Dry Matters

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.

Keywords:

• arid lands
• urban design
• pedagogy
• history
• settler colonialism

In 1922, the Colorado River Compact established an interstate treaty between seven dryland states to legally determine how Colorado River water would be distributed among them. The Compact was predicated on a dominant and pervasive belief that water in the western part of the United States was too precious a resource to let it flow of its own accord and should, instead, be controlled, managed, and commodified to support development, agriculture, and other means of economic growth.¹ Today, over a century later, this “Law of the River” continues to govern how water flows in the region, through which every drop of water is measured, regulated, and deliberately directed through an extensive series of dams, reservoirs, canals, and aqueducts.

Despite its outsized influence on determining the distribution of water, the Compact is an inherently flawed document as its policies were determined by water quantities observed during a particularly wet year, but which have since been followed by a precipitous decline in volume from 15 million in 1922 to 10 million acre-feet today.² Consequently, the river has never had enough water to satisfy each state’s mandated allocation, a condition that will only be exacerbated as the climate continues to change. Additionally, the Compact does not fulfill previous governmental and legislative commitments that guaranteed senior water rights to the thirty federally-recognized Indigenous nations in the Colorado River watershed in perpetuity.³ The Compact thus put into motion a fraught and complex set of struggles between multiple stakeholders as well as demands that far exceed availability.⁴

Among its most significant flaws, the Compact does not acknowledge that ecosystems cannot be engineered out of their intrinsic conditions and environmental limits. Instead, the Compact starkly reveals that no technological advancement can successfully transform a dry place into a wet one. It remains to be seen what the federal government will do to force profoundly necessary reductions in water usage to overcome the current water shortage crisis, especially as arid geographies trend towards even more extreme dry conditions in the face of our current global climate crisis.⁵

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR-6 report has predicted that the drylands of the world will continue to face higher temperatures, reductions in precipitation, and more erratic and intense storms in the coming decades. The dry geographies governed by the Compact will undoubtedly experience these trends, with predictions noting the likely extension of global drylands far beyond their current footprints (Figure 1).^6,7 Given that over a third of the globe is already classified as either arid or semiarid, designers must begin incorporating strategies that address aridland climate trends in two ways: 1) critically supplementing a disciplinary emphasis and bias for landscape adaptation interventions that respond to a wetter future of storm surges and sea level rise, and 2) recovering the drylands as socioculturally and ecologically significant in understanding both the history and future of climate equity.

Figure 1. This global map highlights only the regions that are classified as semiarid or arid landscapes as part of the MODIS Global Land Cover dataset. The grey contours overlaid represent the predicted reductions in precipitation for the next 100 years, a prediction that suggests that there will be an expansion of the arid regions beyond their current footprint. Danika Cooper, “Global Aridlands,” 2021.

To engage with the realities of designing with water scarcity, I taught a graduate design studio, Designing the Desert: Speculations for an Arid Future, at the University of California, Berkeley. The studio’s conceptual framework was guided by the notion of “Dry Matters,” a phrase I use to describe a dual interest. It is first a call to action for landscape architects, both in teaching and practice, to recognize that dry geographies—along with their complex social, cultural, political, and spatial entanglements—actively contribute to our collective futures, irrespective of our local geographies and particular climate crisis impacts. Second, Dry Matters, as a pedagogical device, helps introduce an expanded material palette—or new physical matter—to students, to augment the potential in designing ecologically-resilient and culturally-specific futures for arid landscapes. Thus the studio was predicated on the assumption that aridity is an intrinsically valuable ecological condition rather than one to be overturned by technocratic ambitions. I asked students to use design as a tool for shifting the cultural perception of dry geographies as well as a means of producing alternative visions for dry futures that are responsive to climate predictions and changing sociopolitical conditions. The studio engaged with how historical narratives, policies, attitudes, and perceptions of the drylands have manifested materially in the landscape, and demonstrated how site histories can be a pedagogical tool for students designing speculative, innovative, and imaginative dryland futures. Students proposed dryland design scenarios that engaged with long histories of land occupation (often before the arrival of white settlers), that adapted to inevitable changes in climate (both human-made and naturally occurring), and that prioritized more equitable social contexts and resource allocations for those living in the United States aridlands.

