Building Resilient Extraction: Infrastructure and Endangered Species Restoration in California’s Delta

• In Event: Assembling Resilience - I

Abstract

Ecological restoration projects increasingly aim, not to disassemble artificial encroachments into a pristine natural environment, but to assemble systems resilient to potential disruptions. Restoration as building resilience has a unique relationship to infrastructure. Unlike “mitigation,” it does not simply refer to repairing associated damages. Unlike “offsetting,” it does not imply the valuation of damages, which are netted out elsewhere. Instead, ecological restoration is becoming fundamentally constitutive of infrastructural development. The result is an emergent focus on “resilient extraction,” in which ecological restoration positively contributes to securing access to resources in an uncertain and unstable world. This paper tracks the relationship between efforts to restore California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (“the Delta”) ecosystem, and to maintain California’s extractive water delivery system, of which the Delta serves as the central node. Focusing on the delta smelt, this paper centers on the mutually reinforcing efforts to save the species from extinction and continue extracting water from its habitat. Legal protections of this endangered species threaten the ongoing conveyance of water to farms and cities. However, rather than minimally meeting existing legal requirements, federal, state and regional water agencies have responded by investing significant funds to support the species’ recovery through habitat restoration and a genetically managed refuge population in a laboratory. Rather than valuing the environmental costs of development as an externality to be internalized or offset, in this case, the value of investments in ecological restoration are reflected in the projected resilience of infrastructural projects themselves.

Author

• Caleb Richard Scoville, UC Berkeley