Contribution short abstract:

Examining the economic logic in and distribution of benefits from American water projects reveals the distribution of political and social power in mid-century America, and offers a means to integrate environmental justice, discrimination, and metrics of power into economic and political analyses.

Contribution long abstract:

My research interests: My contribution to the “Water, Land, and Power in the Twentieth Century” roundtable examines the application of economic analysis to American water policy in the work of the President’s Water Resources Policy Commission of 1950. Examining who benefited from and was displaced by federal water projects reveals the distribution of political and social power in mid-century America, and offers a means to integrate environmental justice, discrimination, and metrics of power into economic and political analyses. This case study also reveals how deeply embedded economic analysis is and has been in environmental policy. The resulting policies reordered the American economy even as they compounded environmental injustices of dispossession and displacement of the US’s African-American, Indigenous and Hispanic communities. This record of environmental injustice is not solely the result of economic analysis, but it is extremely difficult to separate the consequences of pure power politics, utilitarian emphasis on developing resources to provide the greatest good to the greatest number, and the expectation that economic analysis could finally offer federal officials an apolitical policy-analysis tool from America's record on racial exclusion in embedding environmental racism in America's water- and landscapes.

My interest in this panel: This roundtable offers an opportunity for transnational comparisons the impact of economic logics on environmental justice and resource policies. We are also seeking to frame a new interpretive intersection between environmental and economic history.