Desalination as a New Frontier of Environmental Justice Struggle: A Dialogue with Oscar Rodriguez and Andrea León-Grossmann

ABSTRACT

This interview begins a conversation about the social justice implications of an emerging socioecological concern—the desalination industry. Seawater desalination is the industrial process of creating drinking water from the ocean. This dialogue, with two activists at the forefront of contesting desalination in California, indicates how this practice, as a proposed climate adaptation strategy, is not just a matter of crafting governance reforms allowing non-state actors to price water for the purposes of efficient management, or “drought-proofing.” Instead, they highlight the ways in which the environmental justice movement now faces a world-system of shareholder, equity-partnered, and pension-funded capitalism that is fragmenting nature and crafting an ever more abstract social nature into various, segmented resource types. As the dialogue describes, desalination is not pursued for the purposes of developing affordable and sustainable water management solutions alone, but for investment in long-duration fixed capital “assets.” This piece further facilitates the programs of environmental sociology and political ecology by engaging various publics in developing a community of critical praxis. As such, the dialogue carves out new terrains of theory and action at the frontiers of nature, water, and society.

KEYWORDS:

• Activist dialogue
• California desalination
• climate change adaptation
• environmental justice
• environmental sociology
• political ecology

Acknowledgments

This article piece was made possible thanks to productive conversations and correspondence with Zsuzsa Gille and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro. Of course, this piece was made possible through the generosity and with the consent of the interlocutors involved. Insights specific to this article would not have been possible without their candor and time.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/31416. This remains a hotly debated topic within academic and industry circles, as research supported by the United Nations, for example, has shown that the actual discharge of brine, the hyper-saline byproduct of desalination, is higher than predicted. See Jones et al. (2019).

2 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/676bbd4a-7dd9-11e9-9f05-01aa75ed71a1

3 This dialogue was conducted in May 2020. Throughout both interviews, BFO indicates Brian F. O’Neill, who conducted the interviews.

4 All italics, unless otherwise noted, reflect the original emphasis of the speaker.

5 Poseidon refers to the company that has installed what is currently the largest seawater desalination plant in North America in Carlsbad, CA, near San Diego, and, who attempted to locate another facility in Huntington Beach.

6 This area has also gained the moniker “Stink City.” In 2015, a local magazine covered legal battles between residents and the school district opposing the Rainbow Disposal Co., Inc. regarding air pollution and high particulate matter, “part of a new generation of residents in Oak View … tired of serving as Huntington Beach’s de facto dump”. See Page 9 of Gustavo Arellano’s piece (2015) Stink city-residents of Huntington Beach’s Oak View Barrio are finally taking on the garbage dump next door. OC Weekly. July 17–23, No. 47: 9–14. https://www.ocweekly.com/huntington-beachs-oak-view-barrio-is-finally-fighting-the-garbage-dump-next-door-6485092/

7 This dialogue was conducted in February 2020.

8 The specific meeting referred to here was a community workshop held at Huntington Beach City Hall on 6 December, 2019.