Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with James D. Parker, author of Vanished Water: Imperialism, Capital, and Rural Ecologies in Late-Colonial Kenya

What inspired you to write this book? 

I came to this project through an interest in development, and the ways that the concept is taught in the United Kingdom. Colonial development lies at the heart of Britain’s representation of its past empire, characterizing it as a benevolent exercise that had the uplift of overseas communities as its main priority. I’d always felt that to be somewhat disingenuous.

To investigate this, I felt that studying smaller-scale projects provided a better insight into the daily harms of development, and the local-level activities disrupted by the arrival of British power. In particular, the projects I study in the book highlight the homogeneity of African ecologies and environmental relationships, and this homogeneity clashes quite starkly with the one-size-fits-all approach imposed by British authorities in their search for economic growth. The analogies to the present day are clear in that respect, whereby land is reduced to its economic value within a very narrow spectrum, and alternate ways of living and producing are excluded. During an era of intensifying climate change, studying prior forms of environmental philosophy in arid spaces is increasingly important for charting a path forward, and I wanted to construct a historical analysis that had very real modern value.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

Arid regions, especially in Africa, are typically portrayed as sites of poverty or as somehow bereft of life. The book really clearly demonstrates the fallacy of those portrayals, and I want readers to think about both why those ideas are so widespread and what kinds of lifestyles they misrepresent. Arid regions are fully of life and vitality despite harsh climatic conditions. To go further, those harsh climatic conditions generate creative and lasting relationships between different ethnic groups and their environments. These are not at all flawed spaces, and the perpetuation of that imagery is something I worked hard to try and dispel in the book.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

Vanished Water is an outgrowth of my World History PhD dissertation, and upon graduation I remember believing that the manuscript was more or less ready to publish; I had a clear sense that that was the story I wanted to tell, that the conclusions were firm and relevant, and that the voices centered accurately represented the historical trajectory of the period. As I completed edits and rewrites during my postdoctoral fellowship at UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, however, it became clear that the story needed room to breathe. Rather than a pure history of arid space in colonial Kenya, the true impact of economic development and its entanglement with local communities could not be understood without an interdisciplinary investigation. Engaging with peers in philosophy and anthropology challenged me to reconfigure my prior conclusions, and to integrate a broader range of sources so as to fully center the voices of those impacted by British power. Folklore, environmental philosophy, and political ecology all shifted the narrative to one that has more applicability for our modern world, and does a greater service to the communities of arid Kenya fighting continued erasure and dispossession.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

Something that the book touches on, especially in the later stages, is the array of so-called development plans proposed by citizen scientists in Kenya’s European community. To continue removing water for irrigation and cashcrop agriculture, individuals frequently proposed questionable schemes to either transport water to indigenous communities or to expand the amount of cultivable land in the colony. Chapter 6 discuss the long-term idealization of a hundred-mile long waterpipe from the Ewaso Ng’iro’s catchment area to pastoral communities downstream. To say nothing of the expense and practicality of the scheme, the attention that this idea received demonstrates Europeans’ obsession with finding ways to shortchange pastoral communities on their water allocation. The archives also contain letters to the Colonial Office suggesting the use of hot air balloons to transport water into arid regions, the use of a gravity-fed aqueduct from the slopes of Mount Kenya into Machakos around 100 miles away, and the use of afforestation to stimulate rainfall around the Tana River. These ideas really drive home the lengths to which communities will go to materialize their own ideas of resource use rather than adapting themselves to their environments.

What’s next? 

Following on from one of the conclusions in Vanished Water, my next project explores how modern day carbon offset programs have inherited the legacies of colonial economic development. In northern and eastern Kenya grasslands have been identified as carbon sinks and withdrawn from community use, in ways that mirror the policies I outlined in the book. I’m therefore hoping to complete a genealogy of carbon offset implementation, and examine how those projects (and other forms of green development) have been introduced to grazing lands and river basins in east Africa.