The Archive: Disrupting Narratives of Emptiness

Students began by assembling a dryland archive to critically interrogate United States history. Their archive highlighted desert events, anecdotes, and stories that have been insufficiently told or altogether left out of usual, normative dryland histories. Students were grounded by scholar Saidiya Hartman’s assertion that the archive “dictates what can be said about the past and the kinds of stories that can be told about the persons catalogued, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios.”⁸ For the studio, the development and curation of this archive revealed that the omission of dry landscapes from the discourse of landscape architecture is not inconsequential, nor is it new. Instead, the drylands have been described throughout European and North American history as empty, bleak, and inhospitable. These descriptions reinforce myths that the desert is terra nullius, or “nobody’s land,” and lacks not only human and nonhuman life but also value altogether.⁹

Through the archiving of dryland materials, students experienced how fictions of emptiness have pervaded the ways that dry landscapes are perceived, imagined, and designed throughout much of European history. As far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the “desert” has been defined as both a “wasteland” and a “thing abandoned,” and thus, directly correlates the desert as an ecosystem with a denigrated, worthless landscape. Historian Vittoria di Palma identifies that within Judeo-Christian ideology and conceptions of landscape, “desert” and “wasteland” were deployed interchangeably to signify landscapes of immorality, whereas other, more verdant lands represented those of virtue.¹⁰ This particular framing and its legacy have reached beyond Europe and North America to directly impact the ways that drylands across the globe are culturally perceived and even physically managed.¹¹ For instance, contemporary environmental science research today continues to reinforce and legitimize these myths of emptiness and abandonment by organizing bioregions in hierarchies of value according to their productive capacities. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Land Cover classification system—broadly accepted in the scientific community as the most accurate geospatial dataset to measure and analyze the earth’s surface and climatic conditions—identifies a category of land as “Barren Land” and defines it as “land with limited ability to support life.” “Barren Land” is characterized by many of the features of desert landscapes, including dry salt flats, exposed rock, and sparse vegetation.¹² That a seemingly “objective” and “scientifically produced” classification system employs profoundly negative rhetoric and obvious bias to describe naturally-occurring and ecologically rich ecosystems speaks clearly to how insidious, powerful, and unquestioned the emptiness trope remains in environmental thinking and planning.

As an alternative, the dryland archive created an alternative reading of the United States that underscored the fullness of the US drylands and its rich human and nonhuman worlds. Students collectively created and assembled an expanded set of materials, maps, artifacts, documents, models, and timelines that attempted to fill in the gaps of the conventional archive and to expose the outsized role that settler histories and perspectives have played in constructing narratives about the aridlands. This newly-expanded archive focused attention on a broader set of stories beyond mainstream narratives, and with special attention to how the emptiness trope has been unsuccessful in dampening Indigenous culture, resistance, and resilience in the desert. Through their archive, students engaged with how normative histories have skewed perceptions of the drylands in order to create particular political and social worlds that shaped the physical landscape in material and profound ways (Figures 2, 3, 4).

Figure 3. Photograph of “The Desert Archive,” collective curation of desert materials for Designing the Desert studio, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2023. Photograph by Danika Cooper.

Figure 2. As part of the “Designing the Desert” graduate landscape studio, students were asked to assemble an archive to counter conventional readings of the desert as historically empty and valueless. Students curated a set of materials that highlighted Indigenous histories as well as created their own geospatial readings of the drylands to include in their “Desert Archive.” Photograph of “The Desert Archive,” collective curation of desert materials for Designing the Desert studio, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2023. Photograph by Danika Cooper.

