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Abstract
“Dry Matters” describes a dual interest. The phrase reminds designers that drylands are active contributors to our collective futures and advocates for an expanded material palette to design resilient arid landscapes. It is also the conceptual framework of a graduate design studio that I teach at the University of California, Berkeley which is predicated on the assumption that aridity is an intrinsically valuable ecological condition. In this essay, I recount how dryland policies, attitudes, and perceptions manifest materially through design and planning. Grounding this research, I show how engaging the history of place can be a pedagogical framework for students to design speculative dryland futures.
Notes
1 Léopold Lambert, “The Desert: Introduction,” in “The Desert: Continental Lives and Anti-Colonial Struggles in Arid, Plentiful Lands,” special issue, The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies 44 (December 2022).
2 Christopher Flavelle, “As the Colorado River Shrinks, Washington Prepares to Spread the Pain,” New York Times, January 27, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/climate/colorado-river-biden-cuts.html.
3 Rachel Monroe, “How Native Americans Will Shape the Future of Water in the West,” New Yorker, January 27, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/how-native-americans-will-shape-the-future-of-water-in-the-west.
4 Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 2nd. ed. (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 255–305.
5 These trends toward extreme dry conditions are seen particularly clearly in places like Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Mead is currently the largest reservoir in the United States, irrigating an estimated 1.5 million acres of land and supplying water to nearly 40 million people in California and Nevada. But water levels have been steadily dropping—visually evident through the display of white bathtub rings all along the sides of the reservoir that mark previous high levels. The drastically decreasing water in Mead raises concerns that it may hit dead pool status. Dead pool is when the water above the dam is so low that no water passes through it. In the case of Lake Mead, dead pool would immediately halt the flow of Colorado River water in this region leaving many industries and communities vulnerable. See Ian James, “Growing Fears of ‘Dead Pool’ on Colorado River as Drought Threatens Hoover Dam Water,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2022.
6 Paola A. Arias et al., “Technical Summary of IPCC AR 6,” 2021, 141.
7 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change and Land: IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 50–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157988.
8 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 17.
9 Samia Henni, “Against the Regime of Emptiness,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, ed. Samia Henni (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022), 9–22.
10 Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
11 Danika Cooper, “Invisible Desert,” in “New Silk Roads,” special issue, E-Flux Architecture Journal (2019), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/313103/invisible-desert/.
12 James R. Anderson et al., “A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data” professional paper (Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, 1976), 18.
13 Mishuana Goeman, “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (University of Arizona Press, 2015), 83.
14 Robert Lee, “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country,” Journal of American History 103: 4 (March 1, 2017): 921–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw504.
15 In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States accumulated millions of acres of land. Through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the US acquired land in present-day Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
16 Revolutionary for its time, land programs like the Homestead Act (1862) and the Desert Land Act (1877) were open to almost any American, including freed enslaved people, single women, and immigrants, although tellingly, did not permit Indigenous people to participate in the program.
17 Danika Cooper, “Legacies of Violence: Citizenship and Sovereignty on Contested Lands,” in Landscape Citizenships, ed. Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, and Ed Wall (New York: Routledge, 2021), 225–52.
18 Salt River Project, “Grand Finish: Crews Complete 131-Mile Canal Lining Effort,” SRP Connect! (blog), January 31, 2019, https://www.srpnet.com/about/history/canal-history.
19 J. Brett Hill et al., “The ‘Collapse’ of Cooperative Hohokam Irrigation in the Lower Salt River Valley,” Journal of the Southwest 57: 4 (2015): 609–74, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsw.2015.0015.
20 Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City (Cary, US: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2011), 25, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=800840.
21 Ross, Bird on Fire.
22 Danika Cooper, “The Canal and the Pool: Infrastructures of Abundance and the Invention of the Modern Desert,” Landscape Research 47:1 (2022) 35-48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2021.1958308.
23 Emily Eliza Scott, “The Desert in Fine Grain,” in The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment, ed. Lyle Massey and James Nisbet, 1st ed. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2021), 160.
24 Winona LaDuke and Deborah E Cowen, “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119: 2 (2020) 243-268. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8177747.
25 Johanna Hoffman, Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2022), 22.Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Citie s We Need} (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2022.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Danika Cooper
Danika Cooper is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where the core of her research centers on the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and designs for resiliency in the global aridlands. Aridlands have largely been underexplored in landscape architecture—her work offers multiple ways of knowing, being, and engaging with desert landscapes to better inform current environmental and landscape architecture discourse and practice. This is especially important as populations in these regions increase and as the climate becomes drier and hotter. Through her scholarship, Cooper traces the ways that nineteenth-century, Euro-Western environmental theories and ideologies continue to influence cultural perceptions, policy frameworks, and management practices within US desert landscapes today. Throughout US history, the desert has largely been imagined in contradictory terms—at times considered “empty,” “barren,” and “worthless” while at other moments brimming with economic potential.