The Ocotillo Water War and the U.S.-Mexico “Salinity Crisis”: An Examination of Transitivity and Scale in Environmental Justice

Introduction

The allocation of water across international boundaries raises fundamental questions of equity and environmental justice. This is especially so in arid regions such as on the U.S.-Mexico border where decisions about the utilization of boundary waters historically have been fraught with disagreement on what is equitable, and burdened by legacies of injustice grounded in the basic asymmetry of wealth and power between the United States and Mexico. This paper explores two interrelated environmental justice problems involving transboundary water issues at the community and international levels. We ask, how are the benefits and harms of international water arrangements distributed? To what extent can environmental justice be assumed to be transitive, with gains at one level supporting gains at another?

Below, we explore a little-known historical link between a local conflict in California over commercial groundwater pumping, the “Ocotillo Water War,” and United States negotiations with Mexico to resolve the Salinity Crisis on the Colorado River. Both cases involved transboundary environmental justice, as participants disagreed over how to equitably and fairly distribute benefits and harms from use of water resources. We draw on the politics-of-scale literature, arguing that contending actors managed scale according to their political interests and capacities, symbolically framing scale as they struggled to define problems, identify causes, and propose solutions. We argue that unpacking the politics of scale and how actors employ scale frames in support of their interests can help explain how both transboundary water problems and solutions can produce unanticipated outcomes for environmental justice.

Environmental Justice, Transitivity, and the Politics of Scale

The loose coalition of grassroots organizations and public interest groups that became the environmental justice movement began in 1982 as residents of Warren County, North Carolina, protested the siting of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in a poor county with a large proportion of African Americans (Bullard 1990; Williams 1999). Although early struggles were narrowly focused on similar cases of environmental racism (Walker 2009c, p. 359), the movement has moved more toward a broader concept of “environmental justice” (Cole and Foster 2001, p. 15; Pellow and Brulle 2005, p. 7) that includes others “deprived of their environmental rights, such as women, children and the poor” (Cutter 1995 cited in Agyeman 2005, p. 16).

Though the environmental justice movement for many years focused mainly on the United States (Walker 2009a,b), environmental justice struggles and research have moved beyond U.S. borders and become more global (Brulle and Pellow 2005). Our study contributes to a growing literature dealing with transborder environmental justice issues (e.g., McDonald and Grineski 2012; Ries 2008; Sze et al. 2009) and to related work addressing the multiplicity of understandings of environmental justice generated by the broadening of the movement’s scope (Walker 2009b). Holifield et al. (2009) argue that critical research should take environmental justice’s “multiple, shifting meanings as an important entry point for inquiry and theorizing” (p. 596).

As will be seen below, at a key moment, Ocotillo residents’ opposition to what they saw as unsustainable mining of their only source of groundwater collided with U.S.-Mexico “Salinity Crisis” negotiations aimed at resolving an international problem of environmental justice. That environmental justice may be defined differently at different levels of political action and analysis is not surprising. But, as we argue below, the Ocotillo case will suggest that a greater sensitivity to the multiplicity of definitions and strategies of environmental justice across scales helps capture more of the complex dimensions of transborder water issues.

To help explain how it is possible that successful pursuit of international environmental justice might undermine environmental justice at a local level, we draw on the notion of scale. Advocates and researchers began early to ask about the spatial location or level of environmental harms. Where does environmental injustice occur? Where does it become visible or invisible? Is environmental injustice primarily the product of racism or poverty, or is it the outcome of rational economic choices? “Depending on the scale of analysis,” Loo (2007) remarks...