Figure 4. In tracking how the United States aridlands have been historically understood and planned, Yu Jade Wang created a map to explore how extractive processes in the desert, like mining, have had direct consequences on the biodiversity of the region. Specifically, she explored the ways that gold and silver mining in the arid West have disturbed the milkweed habitat. As the milkweed plant is the only source of food for the monarch caterpillar, with the decrease in milkweed, the monarch butterfly population has also severely declined. Yu Jade Wang, “Monarchs and Minerals,” map, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2022.

Mapping Dispossessed Lands and Emplaced Infrastructures

As an alternative, the dryland archive project was followed by an exercise where students traced the ways that US political, economic, and social agendas have influenced the current context of its drylands. They developed a series of geospatial visualizations to contend with both the discursive and spatial implications of the emptiness narrative: tracking the spatial transformations of the drylands over long timescales and at large geographic scales, students created timelines and mappings that exposed the complex entanglements of public perception, political will, societal desires, and economic ambitions. Their drawings revealed how emptiness has been leveraged in the US not only to justify social policies of displacement and dispossession but simultaneously to legitimize the wholesale transformations of the desert from dry places to wet(ter) ones. The myth of emptiness is thus deeply inculcated in the current formation of the United States as we know it. As Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman has astutely identified, “building the spaces of the nation, from the individual citizen to the borders that demarcate it, required creating its own national creation myths.”¹³ As a creation myth, the emptiness trope forms a foundational piece of US history by declaring territorial accumulation, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the dispossession of their lands, and the hydrologic transformation of these lands as necessary for—and indeed inherent to—the growth of the United States.

That growth was motivated by both environmental and social agendas. When the United States acquired nearly 530 million acres of land in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase, it nearly doubled in size and set into motion a new form of American optimism, directly tied to this land—namely, that these newly acquired territories would unlock America’s untapped economic potential through settlement and agriculture.¹⁴ President Thomas Jefferson saw this open, “empty” land as a theater to stage an identity of bounty, control, and power. These expansionist visions were supported by subsequent accumulations of more land,¹⁵ as well as federal legislation and land policies that granted large parcels of arid and semiarid land to settlers to cultivate for productive agricultural use.¹⁶ These lands, of course, were neither empty nor abandoned, and Indigenous peoples were repeatedly forcefully removed from their historic and cultural homes. The emptiness myth was a tool for erasure and proved politically strategic in that it allowed these lands to be imagined as free of people and thus available for homesteading and agricultural cultivation. Millions of acres of land stolen from Indigenous communities and nations who had occupied these drylands for millennia. Many, as we know, were forced onto reservations that were often far from ancestral homelands and sacred sites and which were heavily and violently surveilled by the US military.¹⁷

Prior to settler colonial violence, many Indigenous peoples and nations thrived in aridity. Some of these communities, like the Zuni of western New Mexico (along a tributary of the Little Colorado River), built sophisticated infrastructural systems to conserve water for use during dry periods, while others, like the Tohono O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert, traveled nomadically with seasonal water flows. These communities understood water availability as unreliable, inconsistent, and sometimes completely absent for long periods of time. Settlers were not as adaptable to the unpredictability of water in the desert, and as a result, the federal government invested heavily in ensuring that hydraulic engineering would provide consistent and controllable sources of water for homesteaders, ranchers, and farmers. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, hydraulic infrastructure was emplaced throughout the region, creating stable and predictable sources of water—ensuring that the newly settled drylands were transformed into sites of so-called productivity and economic growth, and supplanting all other methods of water management.

The mapping exercise challenged students to reflect on the ways that cultural perceptions of the landscape, such as the myth of emptiness, are manifested spatially and materially through the political, economic, and social decisions made on and through the landscape. Their geospatial mappings were grounded in research of past and current practices for water management in the dry parts of the United States, and of the spatial and dispossessive implications of settlement on Indigenous communities. In this context, students explored the ways that hydraulic infrastructure expanded the geographic footprint of settler development by shifting their perception of the desert from a place that lacked value, people, and water to a place primed with financial and social opportunity (Figure 5).

