‘People Can't Live There Unless There Is Economic Activity': Agriculture and the Structural Impediments to Groundwater Sustainability in the U.S. High Plains

The High Plains region of the U.S. is one of the most important agricultural regions in the world.  Much agricultural production in this semi-arid region, however, depends on the consumption of nonrenewable groundwater from the High Plains Aquifer.  Although the problem has drawn significant attention from policymakers and citizens for over 40 years, depletion of the Aquifer has worsened.  Why does depletion persist despite widespread and ongoing concern?  We explore this conundrum by placing the region into an historical, political-economic context. We argue that the contemporary problem is rooted in the ways in which the region was articulated into broader circuits of capital and exchange.  Private capital and the state incorporated the region as a source of primary raw materials, mainly agricultural products.  Water-dependent agricultural resource extraction opened up a metabolic rift in the hydrological cycle that has only been exacerbated over time through unequal ecological exchange with more politically and economically central places.  These structural dynamics associated with political-economic incorporation have impeded efforts to develop more sustainable uses of groundwater consumption in the region.