WHO ARE YOU

 

Well, I’m Skip.

Who am I and how did I get here

 

I come from a huge family. A military family. No, I’m not a military brat, I just come from a long line of respect and dedication to the military.

Pride. Honor. Respect.

Cousins, aunts, uncles. Photos of great grandparents and great great grandparents in uniform.

 

My grandfather, 82nd Airborne

My father, 82nd Airborne

My brother,

 

Family is important to me. The one we are given and the one we chose.

Pittsburgh is home, it is also comfortable. No one seems to leave.

8 years ago when I moved to the desert for school my family expected me to be gone for 3

 

 

intermittent conversations sporadic visits dissipating cousins developing

 

 

Time. Distance.

I grew older. I grew wiser. I grew.  .    .       .          .             .                .                 .                      apart

 

 

I love my family and I miss them dearly. But I also love who I have become.

Maybe I’m Skip because I like to skip town, or maybe I’m just a girl who likes to take walks and skip rocks.

To Share or Not to Share? Dilemmas of Collective Action in a “Me-First” Society

I had spoken about the water arrangement before, (in the post The Tragedy of The Western Society on the Commons), in how as soon as we got here we reverted back to the privatization, choosing to have the majority of our individual allotments of water given to the individual instead of into the communal pot, which would cause us to have to share more. Well, at this point each of us had thirty gallons racked up in our individual storage.  We had done such a good job at conserving we were going to be able to stay longer, but the large individual allotments meant we would potentially run out of the communal water but not individual water. I decided to try to bring up the idea of going back to 2 gallons of water for communal and two gallons of individual water. I knew it was a gamble because last time I brought it up, emotions ran high and I felt that people were upset with me. But I thought it was important to address because it felt even more significant in the larger context. The World and especially the States, failed to agree upon global binding commitments of reducing their pollution/consumption, largely in part because the rich, white, powerful men of the world did not want to share with the rest of the world. Here was our chance as a group of 8 women, half of us from either other countries or races other than white, and many of us queer, to show how it could be different. Or so I thought…

It was more difficult than I thought, adding to the pressure was the fact that the day prior, one of our comrades had gotten mild heat stroke and had to go to town for help and still was not present with us the next day. First, I suggested that we move to the 2/2 allotment putting equal to ourselves and the commons, but then someone brought up that really the issue was storage, that some people (like myself) were sitting on over fifty gallons. Uncontrollably, I blurted out my first immediate thought, “hey that’s not fair to the people who have been saving more than others”. At that point, I had taken only two showers three weeks in, while people who didn’t have a lot in storage were taking showers every three days. “Everyone doesn’t lose equally with that proposal”. What I didn’t realize was this was again another example of us replicating a societal issue, as in terms of water I was the richest person there and I didn’t want a “tax” that would take from richest. Reflecting on this was surprising, I spent my teenage years fighting for a tax on the rich, how come when it affected me I had a visceral reaction? I too felt like I “earned” this water surplus, that I “worked hard for these 50 gallons” not recognizing we didn’t all have the same water needs.  Then someone brought up, how about we erase the storage completely and go to 2/2 allotment, this one I agreed with. However, the group still had an uneasiness about that proposal, so I suggested that we keep ten gallons in storage and move to 2/2 allotment. With only five days left of our proposed month stay, ten gallons in storage would allow us to technically have four gallons in the personal allotment and two in communal every day. What was crazy to me was that this still was not a motivator for the majority of the group. We voted on this proposal, four said yes, four said no. We never talked about ties and what we would do in that situation, so in political terms, I guess you could say the “proposal died on the floor”. I didn’t have the energy to bring it back up, I could already tell I was pissing people off and did not want to use up the rest of my social capital in the last week so I let it go.

