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- Convenors:
-
Hannah Knox
(University of Manchester)
Andrew Barry (University College London)
Penny Harvey (University of Manchester)
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- Chair:
-
Penny Harvey
(University of Manchester)
- Discussant:
-
Edward Simpson
(SOAS)
- Stream:
- Infrastructure
- Sessions:
- Thursday 17 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how the concept of the Anthropocene might be refined and rethought through the study of post-carbon infrastructure.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores how the concept of the Anthropocene might be refined and rethought through the study of post-carbon infrastructures. The Anthropocene has recently captured the imagination of scholars in the social sciences and humanities providing a language for exploring entanglements of humans and earth systems. Yet its appearance as a concept derived from geological science risks flattening the social either by over-privileging humanity's role in global environmental changes, or by reducing humans to a generic 'species' effect. This has led some to critique the anthropocene, arguing for greater attention to be paid to power, politics, identity and difference.
In this panel we propose another route to rethinking the Anthropocene - through the anthropological and geographical study of post-carbon infrastructures. The recent study of infrastructure in geography and anthropology has generated important insights into the intertwining of materiality, politics, and the state, shedding light on neoliberalism, logistics, territoriality and state-power. But the development of infrastructure is also the primary means through which Anthropocenic effects are being tackled, and human/earth relations remade. From the construction of hydropower dams and 'unconventional' sources of carbon such as fracking, to the geological burial of nuclear waste and new demands for elements such as Lithium; from carbon capture and storage to the calculations required to manage underwater aquifers, post-carbon infrastructures are crucial places where relations between people and earth are being worked out. We invite papers that explore how these emerging infrastructures are remaking human/earth relations in a period of 'transition'.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 17 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines animal infrastructures, namely oyster breakwaters and beaver dams, as emergent forms of post-carbon infrastructure in the Anthropocene. It theorises how the infrastructures redefine human-animal relations by resituating the human and fostering collaborative conservation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines animal infrastructures, namely oyster breakwaters and beaver dams, as emergent forms of post-carbon infrastructure within the context of natural flood management (NFM) and the Anthropocene. As municipal planning transitions from the construction of 'hard' defense infrastructures to 'soft,' we see animals increasingly enrolled as NFM infrastructures that foster wetland restoration, entangled with the humans, sciences, and politics engaged in the transition. Following two cases in Northern California: Living Shorelines' construction of oyster breakwaters and Worth A Dam's conservation of beavers/dams, I explore how animal infrastructures are constructed in relative collaboration between animals and humans. By investigating how the engineers, designers, and conservationists associated with the projects create and understand animal infrastructures and the 'work' they are collectively conducting in the field of NFM, I theorise how these infrastructural collaborations redefine human-animal relations in the Anthropocene in two key ways. First, animal infrastructures resituate the human within the environmental, messy-wetland assemblage, decentring them in the 'Anthro'pocene. Second, once rethought as resituated, human-animal collaboration resulting in and from animal infrastructure opens possibilities for collaborative conservation: working with and trusting multiple bodies' work in climate change adaptation and mitigation. Collaborative conservation is conceptualised not as operating within a flattened hierarchy, but rather as a place-based, biopolitical, interspecies/thing approach to pragmatise assemblage thinking in the Anthropocene. This transition to animal infrastructures in NFM provides a conduit to understand how human-animal relations are being redefined and how that opens multiple futures, for multiple beings, coexistent on the same planet.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws attention to the materials that infrastructure the world we live in and are expected to make our post-carbon future. Our focus is on cement, a building material whose production is a major source of CO2, while also being essential to the construction of post-carbon infrastructures.
Paper long abstract:
What will the infrastructures of a post-carbon future be made of? By asking this question, we aim to draw attention towards the materials that infrastructure the world we live in. Our focus is on cement, a material whose production, consumption, and disposal actively participate in the large-scale rearrangements of earthly matter that characterise the Anthropocene. The manufacturing of cement is said to be responsible for about 7 to 9% of global CO2 emissions. The useful powder is obtained from limestone and clay and, as the mixture is heated, the sedimentary rocks are decarbonised. The artificial compound thus obtained is able to harden with water. Mixed with stones and sand, it makes the handy and cheap building material known as concrete. For geologists, these materials are likely to be one of the most widespread 'technofossils' of our era. Cement and concrete are being consumed on such a massive scale because they can be called upon to produce any shapes and fulfil various tasks, including - and therein lies the problem - the construction of hydropower dams, windmills, nuclear waste containment facilities, and other post-carbon infrastructures. Drawing on a study into the European cement industry, this paper will examine the ways in which manufacturers, scientists and regulators try, and struggle to produce a post-carbon substitute that could become the material of our post-carbon futures.