Figure 5. In this visual timeline, Madeline Forbes traces different forms of infrastructural interventions throughout history in the Lower Colorado River Watershed in order to identify how the landscape has been planned and designed to account for changing water availability and hydraulic unpredictability. She uses the categories of “Fragmentation,” “Projection,” “Consolidation,” and “Speculation” to show how ideas about water have continued to shift and evolve over time. Madeline Forbes, “Tracing Infrastructure Over Time,” timeline, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2022.

Dryland City, in Place

Building on their archival, mapping, and high-level research, in their final project, students assessed how large-scale federal policies were reflected in specific socioenvironmental conditions. Using Phoenix, Arizona as their primary geographic focus, students built site histories that uncovered the ways that water scarcity and desires for its control reformulated its political, social, and spatial conditions.

As early as the nineteenth century, promotional materials visualized Phoenix covered in a green, gridded carpet where agriculture and homesteading were made possible by technological advancements in hydraulic engineering. The Reclamation Act of 1902 provided federal loans to construct dams and canals in efforts to “reclaim” the desert from its dryness and to direct water in service of agricultural productivity across the western regions of the United States. In Phoenix, reclamation projects like the Roosevelt Dam (1904) and the Granite Reef Dam (1906) diverted and stored Salt River water for the benefit of residents and industry, fundamentally transforming the region’s potential for growth. Today, these two pieces of infrastructure work in coordination with additional dams, aqueducts, reservoirs, and canals to divert, move, and hold the water that sustains the city. The Phoenix metropolitan area is currently the fifth largest city in the United States with a water system of over 131 miles of canals that deliver nearly 800,000 acre-feet of water per year to its residents—all of which is made possible by continued political, financial, and technological investment in hydraulic infrastructure.¹⁸

A lesser known part of Phoenix’s water history is that its contemporary hydraulic infrastructure is built atop irrigation canals that were hand dug by the ancestors of the contemporary Akimel O’otham nation in the eleventh century CE.¹⁹ The Akimel O’otham peoples engaged with the arid landscape at significant scales, creating nearly 1,000 miles of gravity-fed canals that serviced an area of about 4,000 square miles of irrigated crops for nearly 1,500 years.²⁰ This sophisticated water management system was designed to accommodate for changing fluctuations in water, seasonal variation, and microclimates. When settlers “discovered” the O’otham canal system in the mid-nineteenth century, they immediately recognized that it was highly specific and intentional in location and function. The canal system effectively, efficiently, and deliberately moved water through what appeared to be a flat landscape but is in reality, a terrain of subtle micro topographic shifts. Though the settler colonial system expanded the scale of the O’otham canals and eventually lined them with concrete to increase efficiency and decrease soil infiltration, the precolonial canal system is largely responsible for teaching settlers how to direct water throughout the dry Phoenix landscape.

Students tracked water flows through Phoenix and its complex infrastructural system that relies on water from the Colorado, Salt, Gila, and Verde Rivers, and discovered that most of the city’s water is directed toward unsustainable land use typologies, like (sub)urban development and agricultural production.²¹ In Phoenix, household water use outpaces all other industries, including agriculture, despite Arizona remaining one of the largest producers of cotton and alfalfa in the United States, both of which are water-intensive crops. This research drastically underscored that current water usage patterns in Phoenix are unsustainable as demands for water continue to increase but sources and quantities decrease. As a prompt for their final design work, students learned that a more ecologically resilient and adaptable future for Phoenix thus requires urgent and radical rethinking of tools, methods, and definitions.²²

To ground their speculative Phoenix futures in the specificities of place, students traveled to Arizona for on-site fieldwork for firsthand experience, as a vital component of historiographic analysis and geospatial research. Students were asked to critically compare what they experienced on site with their previous research; they ground-truthed and probed whether their impressions of Phoenix challenged or upheld the assumptions that other research methods had led them to believe about the region. Students recorded and documented the specific social, political, and environmental conditions they encountered through sketches, mental maps, photography, and artifact collection, and were asked to reflect on their embodied experiences within the city. They met with local water experts, leaders from the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community reservation, and other Phoenix residents who provided grounded perspectives to supplement their archival research and to contextualize their experiences (Figures 6, 7).

