McGinty's Ascent Productions

                                             

                                                   Who Governs the Aquifer? 
                  Power, Representation, and California's Groundwater Crisis
                         
What happens to “sustainability” when the agencies managing an overdrafted aquifer are led by those most empowered to extract from it?

WHY NOW: California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), one of the most consequential environmental reforms of this century, has reached a pivotal moment. As implementation shifts from planning to enforcement, the groundwater sustainability agencies created to manage overdrafted aquifers are making decisions that will determine access to water to impact farms, rural households, tribal communities, towns, and entire ecosystems for decades.

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Who Governs the Aquifer? is a documentary film in progress about groundwater and the forms of power that gather around what cannot be easily seen. Expanding my earlier film, Dry Wells of the Paso Basin: A Tragedy of the Commons, into a broader inquiry, the project begins with a question of visibility: how do you film a resource that is subterranean, shared, and known primarily through its depletion? I approach groundwater not only as a material condition, but as a problem of cinematic form. It lies below perception, yet it organizes landscapes, institutions, and everyday life.The film compares selected Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) from the more than 260 established under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 to govern the state’s aquifers. As SGMA moves from planning toward enforcement, these agencies are negotiating decisions that will shape rural households, farms, Tribal communities, ecosystems, and towns for decades. I am interested less in policy than in the way power takes form through procedure and representation. The film asks how authority is performed, how exclusion is normalized, and who absorbs environmental loss.

I think of GSAs as hydro-social networks: constellations of land, law, infrastructure, and unequal influence. Many are shaped by large agricultural interests, water districts, developers, county authorities, and other local elites, while only 12% include working people, small farmers, or Tribal members in decision-making positions. The project asks what becomes visible in one structure of representation and what disappears in another. It asks whose claims enter the public record, whose speech carries weight, and whose losses are made ordinary.

My visual approach is observational. I am drawn to agricultural landscapes, public meetings, pumps, dry domestic wells, and the everyday spaces of families living with uncertainty. These are not separate worlds but interwoven ones. Through image, sound, and musical themes, the film will bring institutional interiors into contact with lived environments without collapsing one into the other.

At its core, Who Governs the Aquifer? is about democracy at the edge of perception. It asks how a shared resource becomes subject to systems of management that claim neutrality while distributing vulnerability unevenly. More broadly, it asks what documentary film can do when its subject is not an event but a condition, not a spectacle but an infrastructure, not only a water crisis, but a crisis of representation.