How Terminal Lakes Die: Understanding Sacrifice Zones in the American West through Ecohydrology, Political Economy, and Organizational Ecology

Abstract

The world’s desert lakes are collapsing due to deliberate water diversions, resource extraction, and climate change; threats that are unlikely to subside in the future. I argue that desert lakes are sacrifice zones, a term that refers here to intentional sacrifice of less valued ecosystems to promote growth in distant economic centres, such as major cities. My research focuses on a type of desert lake without an outlet called a terminal lake, known for their higher salinities compared to freshwater lakes and natural fluctuations in their water levels that cause them to dry up entirely in some cases. Beyond terminal lakes, sacrifice zones have been widely documented around the world. Yet, our understanding of how they form and evolve, and why they are consequently so hard to manage, lacks rigorous empirical evidence. My doctoral research is motivated by the need to advance our knowledge of sacrifice zones by examining the ecological, economic, and political factors that might explain the persistence of sacrifice zones. Consequently, my findings contribute knowledge on the barriers to improving conditions for ecosystems and communities in sacrifice zones, informing both theory and practice. Specifically, I examined (1) how we can measure ecological change in sacrifice zones, (2) how we can understand the mixture of public and private interests that shape the evolution of sacrifice zones, and (3) how communities and environmental organizations respond to political processes of sacrifice, including management of its ecological and social impacts. To address these objectives, I focused my research on the terminal lakes and basins of the American West, a region where environmental management is highly regulated and the allocation of land and water has been historically contentious.

My approach frames sacrifice zones as a large-scale collective action problem. Accordingly, I worked across disciplines to develop a chain of explanation, which links local environmental degradation to external economic and political processes through the selection of strategic variables. An interdisciplinary multiple methods approach drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis was therefore necessary to explore the relationships between these variables in each core area of interest. Data sources ranged from remote sensing, citizen science, and spatial landowner datasets to interviews, participant observation, documents, and news articles.

To evaluate approaches to measuring ecological change in a remote and extreme sacrifice zone like a terminal lake, I needed to identify data sources that were (1) accessible from afar and (2) routinely gathered. In addition to meeting these criteria, the selected variables had to reflect ecological conditions in a unique ecohydrological setting, where high salinities and ephemeral water flows filter out many aquatic species. For these reasons, I identified migratory waterbird populations and surface water extent as strategic variables for measuring ecological change across multiple study sites. Using a combination of pre-processed satellite data from the USGS and citizen science data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, I used Bayesian modelling to quantify the relationship between the populations of 42 species of migratory waterbird and surface water extent in 17 basins and 16 lakes from 2003 to 2019. While I found that aquatic species were particularly receptive to measures of surface water extent that were contemporaneous to population surveying, I also found that other species exhibited unpredictable relationships that pointed to the presence of other ecological factors at play as well as insufficient monitoring. Thus, while certain species were promising for use as an indicator proxying ecological change in terminal lakes and basins, there is a clear need to collect more extensive data across basins and at different times of year. These findings in part reflected the difficulty of monitoring and analysing remote and extreme environments due to their distance and a lack of analogues to inform priors or hypotheses.

The ecological dynamics of declining desert lakes prompted questions about the economic factors that drive them. While water diversions are the primary drivers of terminal lake decline across the region and thus have been the main focus of past studies, land use change and related land tenure arrangements drive secondary processes across terminal basins but has been minimally evaluated from this perspective. Land use change is underpinned by the motives of landowners, in the case of private land, and managers (owners from here on for clarity), in the case of public lands. Given this divide between public and private interests, many have assumed that public interests support conservation while private interests support development. However, evidence suggests that such assumptions and the binary they lead to are overly simplistic. For these reasons, I ask: How can we evaluate the motives of landowners in a way that moves beyond the public vs. private binary to capture their heterogeneity and that supports exploration of their relationship to sacrifice zone processes? I propose a typology that layers three dimensions describing landowner motives: publicness, economic objective, and absenteeism. In doing so, I identify three main motive types broadly classified as sacrifice, support, and speculation and test three variants of my typology in eight terminal basins with different conservation trajectories to capture a nuanced profile of public and private landownership. I find that (1) the motives related to mixed-use public parcels strongly shape the overall mixture of interests in a basin, underscoring their management importance; (2) although sacrifice- and speculation-motivated private landowners are few, they hold consolidated estates; and (3) their land use activities likely have disproportionate social and ecological impacts. Case summaries of the dynamics for three representative basins further demonstrate the additional insights that could be generated by applying our typology longitudinally and pairing it with qualitative insights. Beyond the contribution of a new systematic tool for characterizing landowner motives in sacrifice zones and the research potential associated (e.g., longitudinal studies and dependent variable testing), I also point to the need for greater exploration of the role of ‘outlier’ groups, particularly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that own private land for conservation to produce public goods.

