What do plants need? The extractive politics behind water and pollination requirements

The California almond industry has drawn the ire of environmentalists for being a “thirsty” crop that drains the state’s limited water supplies and for putting the nation’s honeybees in peril as hives are trucked across the country each pollination season. The underlying assumption is that this particular crop is simply too needy to be sustainable. But how does one know what plants need in the first place? In this talk I show how seemingly stable and benign agronomic measures of evapotranspiration and pollinator dependence are far from self-evident. They are produced through political economic relations. Yet by circulating as statements of biophysical fact, these agronomic measurements come to naturalize extraction.