“conservation”

Conservation has at least two overlapping contemporary usages that are relevant to arid West water politics: the first is a form of utilitarian environmental production, the second is a form of protecting or “saving” the environment. 

In the first usage, to “conserve” water is to use it as an “environmental resource” for maximal and indefinite economic production. This approach has deep roots within the US environmental movement dating back to progressive era conservationists. They established national parks and implemented environmental regulations on the grounds that “the economy of nature” should be wisely and efficiently used to ensure sustained exploitation.[1] Led by white urban elites fearing “extinction,” this logic had twin desire: conservation of the “white race” from extinction.[2] In turn, for Donna Haraway, conservation belongs in the same sentence as eugenics and scientific racism, a relic of “white and male supremacist monopoly capitalism” that she calls “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.”[3] In light of this troubled history, the rhetoric of conservation has been persuasively challenged for its vulnerability to capitalist motives,[4] economic materialism, human essentialism,[5] and present-day “accidental colonial nostalgia.”[6]

For this usage, it is hard to overestimate the influence on conservation and “water conservation” during the progressive era by President Theodore Roosevelt, who first brought the discourse to the rhetorical presidency. As “the conservation president,” Roosevelt’s name and face are still etched into US landscapes—six national parks are dedicated or partially dedicated to him, and his face is engraved on Mt. Rushmore.[7] During his tenure, he set aside 230 million acres of land (four game preserves, five national parks, 18 national monuments, 51 federal bird reserves, and 150 national forests), created the US Forest Service, and signed into law the very ability of presidents to set aside monuments with the Antiquities Act of 1906.[8] Perhaps less remembered or celebrated, however, Roosevelt dedicated significant time and energy to water conservation, that is, irrigation and reclamation. In 1902, he signed the Reclamation Act, a first step toward the eventual the Bureau of Reclamation—the purpose of which, as he writes in his autobiography, was for “reclaiming the waste areas of the arid West…lands otherwise worthless…and creating new homes” for settlers.[9]Between 1902 and 1906, Roosevelt initiated 28 federal projects that irrigated three million acres and thirty thousand farms. In the process, his administration constructed seven thousand miles of canals, tens of thousands of culverts and bridges, and the highest megadams in the world at the time.[10] Roosevelt, through conservation, set in motion federal construction of the immense water extraction and delivery system that’s integral to the Arid American West today. 

The second usage of conservation stems from the same tradition, but contemporary discourse deemphasizes its economic aims and instead emphasizes “protection” of the environment in such a broad sense that it is almost meaningless. To conserve is thus to protect water as a “public good” for all (who are settlers, I might add). In this sense, “conservation” in the arid American West is used to refer to almost anything that is related to the environment. I think it is safe to call this the hegemonic use today given that activists, governments, and corporations all claim it as their prerogative. For example, both advocates for and activists against extractive water grabs ground their arguments through the discourse of “water conservation.”[11] Especially in the arid American West, we hear conservation messages that stress “saving” instead of “wasting” such as: “Overwatering hurts everyone.”[12] “Prevent water waste.”[13] “Save water indoors with these tips and technology suggestions.”[14] “Go waterSMART (Sustain and Manage America’s Resources for Tomorrow).”[15] “Every drop counts!”[16] This conservation discourse about our relationship with water has dominated approaches to managing water in the US for over a century as Presidents, the US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), state and municipal water agencies, and NGOs have stressed the need to “conserve,” “save,” “bank,” and “protect” water.[17]

This second usage of “conservation” seems to be rehearsing conservation as the antidote to too much production or environmental exhaustion. The labor of this antidote is usually by governments or civil society in service of the “public good.” Practically, this part of the conservation movement has sought to protect the environment to an extent never before in the US through national programs like the Antiquities Act. In fact, despite the conservative baggage of the first usage, Leroy G. Dorsey explains that, as a spokesperson, Roosevelt sought “fundamental changes to society” in his campaign for conservation and faced “overwhelming opposition” from both a general public that prided itself in dominating the environment and a Congress committed to laissez-faire policies.[18] Indeed, many scholars of Roosevelt address his ability to circumvent this oppositional Congress by way of the rhetorical presidency.[19] Conservation succeeded in shifting US culture, Christine Oravec writes, with its utilitarian approach to nature (“the greatest good for the greatest number for the greatest time”), which relied on a progressive re-interpretation of US identity (as “a collective population of individual units”) over the previously dominant nationalistic US identity (as “a whole greater than its parts”).[20] 

The primary danger of this second usage, as I see it, is that it treats the symptoms of the problem but never questions the problem itself of ongoing colonial logics. This second usage also obfuscates the fact that conservation succeeds in protecting the environment by linking itself to indefinite economic production.

