This interview begins a conversation about the social justice implications of an emerging socio-ecological concern – the desalination industry. Seawater desalination is the industrial process of creating drinking water from the ocean. As desalination is proliferating across the world-system, this dialogue with two activists at the forefront of contesting desalination in California indicates how this practice, as a proposed adaptation strategy to climate stressed regions, is not just a matter of crafting governance reforms allowing non-state actors to price water for the purposes of efficient management, or “drought-proofing.” Instead, they highlight the ways in which the environmental justice movement now faces a world-system of shareholder, equity-partnered, and pension-funded capitalism that is fragmenting nature, thus crafting an ever more abstract social nature into various, segmented resource types that become tradable and purchasable. As the dialogue describes, desalination is not pursued for the purposes of developing affordable and sustainable water management solutions alone, but rather for the furtherance investment in long duration fixed capital “assets.” To these ends, this piece further facilitates the program of environmental sociology by engaging various publics and that of political ecology, which asserts its distinction as a community of critical praxis. As such, the dialogue carves out new terrains of theory and action at the frontiers of nature, water, and society.

2022 O’Neill, Brian F. “Desalination as a New Frontier of Environmental Justice Struggle” Forthcoming in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.