The systemic and complex nature of ecological and economic dynamics associated with sacrifice zones further raised questions about how those affected by such dynamics – environmental organizations and local communities – responded. Furthermore, my previous studies had suggested that NGOs and citizen scientists were important local and third-party actors in the political processes of sacrifice zones through their roles as data collectors and land managers. Consequently, in my final empirical chapter I examined how large environmental organizations and communities responded to political processes of sacrifice and subsequent attempts at managing its impacts by assessing the advocacy strategies used by large environmental organizations (LEOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) at the Salton Sea. Drawing on organizational ecology understandings of the structural features that shape organizational behaviour, particularly as they relate to one another, I conducted abductive thematic analysis to move from initial principles to an evidence-based and theory-informed codebook. I applied this codebook to organizational documents, government reports, white papers, and news articles for LEOs and CBOs actively advocating for intervention in the sacrifice of the Salton Sea. I identified three advocacy niches that characterized NGO advocacy strategies: Pragmatists focused on mitigation; Opportunists seeking co-benefits for communities; and Challengers who confront policy-makers. I then used these niches to guide my analysis of formal collaborations in the Salton Sea region, finding that partial niche overlap was likely important to coordinate on shared goals and broad advocacy strategies while simultaneously broadening their cumulative advocacy toolkit. However, I also found that action from policy makers was slow, lagging behind policy change and funding by years in many cases and demonstrating the limited prerogative of NGOs in converting policy decisions to tangible progress.

Synthesizing across all three studies, my research makes three broad contributions. First, I find that sacrifice zones form not only to support extractive value chains and private interests, but also to support public interests in distant places. While this deliberate sacrifice may be followed by emergent sacrifice zone processes that benefit mostly a small number of powerful private interests, it must be noted that the water diversions driving terminal lake collapse benefit a broad external public. With their concentration of otherwise-scarce resources and their remote conditions, terminal lakes and basins may be good candidates for sacrifice zones under prevailing economic paradigms. However, they are not empty. As my research shows, communities and wildlife depend on these ecosystems and the constant imposition of costs for outside benefits has both material and normative implications for distributional equity. Second, I find that sacrifice zones are maintained through a complex web of interdependencies spread out over large spatial scales, making them intractable because of the difficulty in identifying win-win-wins between local economies, local environments, and regional economies. This intractability increases when environments are remote, because their distance from civilization reduces the visibility of their decline, and also when environments are extreme, because they have fewer analogues and thus are less predictable than conventional or familiar environments. This leads to my third contribution that managers will likely have to assess the stage and purpose of sacrifice zones and choose between three broad management pathways: (1) try to stop decline in its tracks, (2) monitor and mitigate gradual decline until some equilibrium is reached, or (3) accept decline and mitigate impacts through alternative measures. Deciding between these three options will likely be based on availability of data, ability to conceptualize the complex processes underway, political willingness and funding, the population and potential exposure of nearby communities, and the scale that the impacts are anticipated to reach. NGOs play an important role in encouraging management, and it is potentially their efforts that have led to the Salton Sea shifting to a managed ‘type 2’ decline as was promised by public agencies as opposed to the ‘type 3’ freefall it was experiencing in practice. However, the Salton Sea has a lucrative agricultural industry and larger nearby communities who are not only exposed but also vocal about their concerns, and thus its experience may not be replicable in all terminal basins.

Ultimately, reversing sacrifice is politically costly and involves grappling with trade-offs and distributional issues at regional and local scales simultaneously, a task that is further complicated by unique monitoring issues, incentive structures, and political alliances. While the lenses of ecohydrology, political economy, and organizational ecology are partial, they help contribute to debates in both political ecology and collective action by embracing ecological complexity and heterogeneity within and among actor groups, including third party organizations such as NGOs. In other words, sacrifice zones are hard to measure and hard to reverse, if not impossible. Once they are sacrificed, there might not be any going back. The consequences for terminal lakes in the American West have already been emigration to cities and far-reaching environmental problems like dust storms and the breakdown of migratory networks. Remediating these issues is expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, and introduces additional problems to a world already struggling with many. As interest grows in developing increasingly remote and extreme environments like the Arctic, the deep sea, and outer space, we should remember that – no matter how remote - the consequences are likely to one day reach us in unexpected and costly ways. We must decide if they are worth it.