What was interesting to me though was that the last proposal I had suggested would have given people actually more gallons per day technically, but that was still not enough to motivate people to share. What this told me was that the issue was not really having enough water but having control over your own personal water. Perhaps, it was a thing about people not liking change and that we only had a few days left, all valid points. But I would argue the situation on this planet in the current trajectory means we do not have a lot of time left either unless we all change. At first I was really disappointed, but after talking to a friend, he kind of convinced me that maybe what this shows is that if the proposal to share water is disconcerting for eight politically “woke” and socially conscious women, maybe preventing the forced need to share can be a motivator for people to change their behavior. I guess what I am saying I learned is that it is easier to change individual behavior then cultural norms, like it may be easier to get people to save their greywater then it would be to get people to share their water with their community.

desert radio, sign off

 

From May 13 through June 10, eight Arizona State University students, pursuing a mixture of art and sustainability degrees, enacted a very near future in a remote location in the Mojave Desert. We were hosted at the Dryland Lab of the MATZA project of Séverin Guelpa (see https://matza.net).

During our project the participants were permitted 4 gallons of water per person per day. Within this context of resource scarcity, the participants could self-organize how they would govern their limited resources. The project was inspired by the work of Elinor “Lin” Ostrom, “a Californian girl” who started her academic work by studying groundwater governance in California and won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2009 for her work on governance of common resources. Ostrom’s work show that it is possible for groups to avoid the tragedy of the commons; the overuse of shared resources.

This art-science project created a situation where eight individuals had to share limited resources and had to cooperate to cope with these resource constraints. The participants achieved these goals since they used only about 3 gallons of water a day. Participants initiated additional goals: addressing their collective and individual privilege/responsibility related to water use; and a desire to exist alongside one another in harmony and foster an environment where the usual patterns of domination and coercion are not reproduced.

Drylab 2023 has now ended and the eight women have returned to the present with no restrictions to water use.

Although the experiment has concluded, we will use this website to feature project outcomes. We are producing a short documentary, will write papers and other reflections on this unique experience in “extreme experiential learning.”

So stay tuned!

Project directors

Marco Janssen, Professor, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Adriene Jenik, Professor, School of Art, Arizona State University

ONE MONTH PASSED, REFLECTIONS

Its been one month at Drylab. It feels like we’ve always been here- born in the desert to hot days, little water and this weird little family we’ve created. Only soon this will be as much a memory as the days before water privatization, drought and war. Soon indeed. The group has already begun to part: Moso left to meet her husband. Saf and Na.Ru moved on too. Who knows where BCC: will go next but we hope to hear her voice on the radio again someday.

Our initial calculations had us staying at Drylab 30 days at 4 gallons each/day but we used our water well and have enough left over to sustain the rest of us for at least another 29 days. For those staying behind, we’ve agreed on a new way to manage the water: our remaining supply will be completely communal and we will take only what we need each day. No personal vs. communal allotment, no banking extra water for future personal use. We will be 100% accountable to each other and our ability to stay here are long as possible.

Perhaps our initial decision to allot 3 of our 4 daily gallons to personal use was a result of being raised in a capitalist culture and it felt safer or just easier to manage it individually… easier and safer to be accountable to ourselves rather than each other who we barely knew. Now however, we’ve worked out our systems for limited water use and we know how much we actually need. And perhaps more importantly, we have formed a community- a deep caring for each other’s well being. Maybe it is these things that have loosened our feelings towards sharing a limited resource? Maybe now it doesn’t matter how we allot the water? Maybe it is these things that will take us through our new reality? This remains to be seen.

SAF

I spent a month in the desert and I don’t know why. It’s easy to say there’s a reason, an explanation, to create a synthesis of my experience, but it would just be words.

I imagine it will be years before I truly know the impact of Drylab. What I do know is that I was set. I knew who I was and what I was doing. I was vaguely dissatisfied with life, it was traveling along its merry way, buffeting my in its wake, but I knew that and I was alright with it. Then I was given this assignment. I fit the criteria, though exactly what that was, I don’t know.

