Review: Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles , by Sayd Randle

This book provides an incisive analysis of the water crisis in L.A. and is an indispensable text for anyone interested in urban environments and environmental justice. As Randle so ably shows us, the devil is in the details when it comes to implementing policy that most impacts poor and working-class minority communities, those most susceptible to the dire consequences of climate change.Randle systematically evaluates policies as they are carried out by becoming an actor in the drama herself, working side by side with her “interlocutors” to effect change in one community (and even one neighborhood) at a time. She finds some surprising results, not all of them positive. Thus, she relies on lived experience as much as on conventional academic sources to support her argument that even solutions to climate change that appear to be unbiased can increase rather than ameliorate inequity in practice and may not be real solutions at all.The book is organized into two main parts, with a lengthy introduction that carefully explains Los Angelenos’ long history of dependence on faraway water sources. Randle highlights the significance of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which enabled rapid and extensive development of communities, urbanization, and industrial agriculture. This growth occurred with little concern for the long-term consequences of importing water to maintain exponential population growth or to support an industrial and agricultural base that exploded with development throughout the twentieth century in a geographical setting never meant to sustain it. She zeroes in on the San Fernando Valley, one of the few areas with still-available land, as Los Angeles seeks to “replumb the city” to cope with the dire consequences of a severe megadrought driven by drastic climate change.The idea of using wastewater flows to create a more reliable water supply became problematic when environmentally minded residents, who advocated reusing their own greywater, diverted water from public storage. This action clashed with environmental experts who advocated a centralized system of recycling and storage, positioning these expert outsiders as decision-makers and power brokers rather than allowing local communities or individual homeowners to control their own resources.Randle argues that the public needs a better understanding of waste to support new, more localized policies and practices that disrupt the unsustainable practice of pumping from afar in an era of climate change and severe drought. The marketing term “from toilet to tap,” for example, was a regrettable choice for convincing the public of the benefits of recycling wastewater rather than importing water, generating widespread resistance to the “yuck” factor of the process.Inequity is baked into the Los Angeles model, according to Randle. Poor and minority communities are routinely formed in the least desirable and most polluted parts of the region, those most vulnerable to catastrophes such as floods and fires that result from climate change. Environmental activists often argue for equity and environmental justice by “empowering” poor and minority residents to make landscape changes for themselves to save and store water resources. However, this perspective overlooks an important point: that this is work that should be valued as paid labor, according to Randle. She shows beautifully that when government agencies task (unpaid) homeowners and community members with changing their personal environments to utilize local water resources more effectively, they also unfairly burden already overworked, low-wage residents with duties the government should be carrying out and paying for: The San Fernando Valley’s green infrastructure project to maintain new installations that preserve runoff “effectively makes twenty-four low-income families responsible for the maintenance of infrastructure in a way that no one else in the city is” (163). The consequence is to increase inequity and add to environmental injustice, rather than to rectify it.Randle is strongest when she immerses herself in the work, detailing firsthand what implementing policy looks like and the innumerable tasks people must undertake to alter landscapes to increase Los Angeles’s water table. She makes a compelling argument. According to Randle, “ecological labor” is disconnected from “livelihood,” which requires both appreciation and remuneration, thereby linking ecological work to the gendered, poorly paid, or unpaid work of childcare and kinship (147).I would have liked to see her situate her narrators in a fuller context, since much of her argument depends on interviews and participant observation in everything from policymaking to new methods for conserving water through changing local landscapes. Rather than designating individuals solely by race (White, for example), it is essential to share the details of the character of the community they live in—to identify class, citizenship status, ethnicity, and stage of migration (if referring to an immigrant community with family members at different stages of settlement) so that we might have a deeper understanding of the lives of the human beings whom Randle interviews and works with. Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, her geographic area, is a demographically complex region with every racial and ethnic group deeply divided by class, citizenship, length of residence, and gender, among other critical factors. These crucial components of identity are overlooked here but might explain much about a given community’s response to climate change and the emerging policies for local control.This is a minor concern, however. Replumbing the City is an excellent analysis of the real people currently struggling to cope with the crisis of rapid climate change, which leads to extreme drought, out-of-control fires, and sudden, catastrophic flooding, resulting in devastating losses of property and human, plant, and animal lives. It is a must-read for scholars and policymakers alike interested in cutting-edge solutions to California’s and the nation’s environmental crisis.