Water Politics in a Water-Scarce Landscape : Examining the Groundwater Debate in California’s Central Valley

Sammanfattning: The history of California is in many ways a story about water, and the outsized effect that droughts, floods, and seasonal precipitation rates have had on the political and economic development of the state over the past 170 years.  This thesis uses discourse analysis of historical and ongoing negotiations that have been presented in federal and state reports, narratives, case laws and legislation to explore how the discourse around water politics has been shaped in the state.  From this, an antiessentialist environmental history develops around the relationship between overdrafted groundwater basins in the Central Valley and the agriculture industry located there.  Finally, this thesis explores what the future of a waterscape built during the capitalization of modern society may look like as we move towards a new regime of nature.