And I spent a month in the desert, on desert time, no clocks, no screens, no scheduled life, just myself, the other women, and the landscape we dwelled in for that short time. We had our own agendas, our reasons for being there. We were very different people, but we managed to live with each other. Truly, exist with other people, without distractions or the filters we usually experience the world through. The strength and give of our minds was the filter.

And we lived.

I walk along the road side. Cars pass occasionally and the sun scorched my skin. I have gallons of water strapped to my hips and I refill them when I am able. The cold at night chills me. I sleep in ditched among refuse, wrapping sun-bleached scraps around me. I keep walking.

I will find the new me. It will take some searching and some time, but eventually, I will be able to greet the person I have become, to shake her hand and hug her and laugh at the harsh moments we experienced. And a few years after that, when I have had other encounters and been to other places, I will recognize the person I have become then. I will embrace her and we will look forward to meeting all her sisters yet to come.

Na.Ru

The women each taught me about themselves, how they move through the world, and how they manage to live sustainably. I still cannot fathom how excessive our lives were before the war. It feels hopeless still that our standard for living was so harmful to our bodies and to earth. I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to make it with less; I would miss the good life too much. I still think that sometimes, but I know that if I practice gratitude and open my heart to the world and to humanity that I will empower myself enough to survive and cultivate meaning and worth in my life.

I left the group to return home. I don’t plan on remaining long, I just need to gather my family and get them ready for the trek to the Pacific Northwest. I hear there are an abundance of water and a culture of sustainability an activism still going strong there. Since Washington became an independent state, people have been able to enjoy sanctuary and live with more peace.

I used to write off places like Seattle and Portland as privileged white bubbles twisted with classism and racism. I realize now that I must forgive the cities for their shortcomings, assume positive intention, and be the force of progressive humanity that I envision is best.

I used to think that all of the work that Seattle was getting done (the pollution tax, the waste reprimands) was irrelevant and miniscule until the rest of the country adopted those practices. I realize now that pockets of progression like the cities have been models for real change, and it is very important that they exist. Large scale and widespread change is crucial, but society doesn’t work that way. We are going to crash. We need to be resilient, and people are usually resilient.

I will carry my family with me, discussing with them and teaching them the methods that I’ve learned this month. There are many checkpoints and militias along the way, but we must try. We will travel at night, walk, and hitch rides if we find people we can trust. I have heard of networks of people who help folks like us, like Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad. There’s enough on this earth for everybody. We cannot manage ourselves with hate and alienation. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

MOSO: I have known for some time that I do not like the city, and I have been waiting for my chance to escape it. Drylab gave me that chance. I have left drylab to search for my husband and have returned to the city before venturing northeast. It has been no easy transition. I don’t wake with sun. In fact, I don’t see how I could, my room is so dark. While there is the relief of air conditioning inside, I find it discomforting and prefer to spend my day outdoors. But there is no breeze to cool my skin and the only noises I hear are cars and police sirens. A wall blocks my view, and if it were not there, another home would still stand in the way. The sky is a dingy gray and purple haze at night, and only a few stars are strong enough to shine through. I don’t think I will ever fully transition, but hopefully I won’t have to.

I am staying with a friend of a friend for the time being, a home equipped with running water. The toilets flush. The sink turns on full force. Water falls from the showerhead. The first time I turned on a faucet, I panicked. I quickly shut it off and felt a tinge of guilt. All that water in a mere second, down the drain. No basin to collect it for another use. During my last few days at drylab, when things were running smoothy (outhouse was up, graywater and my own water storage were at a surplus), I felt myself begin to relax. I treated myself and took a two-gallon shower. But to what gain? That extra gallon could have sustained me a day longer or helped a friend in need. Now I find myself back where water runs freely, but there is still a cost. And today, it is too great to waste a drop.

