Bertenthal: The Alchemy of Public Interest
In The Alchemy of Public Interest, Alyse Bertenthal (Wake Forest Law) uses the specific history of Los Angeles and its water extraction from the Owens Valley to explore how a common legal concept like “public interest” can be engineered to enact and justify particular visions of publics and their interests.
Bertenthal begins by arguing that “public interest” is comprised of more than just the interests of a certain subgroup of people. Instead, the author asserts that public interest should include all people and the water and land as well. In this way, Bertenthal reorients public interest into a more pluralistic concept and, in contrast, how more common, narrower constructions of public interest exclude certain peoples and things – and what this means for all people and things connected.
The author conducted over two years of ethnographic research relying on archival research, participant observation, and interviews. This research allows Bertenthal to provide a story of how the Los Angeles – Owens Valley battle at the turn of the century over who could control, run, and regulate the Owens Valley water supply helped create a crafted “public interest” which deliberately benefited urban people and how this negatively affected their rural counterparts through deprivation of resources, poverty, and relocation. The author uses this historical event not because it is unique, but because it clearly depicts why we must understand the dynamism and complexity of “public interest” itself in order to transform our environmental governance.
The Los Angeles Water Department spent years crafting rhetoric and urban opinions on the residents of Owens Valley, mainly the Paiute and Shoshone Indians, that justified the city’s taking of the valley’s water. The article articulates how the Water Department reconceptualized the Owens Valley as solely a source of land and water, disregarding the lives within the Valley. Through masterful campaigns and propaganda, the Water Department was able to craft the urban idea that those resources were there to serve urban interests – to nourish and sustain not just any man, but a specifically urbanized man in need of water and power.
Bertenthal claims the key to the Water Department’s successful campaign of “othering” and erasing the people of Owens Valley was their restructure of how urban Angelenos situated themselves against the rural Others. By expressly distinguishing the urban center from its rural periphery, the Water Department reconstituted the city’s relationship with the natural world. Los Angeles relied on the literal and figurative erasure of other people’s claims to the water and land by viewing the valley as a rural, untouched, and unclaimed utopia. By linking rurality with an unpeopled natural world, the portrayal of the rural non-place – devoid of culture but full of nature – Los Angeles simultaneously erased the people of Owens Valley and situated their own urban public interest as supreme.
The Alchemy of Public Interest asks readers to think of environmental governance more dynamically, considering factors including cultural power, appropriation, and negotiation between groups. This is necessary, Berenthal asserts, to reformulate not only the concept of the public interest, but also to reconsider how people investigate the development of law and legal processes more generally. Berenthal argues the case of Los Angeles-Owens Valley demonstrates why “local” should not be equated with “municipal” governance when evaluating environmental policy – each plays a discrete role. Bertenthal states a more robust theory of local environmental governance must account for not only relations between local and federal governments, but also differences within the local level itself – all while recognizing “local” expands well beyond a city’s borders.
In sum, Bertenthal asks readers to recognize law does not emerge in a cultural void. Understanding the cultural norms that scaffold what is in place is key to dismantling and rebuilding our systems in a structurally meaningful way.
