In October, the Center for Investigative Reporting broke a story about the Saudi dairy industry’s expropriation of Arizona’s ancient aquifers. The story reminded me of my son’s second-grade school play. An alien from a desiccated planet came to Earth with a hair-brained scheme to steal our water, bwahaha. The Earthlings resisted the alien and, ultimately, sent him packing with (non-sequitur alert) a tub of cream cheese as a consolation prize.
Okay, I didn’t say the plot was coherent; but, the point is that these seven-year old Earthlings displayed more common sense than the people of Arizona and California who are standing idly by while Big Ag exports our dwindling water resources in the form of hay for Saudi and Chinese cattle. These mega-farms are drilling ever deeper, irrigating their fields with groundwater from aquifers that will soon run dry and won’t recharge for thousands of years.
Agriculture in Saudi Arabia thrived until the turn of the millennium but is now in a state of collapse. Unregulated use of groundwater enabled landowners to pump prodigiously and by 2002, the wells were running dry and the oasis turning over to desert.
Likewise, China is importing an increasing percentage of its food, much of it California-grown nuts and hay, as its over-pumped aquifers give out. And when the aquifers of the western United States collapse, what then?
In and of itself, this is an amazing story of the perils of globalized agribusiness. But there’s a story behind the story that’s even more troubling: The rural Arizonans whose water is being stolen out from under them don’t object.
In their view, agribusiness has the right to make as much money as it can. They understand that soon the water will be gone, but that’s just the way it goes. These folks talk about their plight as though it’s simply the unintended consequence of an immutable natural law that sanctifies profit-making above all else.
So, just to recap, Saudi water barons despoiled their home turf, and now they’re coming for ours, and we accept this as part of the capitalist order.
Ayn Rand would be proud, but I’m mortified. It’s one thing for Donald Trump and fellow billionaires to insist on the logic of market fundamentalism. But for ordinary Americans, whose livelihoods are blowing away with the tumbleweed, to rationalize their own ruin is a testament to the powerful ideological hold of neo-liberal economics.
We as a nation are clearly still in the thrall of neo-liberalism, but it’s high time to snap out of it. There are matters of epic global importance to be settled in the next few years: trade agreements to be accepted or rejected, austerity-ravaged economies to be resuscitated, greenhouse gases to be suppressed, water to be rationed.
To leave these matters to the invisible hand of the market is to place our fate in the plainly visible and very dirty hands of corporations who exist for the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder profits. These corporations, whether they’re Saudi, Chinese or American, will do what corporations have always done—plunder one part of the world after another until there’s nothing left.
When colonial settlers started pillaging native lands, indigenous Americans gave up their lives trying, unsuccessfully, to defend their land base. Four hundred years later, the conquest of the commons goes largely unnoticed.
We are all Arizonans watching as our water commons is drained. If aliens came to Earth and started pumping groundwater, we wouldn’t say, “Well, they’re just trying to earn an honest buck, let’s leave them alone.” We’d rise up and reclaim our commons. And so we must rise up against the forces that are laying waste to nature.
Rivers, aquifers, oceans, forests, the atmosphere, they’re ours, all ours. Bwahaha.