NAYARA:

It has been a month now, I have gotten used to idle time. I have finished four books and write regularly. The people in the café have really opened up to me. I guess it is because I am there all the time. I would even say we have become friends. I had even invited them over for dinner the other day and our group made a huge feast, only two people showed but we were still happy to break bread with new people. The heat still makes us lazy, at the hottest part of the day most of us do not do anything it is just too hot to handle. We lay there and let the sweat roll off us. I have finally gotten used to being dirty, sometimes when I get wet from doing dishes or something, the dirt starts coming off and it’s a little awkward if I wasn’t intending to clean up. We all have gotten used to sleeping outside every day and that is how I deal with the heat. What I like the most is our routine, we have gotten in kind of a process that we know the same way every day, people have broken off into groups, naturally gravitating towards like-minded individuals. The day is broken into three parts for me, making breakfast, waiting for lunch and cleaning after dinner. The only activities I partake in fit between these three-time units.

I use less than a gallon of water a day, I created a surplus, in fact, I have the most surplus of the group and thus plan to stay longer now that I am able.  I don’t know where I will go next. I thought that the USA would be the answer to the drought but it seems that they are suffering too. It does not seem likely that I will be able to find a surplus of water that I could share with my family. I feel that I have failed in this mission, perhaps though with this new-found wisdom of living lighter and off one gallon a day, I can go back and practice it. After all, these were the ways of my grandparents, and now that the modern is going extinct, I must go back to relearn the traditional ways that will save us from this situation. Living here has taught me how to live lightly, work towards a circular life cycle for consumption, and how to cook food made from real, raw, ingredients instead of that processed food that we strived so hard to eat back home so we could look fancy eating Western food. I think of water differently now, I can no longer let it go down the drain, I must catch it and use it again. Round like the earth, it is the natural way of things, things were meant to be reused again on this finite planet

SKIP.

Our projected month is coming to an end. Though we were smart with our water usage and saved up to stay longer, many feel it’s their time to go.

As per usual we are split down the middle, 4 are choosing to stay, 4 will go.

Estranged. Will this be like my last group?are we meant to move through the world replacing one with the other?
I look at the relationships we’ve created. The bonds that were made.
Will we stay in contact and if so, how?

I made a friend at the market, she has invited me to spend time at her property.
I don’t have much to offer in exchange other than time and labor.

She lives a simple, sustainable life. She very much so understands the scarcity of water.

She has running water and a flushing toilet. She offers me a shower and I accept.

Running water scares me. Where does it go? Does it only have one use? Why does it move so fast?

Survival. To survive you think past A.
You think past turning on the faucet to wash your hands, brush your teeth, take a shower, rinse a vegetable.
You think past using two gallons of fresh water to flush the toilet.

How can I collect this? What else can this be used for? What is my order of actions, wash face, then my body, then my clothes? Are the ingredients found in my products (body wash, shampoo, detergent, etc.) safe for my garden?
What can I do with the running water while it comes to temperature? Too cold to rinse my body, but not to rinse my hair.

How have we not created systems that address these issues. Why are we still flushing the toilet with fresh water?

Like minded, my friend and I discuss changes that can be made and systems that can be fabricated.

I finish helping her with a project and the topic of “what’s next for you Skip” comes up. I don’t know.

For now I will return to Drylab while I still can. My time is not done there and I must rejoin those who are left of my family of odd kins.

FAREWELL

 

I left drylab Saturday. I was not the only one to say goodbye. No, Saf left before me. She headed east on foot. I assume conflict drove her mad. Inexplicably drawn to the group, forming relationships with each of us, simultaneously spying on us like we are criminals, reporting back to greedy men. I’d like to think this group made her think twice, but more than likely she turned us all in and left before it got ugly.

A few others planned to leave after me, but I did not stick around to find out.

I’ve stopped in a city on my way northeast. It’s quiet here, but not the same kind of quiet as the desert. Rather, it’s false. No owls wake me. No ravens call to me. No lizards ruffle in the creosote. There is no breeze to cool my skin and no stars to guide my way. Tall structures of concrete stifle the morning sun. Roads and structures smother growth.

