Written in water: The rhetorical protests of the Owens Valley Water wars

Conflicts over resource use continue to multiply as the Western United States faces an unprecedented water shortage and the world's water supply becomes evermore privatized and commercialized. Few, if any, of these conflicts are marked by a desire to leave nature "untouched." Instead, they are negotiations over what defines the equitable distribution of resources to "natural" and "built" environments. Given this emphasis on how resources should be used (as opposed to whether they should be used at all), research on historical environmental disputes characterized by interaction between the rhetorics of the less- and more-powerful becomes newly significant to questions and conflicts about water. As such, I turn to the Owens Valley Water wars as a case study in environmental rhetorical history, and as a site for developing alternative modes of environmental rhetorical analysis sensitive to the ways stakeholders' ideological investments crosscut the language they use to enact conflict. The intersection of environmental protest and discourses of rural spaces offers a generative resource to scholarship on environmental rhetoric. The simultaneous investment in conservation, monetary profit, rural life, and urban influence characterizing the Owens Valley rhetoric shines new light on rhetorical approaches to the environment as our attention increasingly turns toward questions of sustainability. The valley rhetors' investment in equitable distribution provides an early model of a sustainable stance toward natural resources while a mode of rhetorical analysis derived from their practice offers an alternative approach to other environmental controversies. That is, my study recovers a valuable rhetorical practice within a specific environmental debate, while developing a flexible rhetorical method for examining those debates more generally.;I discuss a rhetorical ecology of texts produced by Owens Valley citizens to demonstrate a rhetorical approach rooted in the transfer of tropes, arguments, and narratives across ideological divisions in the debate. I read of articles in a regional booster publication, Mary Austin's The Ford, and the physical occupation of the Los Angeles aqueduct in order to situate the Owens Valley controversy within the larger fields of the history of rhetoric and environmental rhetoric, thinking specifically about the relationship between public conflict and rhetorical interpretation.