Figure 6. In Spring 2019, students from “Designing the Desert” studio traveled to Phoenix, Arizona for a week of fieldwork. While there, they documented not only what they experienced but also critically engaged with their assumptions about Phoenix and the desert. Hongxiang Chen, Sarah Fitzgerald, Meghan Kanady, and Félix de Rosen meticulously documented the wide variety of textures, plants, soils, and colors they encountered on-site. Upon returning to California, they produced an abstract, diagrammatic model of the micro-watershed they studied that demonstrated how their on-site observations changed their perception of the desert. Hongxiang Chen, Sarah Fitzgerald, Meghan Kanady, Félix de Rosen, “In the field,” materials from site visit to Phoenix, Arizona, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2019.

Figure 7. Hongxiang Chen, Sarah Fitzgerald, Meghan Kanady, Félix de Rosen, “In the field,” materials from site visit to Phoenix, Arizona, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2019.

As a response to their research, analysis, and fieldwork, students developed multiscalar designs, phased over time, that envisioned a speculative, adaptive future for Phoenix. Their designs reflected the belief that designing a future for the aridlands required a new way of thinking about the relationships between landscape, society, and infrastructure. More specifically, I encouraged them to develop an expansive set of imaginative, technical, and spatial tools to reconceive the aridlands as resilient and valuable, despite the site’s limited water sources. The students’ work revealed that truly rethinking the drylands requires that designers be informed by narratives that champion arid conditions as robust and intrinsically valuable ecology, challenge the trope that deserts are empty, counter the notion that infrastructure is capable of overturning aridity, and address the urgency for more just socioenvironmental frameworks for those who live in the drylands. Furthermore, reformulating our understandings of the aridlands and priming these landscapes to respond to changing climatic conditions depends on recentering Indigenous peoples and their land management practices, past and present.

Conventional readings of the United States neutralize its aridland histories and present the development of its western lands as the result of diplomatic accumulations of territory and effective and innovative technological advancements for settlement. However, as Emily Eliza Scott has deftly observed, the aridlands remain places “of intense and ongoing struggles, where various stakes—of cultural memory, of environmental justice, of sovereignty and survival—indeed come into particularly stark resolution.”²³ Infrastructure lies at the center of these struggles in its ability to radically alter the spatial and ecological conditions of place, and in its capacity to reorganize sociopolitical power dynamics. For the Ojibwa peoples, these violent infrastructures are named “Wiindigo,” anthropomorphized as a cannibalistic monster who wreaks havoc on community and land.²⁴ Though the Ojibwa peoples are not from the United States aridlands, the Wiindigo is a powerful concept in helping reframe our understanding of infrastructure as nonneutral, but rather as a formidable, and sometimes even deadly, set of artifacts that fundamentally alter the relationship between people and their environments.