People seem to think time moves faster in the city, in the ‘real’ world. And I think it moves too fast for me. I left drylab and thought I’d never look back, but I’m still sitting outside and drinking tea every morning. The people, the place, the situation. They made more of an impression on me than I thought. Perhaps someday I will venture back to drylab, and perhaps it will rain for the first time in seven years. Until then.

He Came To Drain the Swamp but instead, He Drained the Aquifers

 

Some of you have been wondering how exactly we got to this point – exiled within this country with no legal access to potable water. Some part of the story can be traced back to our neighbors here in the Mojave – Cadiz, Inc.

If you remember, it really felt like the end of the world after Trump got elected. At first, most Americans acted in a rational way, mass mobilization as a response. But after awhile, people got desensitized; they stopped showing up and they stopped paying attention. Circumstances gradually got worse in many sectors, especially regarding environmental stewardship, but as people adjusted to “the new normal” the decline was able to happen without protest or mass response.

A pivotal point in this downslide can be traced back to the Cadiz aquifer system. For ten years prior to the 2016 election, the federal government acted rationally to protect desert water resources – continuing turn down the prospective water scheme (which claimed ownership over an ancient aquifer in the Mojave desert proposing to redirect it with many miles of pipeline in order to supply Southern California’s insatiable thirst). The Cadiz, Inc. project set a number of precedents including the beginning of the privatization of water, as a claim was made that the “owner” of the water was a private company called Cadiz, Inc. who bought land above the aquifer. They would, in turn, sell this water to a public Metropolitan Water District in Orange County, CA. SoCal’s increasing population, development, and overconsumption even during years of drought left it operating in a state of scarcity indefinitely, looking for new water sources to fill swimming pools and keep lawns and golf courses green.

The Cadiz, Inc. project required an investment of over $150 million dollars to build a 43-mile underground pipe from the Cadiz aquifer in the Mojave desert to the Colorado Aqueduct, after which it will merge with water headed to the coastal cities. Cadiz had no prior experience building infrastructure yet was contracted to build this underground piping that would supply entire municipalities. The founder of Cadiz was a British man named Keith Brackpool “who came to the U.S. after pleading guilty to criminal charges relating to securities trading in Britain”.  However, Brackpool had friends in high places that allowed this horrible plan to continue even after scientists and locals organized to stop it; namely the former Governor of California, Gray Davis, people on the California Public Utilities Commission and even the Secretary of the Interior.

As scientists had been arguing for years, the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery, and Storage Project was not ecologically feasible. They started drawing 50,000 acre-feet a year (equivalent to ~16.25 billion gallons a year or put in another way Cadiz pumped “enough water from the desert to fill the Rose Bowl to the brim, and then drain it all away, 194 times a year”. However, USGS stated that Cadiz had overestimated the aquifer’s recharge capacity (how quickly the water fills back up the aquifer) by 15x. Instead of the supposed 32,000 acre-feet a year rate Cadiz claimed was safely available to extract through regular recharge; the recharge rate was closer to 5,000 acre-feet a year. If the science had been able to be presented and taken seriously – the project never would have passed an environmental review.

This then became the lynchpin of the project, for those who were against it, all they needed to do was get the government to conduct a thorough environmental impact review (EIR) of the project and that would be the death of this nonsensical boondoggle. Under President Obama, and with the support of CA Senator Dianne Feinstein, it seemed like this project was killed off, but as soon as Trump got into office he accelerated this project to number 15 on his list of 50 national infrastructure investment priorities. The project’s fate, and the fate of this fragile desert ecosystem was sealed. When one of Cadiz’s CEO’s former employees became nominated as Deputy Secretary of the Interior, it further demonstrated the power of political influence, as the Deputy stripped California BLM of its authority, allowing BLM administrators in Washington DC to wave away all regulations and environmental review, green lighting our current disastrous state.

