Gold Is the New Green: Thinking Environmental Shame in Drought Times

Electronic highway signs across California, often used for AMBER Alerts or construction delays, plead with constantly mobile Californians to limit water consumption: "SERIOUS DROUGHT. HELP SAVE WATER." In 2018, drought conditions in Southern California have continued to escalate, and we find ourselves nearing almost a decade of record-low rainfall. The crossed fingers, prayers, and hopes for El Niño's torrential downpour in early 2016 went unheard and unanswered; 2017's La Niña, which often follows El Niño, brought even less rain. As I write this in Santa Barbara, California, in summer 2018, I can count on two hands, minus several fingers, the number of times it has rained this year. Our reservoirs and lakes are low. Streams and rivers that once ran wild are now tamed to trickles or have evaporated altogether. California governor Jerry Brown and politicians from across the political spectrum have condemned water wasters—that is, those ostensibly drought-ignorant individuals who continue to water gardens, plants, and lawns. Water rates have increased for tenants and homeowners at exponential levels. Cities have even threatened to act against the most egregious of these water wasters, but the plan of action remains unclear and mostly subject to the rumor mill.

While cities and politicians scramble for solutions, everyday Twitter users, starting in 2014, began to deploy their own remediation efforts: #DroughtShaming. #DroughtShaming effectively combines the excitement of a social media phenomenon with the collective policing of condemned water-wasting behaviors. Hashtag users employ the hashtag to engage a social justice movement meant to heighten awareness and conservation of water resources. Unlike some other hashtags that have lost steam over time, #DroughtShaming continues to grow stronger and more disseminated via Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In fact, the popularity of #DroughtShaming has moved beyond the specificity of Southern California and now embodies a larger global initiative that seeks to promote user awareness of water waste and seeming environmental injustices—that is, water overconsumption in drought times. Environmental justice, as a result, becomes likened to the interaction and use of the environment to benefit the human. The human can only be just and experience justice, which clearly dismisses consideration of justice for nonhuman environments. #DroughtShaming has thus broken through the Southern California drought ceiling and has now gained a national, if not international, buzz.

This essay begins in the desiccated heart of the Southern California drought, following the #DroughtShaming hashtag in order to think through how communities ground the deployment of shame through environmental discourse. Specific to Santa Barbara, I focus on yet another tactical foray into community water conservation, the Gold is the New Green initiative, which—part of the city's attempts to incentivize limited water use—prioritizes a problematic gold standard of environmentalism as a solution to the drought. Homeowners who limit water use are able to transform their once-green lawns into golden commodities. Such readings of gold and commodity culture are immediately recognizable following Karl Marx's Capital, which reveals the use of gold as "final settlement," or the exchange of gold as the only legible value system among differing, global financial institutions.¹ The contemporary financial reality of Marx's insistence on gold could not be further from the truth,² but gold has a particular staying power in its symbolic recognition for both the state and the individual. We need only think about gold coins, gold engagement and wedding bands, gold-colored iPhone models, gold records, and even gold-level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Through Gold is the New Green, the city of Santa Barbara hopes to capitalize on such golden recognition.

At the same time, another initiative, No Water, No Jobs, punctuates billboards along rural California highways that are distances away from California's famed metropolises. Whereas Gold is the New Green makes visible the class-based implications, No Water, No Jobs emphasizes the racial implications of the drought—California is, after all, the agricultural epicenter of the United States—which drought shaming and other media forms seemingly ignore altogether. These two advertisement...