Water conservation as settler discourse: Michael Warren Cook, Settler Discourses of Water Conservation: Addressing the Arid American West from Roosevelt to Snake Valley, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2020 | settler colonial studies blog

Water conservation as settler discourse: Michael Warren Cook, Settler Discourses of Water Conservation: Addressing the Arid American West from Roosevelt to Snake Valley, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: This thesis aims to foster discussion about the complex terrain of water politics by investigating the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of a hegemonic water discourse in the US today: water conservation. Its overarching question is: how do settler colonial invocations of water conservation discourse facilitate unsustainable relationships to water in the arid American West? The second chapter attempts to answer this question by drawing on rhetorical criticism. I revisit a key moment in the emergence of water conservation discourse in the US by “the conservation president,” specifically Theodore Roosevelt’s first State of the Union Address in 1901. The third chapter answers this question by drawing on rhetorical field methods and analysis of public culture. In this chapter, I analyze oral histories of water I conducted from settlers in Snake Valley, who are resisting a decades-long water grab that’s been justified in terms of “water conservation.” The two chapters engage extant conversations in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Environmental Communication, respectively, with the hope of bringing this research into dialogue with rhetorical studies and a cultural studies approach to environmental communication.

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