Immediately, the project relocated enough water to supply 100,000 houses or 400,000 people, allowing Southern Californians to continue to grow past their means; developing larger cities in a land that could not sustainably supply more people with water and that would be threatened as soon as this water source dried up. As was suspected, which is why the Council for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit, within a few years we started seeing damages to the Mojave Desert ecosystem. The pools of water Cadiz, Inc. had categorized as “wasteful”, were islands of oasis for migratory birds, reptiles, raptors, and Bighorn sheep. When these dried up, so did these desert populations that relied on them. Sacred Native American sites like the Old Women Mountains were also severely and irreversibly damaged by the draining of the aquifer system. Most immediately apparent was the desiccation of the Bonanza Spring, which “fed a half-mile corridor with towering willows and cottonwoods”. This spring was supporting much of the desert wildlife, so when it dried up vegetation and animals perished. As had been suspected but not confirmed, Bonanza Spring, a spring that had existed for hundreds of years, even before they started keeping records, was fed through the aquifer as well. The saddest part is once this ancient spring dried up there was no going back, “Once a spring dries up, the hydrological connectivity is broken, the soils deflate and the spring cannot be re-established” (Anderson, 2017). But this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Once this project had been approved it set the precedent that water underneath private property belonged to the surface property owner, allowing corporations to privatize a natural resource – making quick millions while killing off the regional ecosystems that have developed and been stewarded for millennia. As the Mojave desert dried up, the Joshua Tree communities began to be affected. Though the majority of aquifers they relied on were in Joshua Tree National Park, after two years of Trump’s military-heavy and ecologically light budget, the USA was in the type of debt that banks didn’t want to loan to and the price of the dollar fell sharply. Desperate, Trump did what any cutthroat capitalist would do: privatize government to “balance the budget” while still ignoring that 75% of the budget was spent on the military for guns and bombs. Schools, prisons, post offices, and parks were a few of the many things that became privatized. When the National Parks went up for bid to private corporations it was mining and water companies that bid highest to get at the minerals and other natural resources that were being conserved by the Parks. This blew open the floodgates, creating an open season for drilling, mining and exploiting the planet. The aquifers under the Joshua Tree National Park were some of the first to vanish, since, without increased conservation efforts, coastal Southern California was insatiably thirsty.

With groundwater depletion now the order of the day, ecological chaos ensued, ecosystems crashed and the flora and fauna that had once brought over 2 million visitors to Joshua Tree National Park were devastated, their populations falling below recovery.  Even worse is that the aquifers in the San Andreas fault that dried increased the plate tectonic activity and the risk of earthquakes. Thus we find ourselves in this spreading state of financial, ecological and physical instability.

In just a few years, the actions of a greedy government and short-term profiteers, which ignored the ecological wisdom of the scientists and Native people, had ruined the desert ecosystems and communities of Southern California.

Now what will we do?

 

Editor’s Note:

This is science-based fiction, all the facts presented here are real and the outcomes of the future though have not happened yet are plausible realities based on these facts presented and the trajectory we are on. The facts come from credible sources (that are linked directly in the article) as well as interviews with the following experts: lleene Anderson, Senior Scientist/Public Lands Deserts Director at Center for Biological Diversity, and officers of the scientific resource division in Joshua Tree National Park, whose names will not appear as the new Federal government doesn’t allow them to talk about climate change with the public.

MY LUCK IS RUNNING OUT

 

My luck may be running out. I caught Saf in my room the other day. She claimed she was fixing her hair but failed to mention why she wasn’t doing that in her own quarters. I have no doubt now that she is a spy, though I am still not sure why she is here. We aren’t breaking the law living out here. We didn’t come by this water in any illegal means. But we are defiant, and that is always an issue to our wealthy but fearful government. Wealth only brings a false sense of security. When one resists, others will follow, and perhaps that is why Saf is here.

She is not here for me, that is certain. She would have turned me in long ago. But I can’t have her going through my things; she will surely learn who I am. It has almost been a month here and my husband is still missing. I will leave tomorrow.