Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. I draw on Jean and John Comaroff’s (1991: 5) definition of the state and Lazarus-Black and Hirsch (1994: 1) to think about how people use law to reshape oppressive states. See Rademacher 2008 for analysis of how state power works through modes of violence and governance in urban riverine territory. 2. This insight came from various sources but primarily from walking interviews with artist and city planner Maria Luiza Mendez Lins in Olinda, December 28, 2006–January 4, 2007, and in Salvador, February 28, 2007; with environmental activist Antonio Conceição Reis in Salvador, January 8, 2007; and with friends in Guarujá, October 15, 2006. Except where noted, all interviews were conducted in Portuguese or Spanish; transcripts are based on my translation to English. Most interview material presented is based on typed transcriptions of handwritten notes. I rarely tape-recorded interviews because I find that recording tends to restrict the interviewee’s talk. 3. For recent scholarship on water and cities see, for example, Gandy 2003; Meyer et al. 2010; and White 2010. See White’s diagram, “The Differing Layers of Knowledge Needed to Move Towards a Water Resilient City” (116). For literary and ethnographic works that take port cities as central characters, see Brown 2005 on Liverpool; James 1994 on New York; Morris 2002 on Trieste; and Pamuk 2004 on Istanbul. 4. Relevant to the space between law and crime is Nordstrom’s (2007) analysis of the intersections of the legal and illegal (the “il/legal”) in world trade. See also Santos’s (2007: 9n42) discussion of the relation between voluntary compliance with “soft law” and lawlessness. 5. I use real names for public figures like Antonio and for professionals in public agencies who did not share controversial information. I use pseudonyms for everyone else to protect their privacy. 6. For scholarship on the cultural continuities between these dictatorships and democracies, see Jelin 2003; Scheper-Hughes 1997; and Taylor 2003. 7. See also Mumford 1934. 184 / Notes to Chapter 1 8. The largest two countries in South America, Brazil ranks fifth and Argentina eighth in land area in the world (World Almanac 2011: 733). 9. In quantity, their renewable water resources rank among the top fifteen (United Nations 2003: 194); in quality, Argentina ranks thirteenth and Brazil twenty-third (Esty and Cornelius 2002; United Nations 2003: 154). See also the map of major rivers in National Geographic (McNulty and National Geographic staff 2010: 46–47). 10. I translate and paraphrase Bloch’s text from the Spanish throughout. 11. Encyclopedia Britannica 2005. 12. Bloch calls the waterway the “Mississippi of Latin America” (65). 13. Encyclopedia Britannica 2005. 14. Bloch 1999 (49) shows a map with twenty-two major sites of existing and projected dam and canal projects in the Plate Basin. 15. Bloch 1999: 46–52; United Nations 2003: 130, 524. The Rio declaration lists the fifteenth precautionary principle: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” See http://www.un.org/documents/ ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm. See also Carson 1962, which was the inspiration for the development of this approach to pesticide control, and Freestone and Hey 1996, for analyses of the precautionary principles and international law. 16. Ribeiro (1994) applied the concept of juridical ambiguity to Yacyretá. 17. The name links the Triple Frontier to both the war on terror and the war on drugs, perhaps anticipating that the need to protect U.S.-based private claims to the Guaraní aquifer (e.g., see critique of Doug Tomkins’s vast investments in Bustinza 2007: 19; Goñi 2007). In his work critiquing big oil, Gedicks (2001: 199) prefigures the use of drug war rationales in future contests over water sources: While The Northern Miner may complain that “there are simply too many” NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and that “corporations are being overwhelmed with bureaucratic demands that are strangling their projects” [“NGOs and the Global Village” 2000], these same corporations have no hesitation in calling upon the military to suppress democratic opposition to movements, or lobbying for a phony “drug war” that will provide military protection for U.S. oil investments in the Andean Amazon region. 18. For violence against antimining activists in Latin America, see Gedicks 2001 and Whalen 2011; for...