Natural Capital or Natural Commonwealth?

“We are subject today to a barrage of neoliberal attempts to commodify what was previously seldom or never appropriated for private sale — the human body, water, hospitals.”

—Immanuel Wallerstein, “New Revolts Against the System”

Enabled by digital media, we humans are constantly convening ourselves: for protests and truck rallies; for funerals and football games; at swimming pools, dive bars, playgrounds, break rooms, factory floors.

But humans are also constantly convened by more ordinary media — so ordinary, in fact, that we rarely recognize it as “media” at all. “Clothing and housing,” for instance, “as extensions of skin and heat-control mechanisms, are media of communication, first of all, in the sense that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community,” as the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote.

This is true of blue media, too: water-control mechanisms such as faucets, canals, sewers, sprinklers, umbrellas, dams, and reservoirs. In an attempt to imagine an alternative to the rampant commodification identified by Wallerstein (and many others), this essay dwells on the last example: reservoirs — one, in particular, which I visited recently for the first time.

Lake Powell: a giant, many-tendriled lake in the middle of the US Southwest’s Colorado Plateau. An artificial lake. A reservoir on the Colorado River. One of the world’s largest reservoirs, according to the National Park Service, the federal agency that administers the recreation area that encompasses the reservoir.

96 soaring sandstone side canyons. 2,000 miles of shoreline. A hydroelectric power source, and a popular destination for watersports enthusiasts throughout the region. Houseboats the size of oil tankers glide imperially (in all senses of the word) across the open water, up and down side canyons. Two-person, inflatable paddle rafts like mine could never hope to keep up.

The dumping of houseboat septic tanks into the lake is illegal. Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The official reservoir map has special icons indicating the location of pump-out stations, for emptying on-board sewage tanks, and floating toilets, for boaters whose sewage tanks are full, or nonexistent.

The use of portable human waste disposal systems is also encouraged by the National Park Service. For example, a multi-use Waste Alleviation and Gelling bag, also known as a “wag bag,” comes pre-loaded with specially formulated, moisture-locking Poo Powder, and allows lake visitors to Go Anywhere, according to the zip-sealed, puncture-resistant packaging.

Many of the lake’s visitors adhere to the sanitation rules posted throughout the recreation area. But many do not. Despite the possibility of criminal fines, some do, in fact, empty their sewage tanks directly into the lake.

Others opt to use a (seemingly) remote beach area to relieve themselves, forgetting that the lake is visited by two million people each year, many of whom similarly overestimate the remoteness of various beaches, thereby underestimating the true volume of human waste already cached in various shallow holes in the sand.

The National Park Service has been forced to close several beaches until further notice after the detection of alarmingly high levels of Escherichia coli, also known as E. coli, a species of fecal coliform bacteria that thrives in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, such as humans.

In addition to avoiding these particular contaminated beaches (also marked with special icons on the map), reservoir visitors are advised by the official NPS website to adhere to the following guidelines:

avoid ingesting the water;

avoid touching your eyes or mouth after touching the water;

wash your hands after coming into direct contact with the water;

wash your hands after coming into direct contact with something else (like a swimsuit, wakeboard, or inner tube) that has recently come into direct contact with the water;

shower with soap after swimming in the water; and

avoid the water entirely if you have open cuts or sores.

Upon leaving the reservoir, owners of motorized vessels and/or non-motorized watercraft are required to thoroughly clean, drain, and dry their vessels and/or watercraft, to prevent the spread of invasive quagga mussels to other bodies of water. These mussels have a verified presence at the lake. Notorious sources of clogged boat engines, hydroelectric equipment, and harbors, they also dramatically alter the existing food web by filtering out large amounts of phytoplankton from the ecosystem.

Water from this bacterial reservoir serves millions downstream: farms, exurbs, suburbs, and cities in the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada, and California.

But mostly farms. 80% of Colorado River Basin water — 1.5 trillion gallons — gets slurped up by Big Agriculture, according to The New York Times. Most of those gallons help grow livestock feed: corn, hay, alfalfa. A 2020 Nature Sustainability study found “irrigation of cattle-feed crops to be the greatest consumer of river water in the western United States, implicating beef and dairy consumption as the leading driver of water shortages and fish imperilment in the region.”

Silicon Valley’s data centers guzzle quite a bit of that water, too. “Water-cooled data centers use an estimated 13.25m liters (3.5m gallons) per MW each year,” The Guardian reports. “The data centers used by major players can range in scale from 5MW to 30MW. And with an estimated 800 data centers in California, those numbers add up.”

Only on very rare occasions has the supply of river water exceeded demand. On such occasions, the river managed to flow all the way to the Gulf of California, emptying into the Pacific Ocean. This happened, briefly, a few years ago. During that three-month period, according to San Diego’s KPBS news service, “The water’s life-giving effects spilled beyond the river’s banks. Kids who’d never seen it in its natural channel splashed and played. Spontaneous festivals came to life. Birds returned, and trees and marshes greened up.”

On these occasions, the unused, surplus water is considered, by many in the farms, exurbs, suburbs, and cities the river feeds — but especially by Big Ag — to be wasted. This conclusion, of course, depends on capitalist logic. Such logic insists on plundering qualitative use values for the sake of quantitative exchange values; on defining “wealth” in narrow, economistic terms; and on misidentifying the “blue media” that is a precondition for both human survival and human flourishing as, instead, a manageable, monetizable asset — “blue natural capital,” as the World Bank calls it in The Changing Wealth of Nations 2021: Managing Assets for the Future.

So, let us not share this conclusion. Let us hope, instead, for more aquatic spillover, for another chance, one day, to splash and play, to exult in the blue media surplus — shared, not hoarded.

Excess blue media, enabled by radically different economic and ecological priorities: a goal to paddle toward.

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