Articulating water conservation as colonization: revisiting the “public interest” in Theodore Roosevelt’s First Annual Message

Abstract

ABSTRACT As policymakers attempt to cope with climate chaos, traditions of water injustice persist. Meanwhile, water problems and solutions in the U.S. arid region have long been discussed through the discourse of conservation. This essay traces water conservation discourse back to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1901 First Annual Message to better understand its relationship to U.S. water colonizing ideologies in today’s context. Attuned to colonization as practices of extraction and ideological articulation, I argue that Roosevelt articulated water policies in the name of the progressive “public interest” with a set of moral, legal, and infrastructural water logics. These logics link the value of progressive water management to specific capacities that expand white settler ecologies in arid regions. Roosevelt's early-twentieth-century articulations are palpable in contemporary calls for water conservation, suggesting major implications for presidential and environmental rhetoric as well as water policymaking.