Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the political struggles over knowledge about Lake Sasyk's water environments and how different actors are imagining the agencies of water and humans in forecasting Sasyk's future.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 1970s, a Soviet agro-industrial project tried to turn the salt-water Sasyk estuary in southern Ukraine into a freshwater lake to irrigate fields by constructing a dam and a canal transporting fresh water from the Danube River. The result was a disaster - infertile land, contaminated ground water, health problems, and a dramatic decline in Sasyk's biodiversity - that remained officially unacknowledged for over two decades. Since the mid-1990s activists from a local NGO have campaigned for an official decision to remove Sasyk's dam, which they achieved in the spring of 2009 after years of lobbying, commissioning scientific expertise, and demonstrations. This paper considers two issues: first, the political struggles between the NGO and canal system authorities to produce, refute, and conceal knowledge about Sasyk's complex water environments; and second, how activists, residents and scientists are imagining the agencies of water and humans in forecasting Sasyk's future.