land that can support settlement.[2] Draining a swamp could be reclamation. Tearing down a forest could be reclamation. Here, the goal is to make land farmable (in the primitive accumulation sense), so that settlers can occupy Indigenous lands. “Wasteland” is thus land that has not yet been colonized. The USBR thus calls reclamation “homemaking.”[3] Roosevelt called it “nation building.”[4]
The problem with these usages for the water cycle is that both interpret water use through the frame of settler colonial nation building. When a landscape is not colonized or producing crops, it is a wasteland, “a problem.” To rely on the original etymology, the landscape is “lost in sin” and must be “called back to right living.” My first suggestion for using “reclamation” is to stop using it as synonymous with irrigation. This definition conflates colonial logics with the more basic transfer of bringing water to crops in arid land. There were (and still are) plenty of Indigenous irrigation projects in place in what settler colonizers considered “wastelands” that needed to be reclaimed. My second suggestion for using “reclamation” is to start talking about it as value-laden rather than value-neutral. To “reclaim” land could mean the colonial process of making land farmable, of taking control of an entire watershed, of misunderstanding the water cycle. In another direction entirely, my third suggestion is to coopt this obscure rhetoric to dismantle the work of the USBR and respect the water cycle. In this sense, reclaiming land could mean to take water back from dams and canals in order to restore the water cycle. To “reclaim” land could mean to restore human/water relationships of mutual responsibility.
[1] https://www.usbr.gov/history/borhist.html
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/national-swamp-reclamation/
[3] https://www.usbr.gov/history/borhist.html
[4] http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/theodore-roosevelt/state-of-the-union-1901.php