With both of these usages in mind, I think our long term aim ought to be abandoning the discourse altogether for the alternative of “restoration” (see key term). In the meantime, I suggest we modify uses of conservation with adjectives such as “colonial conservation” or “economic conservation” when we refer to it (see frame: Settler Colonial Environmentalism). If we don’t call out these modifications, the underlying colonial-capitalist principles will keep shaping our imagination of progressive environmental futures.

[1] Phaedra C. Pezzullo and J. Robert Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, Fifth, Book, Whole (Los Angeles, California: SAGE, 2018), 35. Christine Oravec, “Conservationism vs. Preservationism: The ‘Public Interest’ in the Hetch Hetchy Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 4 (November 1, 1984): 444–58; Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History, Book, Whole (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 120. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136.

[2] Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, Book, Whole (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 40; see also Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection, Book, Whole (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11qdxtg.

[3] Roosevelt “embodied this ethos” she writes. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text 11, no. 11 (1984): 21, https://doi.org/10.2307/466593.

[4] Tarla Rai Peterson, “The Will to Conservation: A Burkeian Analysis of Dust Bowl Rhetoric and American Farming Motives,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 52, no. 1 (December 30, 1986): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/10417948609372676.

[5] Justine Wells, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Conservation of Races: A Piece of Ecological Ancestry,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49, no. 4 (August 8, 2019): 342–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2019.1634830.

[6] Marouf Arif Hasian Jr and S. Marek Muller, “Decolonizing Conservationist Hero Narratives: A Critical Genealogy of William T. Hornaday and Colonial Conservation Rhetorics,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 27, no. 4 (August 8, 2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2019.1624543.

[7] “Theodore Roosevelt and Conservation,” National Park Service, November 16, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/thro/learn/historyculture/theodore-roosevelt-and-conservation.htm.

[8] “Theodore Roosevelt and Conservation.”

[9] Theodore Roosevelt, “Chapter XI: The Natural Resources of the Nation,” in Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography, Book, Whole (New York: The Macmillan company, 1913).

[10] Roosevelt.

[11] Advocacy for water grabs: “Groundwater Development Project,” snwa.com, n.d., https://www.snwa.com/where-southern-nevada-gets-its-water/preparing-for-the-future/groundwater-development-project.html. Resistance to water grabs: “What should countries which face water scarcity do?” Jennifer Franco et al., The Global Water Grab: A Primer (Hands Off the Land Alliance, 2014), https://www.tni.org/files/download/the_global_water_grab.pdf.

[12] Reality Check - Fall Watering Restrictions (SNWA Video, 2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=V6ioGHZv3tY.

[13] “Water Waste,” snwa.com, n.d., https://www.snwa.com/importance-of-conservation/water-waste/index.html.

[14] “Indoor Conservation Tips,” snwa.com, n.d., https://www.snwa.com/importance-of-conservation/indoor-conservation-tips/index.html.

[15] “WaterSMART,” Reclamation: Managing Water in the West, n.d., https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/.

[16] Ria Convery, “Every Drop Counts” (Massachusettes Water Resources Authority: PRESS RELEASE, June 1, 2017), http://www.mwra.com/01news/2016/081916-conserve-water.html; “Water Conservation,” City of Forest Grove, n.d., https://www.forestgrove-or.gov/publicworks/page/water-conservation.

[17] “Water Scarcity”; see also Shiva: “Since 1970, the global per capita water supply has declined 33%...During the last century, the rate of water withdrawal has exceeded that of population growth by a factor of two and one-half” Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2002), 2. A recent World Water Development Report says global water demand has increased six-fold over the past 100 years and grows at the rate of 1% each year. By that measure, over 5 billion people could face water shortages by 2050. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/19/water-shortages-could-affect-5bn-people-by-2050-un-report-warns

[18] Leroy G. Dorsey, Theodore Roosevelt, Conservation, and the 1908 Governors’ Conference (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016), 13.

[19] Tulis considers him “the father of the rhetorical presidency”; Stuckey argues he established the presidency’s “interpretive dominance” of important cultural events. Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, Book, Whole (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1987); Mary Stuckey, “Establishing the Rhetorical Presidency through Presidential Rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt and the Brownsville Raid,” Quarterly Journal of Speech92, no. 3 (2006).

[20] Oravec, “Conservationism vs. Preservationism: The ‘Public Interest’ in the Hetch Hetchy Controversy,” 444.