Paper short abstract:

Through two environmental infrastructures in the Americas, we interrogate how such projects, set in motion by green entrepreneurs, fabricate the temporality and spatiality of utopia, inviting the elite to participate through increased mobility, contracting the supposed ethos of climate awareness.

Paper long abstract:

Taking two case studies across the Americas - SpaceX based in Los Angeles’ South Bay and a new scenic route through Chile’s Patagonia, the Ruta de los Parques de la Patagonia, this paper interrogates how environmental infrastructures, set in motion by green entrepreneurs, produce new, out-of-touch hypermobilities, contradicting the very ethos of climate consciousness. We inquire into the divergent spatial and temporal logics of utopias as they are imagined and inaugurated by these green entrepreneurs toward either a recreated past or a technofuture. In the Chilean case, US conservation philanthropists Kristine Tompkins and the late Douglas Tompkins have developed and marketed the scenic Ruta, aiming to “rewild” the region and so return it to an ecological past. Headquartered in a predominantly low-income Black and Latinx region of Los Angeles, Elon Musk’s projects at SpaceX promise utopian visions for humanity by shifting mobilities toward outer space frontiers and a more efficient, interesting, and less depressing future, as Musk would phrase it. We analyze the visual rhetoric of these infrastructures - their directionality, aesthetics, and intended audiences - in order to explore the entrepreneurial appeals for buy-in and participation to install these utopias. Through comparing these infrastructures as well as the recent geographic histories each exists upon, we uncover the ambiguity of green entrepreneurial utopian senses of time and space, interrogating the “nowhere” places and skewed temporalities embedded in these visions as well as the elitist hypermobilities they produce.