Introducing these non-Western readings of landscape helped students to interrogate and resist normalized assumptions about the environment and to design alternative and more generous dryland futures. To that end, the studio asked students to speculate on how current infrastructural systems could be dismantled and replaced with more ecologically and socially resilient ones. These new futures imagined more resilient and adaptable approaches for engaging with arid conditions—ones in which society is responsive to changing (and unpredictable) patterns of water availability, embraces the intrinsic qualities of dry ecology, and adapts to climate change predictions. Students proposed a strategic landscape framework, phased over a 100-year timeframe in which they assembled scenarios for how their strategies might respond to changing political, social, and ecological conditions. I used worldbuilding, “the process where imaginary realities adhere to organize systems,”²⁵ as a pedagogical tool to allow students to both freely imagine a truly alternative future for the site, while still grounding their design ideas in the archival, data-driven, and fieldwork research they conducted over the course of the semester. These alternative worlds allowed students to think beyond assumptions about what life is in the drylands and instead to define what it could be. They were tasked with defining the social, environmental, political, and spatial values that would drive this future in order to suggest new types of urbanism for the future aridland city. Students tackled how large-scale systems must be adaptive to this new future, as well as proposed spaces for the everyday lives of the people who they envision will live in this future. Students imagined a range of outcomes for the future of Phoenix, from utopic visions that attempt to address scarcity and social justice by providing equitable distributions of water to more dystopic scenarios that allow tension and conflict to thrive, and everything in between (Figures 8, 9, 10).

Figure 8. Alison Pugash, Yaoyao Ding, and Byron Li proposed a 100-year phased set of interventions to create a more resilient and just future for Phoenix. In the first phase, “Rebuild and Relocate,” they proposed relocating residents from the southern part of the site where a legacy of micro-chip manufacturing has polluted the soil and ground water into what they imagined as newly-built high-density communities on the northern part of the site. They then advocated for a long phase of “Remediation” to clean the soil and water. In the final stage of “Return,” they proposed giving back the cleaned land to the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC) reservation community. Alison Pugash, Yaoyao Ding, Byron Li, “A System of Radical Restructuring,” phased diagrams, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2022.

Figure 9. In their proposal for Phoenix, Olivia Haag, Madeline Forbes, and Yu Jade Wang proposed a long-term strategy to address the decommissioned gravel quarries that have dotted the Salt River wash and which have contributed to contaminated soils and loss of habitat diversity. Their reclamation proposal imagined reprogramming quarries with a range of environment and social agendas—parts of the site were grounds for high density housing, new types of resilient, drought-resistant agricultural fields, and wildlife habitat with the integration of native plantings. Olivia Haag, Madeline Forbes, Yu Jade Wang, “Reclaiming decommissioned quarries,” phased diagrams, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2022.

Figure 10. When zooming down in scale to the neighborhood, Madeline Forbes proposed three different types of landscape interventions. “The Bridge” acts as a vegetated path to connect the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC) reservation to the Lehi Cemetery, a sacred and ceremonial ground for the Indigenous peoples of SRPMIC. Currently these two parcels of land are separated by the Salt River wash; Madeline’s proposal relinks them both physically with a bridge and visually by planting Populus fremontii (Fremont Cottonwoods) and Salix gooddingii (Black Willows). “The Grove” is a proposed cultural center for the SRPMIC reservation inset into a Proposis velutina (Velvet Mesquites) grove that can withstand fluctuations of water in the Salt River wash and acts as a food source for many Sonoran Desert fauna. This intervention aims to reestablish the relationship between SRPMIC reservation’s culture with a history of dynamic ecological systems. “The Pool” is a viewing area along the Salt River wash that reveals the seasonal dynamics of water within the wash system. Planted with multiple species of desert trees, the site registers how water’s variability is not only endemic but deeply part of the ecological logic of the desert. Madeline Forbes, “Neighborhood Speculations: The Bridge, The Grove, the Pool,” University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2022.

As the climate crisis forces a reckoning with how the environment has been managed, designers have the opportunity to radically rewrite the ways that the drylands are culturally perceived, politically engaged, and spatially designed. There will never be a singular vision for the aridlands that can address its complexity, and trying to find solutionist responses is a fraught exercise. Designers can instead expand the discourse surrounding these landscapes to include a multiplicity of perspectives and voices to collectively determine the values that will guide these potential futures. As such, design has the ability to develop techniques and tools that incorporate alternative histories of place with innovative worldbuilding strategies to invite possibilities for implementing just, resilient, and adaptable dry futures.

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.

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.