Abstract

This article explores the politics of producing knowledge about drought in a suburban region of southern California: Orange County. Based on nine months of ethnographic research with the assistant specialists that keep the Loma Ridge Global Change Experiment (LRGCE) station running, the article demonstrates how the station, which studies microbial communities and wildfire effects on the local ecology, simply cannot produce the necessary data without these workers' and specialists' expertise and efforts. More than an examination of how drought research happens, this article interrogates how the LRGCE, situated on the Santa Ana mountains and on the ancestral land of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples, is part of a regime of scientific knowledge production tied to land-use claims. Rather than focus on the science that is produced into valued research products through occupation of Loma Ridge, this article focuses on the forms of repair, tinkering, and maintenance that are near-daily necessities for maintaining the conditions necessary to pull drought knowledge from Loma Ridge and that reveal the various openings where science and land occupation is anything but natural, exposing the relations of settler colonial occupation. Centered on a theory of "mending," this article provides a window into drought's political economy; in particular, it foregrounds the complex relationships between drought and the settler colonial mode of domination that structures southern California's suburbs and the production of scientific knowledge on native lands.

Keywords: drought, political ecology of water, settler colonialism, maintenance, southern California

How to Cite:

Zarate, S., (2024) “Drought mending: Experimenting with drought in suburban southern California ”, Journal of Political Ecology 31(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5549