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Paper short abstract

Treating gas as an interscalar vehicle, this paper moves through geological formations, extractive politics, and histories of land and energy use in Groningen (The Netherlands), to explore representational challenges of the (planetary) legacies of fossil fuels.

Paper long abstract

The documentary “The Soil is Moving: When Worlds Collide” (2023) depicts the struggles of residents in Groningen, the Netherlands, seeking recognition and compensation for damages caused by earthquakes linked to gas extraction. While it foregrounds conflicts between residents, the government and extractive industry, it begins with reflections on the landscape shaped by peat extraction and polders, highlighting a collision between subterranean worlds and the surface.

This paper explores an ethnography ‘from the ground up’, by treating natural gas as an “interscalar vehicle” (Hecht 2018) that moves our analysis across a variety of the scalar and temporal registers and claims. As a dynamic participant gas allows us to move ‘through’ the soil with attention to different strata, centuries of human land and energy use, colonial extractive practices, energy consumption, welfare state narratives, and residents’ experiences of marginalisation and resistance – while notably, connections to climate change are largely absent in these accounts.

Our material draws on a heritage ethnography approach. As the wells are closing and gas infrastructure is being removed, we participate in a grassroots effort to create a memory infrastructure that preserves the narratives and traces of gas extraction, making subterranean worlds and their expansive temporalities visible. We explore examples of visual, artistic, and material strategies to think “from the ground up” and render geosocial formations of gas tangible. This approach combines multiple forms of knowledge—geologic, artistic, historical, experiential, and ethnographic—demonstrating a collaborative effort to understand the entanglements of human and nonhuman worlds beneath and above the surface.