Paper short abstract:
The crisis of mines and industries in south-west Sardinia pushed political power to suggest "alternatives" to mining and industry. The paper explores how different concepts of environment affect old workers and young post-industrial workers.
Paper long abstract:
Between the 20th and the 21st century, the Sulcis Iglesiente, a mine region located in the South-west of Sardinia, was primarily exploited for coal production and for chemical industries during the past decades. The crisis of mines and industries has pushed political power to suggest "alternatives" to mining and industry such as the new "green" activities, among which the storage of carbon dioxide in old coal land, and the touristic exploitation of the geological, historical and cultural mining heritage. However, in December 2018 the last coal mine closed and was transformed into an argon distillation project while the tourist mirage entered into crisis with the expulsion of the Geo-Mining Park from the network of UNESCO geoparks in 2019.
The different social actors involved in these projects appear to share diverse spaces and times in the same place. On the one hand, the young generations seem oriented to a healthy, safe and clean future. On the other hand, older workers seem to refuse to accept the ultimate result of the energy transition, failing to conceive a future without the industries.
Starting from an ethnographic research, this paper explores how different concepts of environment affect old workers and young post-industrial workers. In a space of transition, different imaginaries and different moral regimes coexist: a "past" of coal extraction and industrial production and a present based on a new industrial futuristic promise oriented to a "healthy", technologically advanced and "clean" work.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines how the replacement of fossil fuel transport with electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries is triggering the non-scalability of microbial carbon fixation in the places from which lithium is being extracted.
Paper long abstract:
In this work we explore divergent decarbonising practices and logics taking place in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. The paper examines a paradigmatic climate 'strategy' aimed to stabilize the planet's temperature, emissions reductions, particularly by exploring how the replacement of fossil fuel transport with electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries is triggering the non-scalability of microbial carbon fixation in the places from which lithium is being extracted. Building upon ethnographic work with microbiologists and indigenous peoples in Atacama, we discuss how infra-decarbonisation in microbiology -a fundamental immanent process of biotic and abiotic 'becoming with'- clashes with the modern territory of the infra-decarbonisation of the capitalist economy at stake in low-carbon transitions concerned with the decarbonisation of transport. Crafting contrasts between these divergent decarbonizing techniques, we wonder how to better conceptualize a unit of survival which is always changing, enacting and disrupting scales and temporalities while the temperature of the Earth continues to raise.
Paper short abstract:
Conceiving of nuclear waste repositories as post-allegedly-post-carbon infrastructures, and engaging with concerns about a loss of the sacred in the Anthropocene, I compare Dutch and English examples of caring for nuclear waste that constitute both denials and expressions of human - Gaia relations.
Paper long abstract:
In the debate on the so-called energy transition, nuclear options have made a surprising return as an alleged* low-carbon solution. Having emerged as a source of energy before anxieties about climate change and concerns about Gaia came to the fore, nuclear power is not literally post-carbon but has become embroiled and appropriated in energy transition discourse as an alternative for more straightforwardly carbon-intensive energy sources. I discuss a particular kind of infrastructure that is intimately associated with nuclear materialities but smoothed over in nuclear energy politics, namely nuclear waste repositories, facilities for (temporary) storage of a variety of nuclear 'waste products'. Dutch cultural historian Gerard Rooijakkers (2016) has made analogies between the care bestowed on nuclear waste and that extended to sacred relics—both examples of cultural practices of safekeeping, he argues, that are closely related to moral identities that human societies seek to portray. Conceiving of nuclear waste repositories as post-allegedly-post-carbon infrastructures, and complicating Rooijakkers' provocation with concerns about a loss of the sacred in the Anthropocene, I argue that these facilities may constitute both denials and expressions of human - Gaia relations that are differently shaped by national, historical, and aesthetic concerns. My ethnographic case studies are the Low Level Waste Repository Ltd and the Sellafield Ltd on-site Calder Landfill Extension Segregated Area (CLESA) in West Cumbria, England, and COVRA, the Central Organisation for Radioactive Waste in the Netherlands.
* alleged, because the front-end of nuclear power generation is considered by nuclear power sceptics to be carbon-intensive
Paper short abstract:
In Jerusalem - a city in a region defined by water scarcity and its politics - desalination shifts concerns about access to quality. This paper explores what this shift does, what it conceals, and how the Anthropocene, examined from this setting, redraws the boundaries of responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
What does the Anthropocene look like in Jerusalem? A city where climate change is rarely at the forefront - eclipsed by urgent stories of daily survival - it is also located in a region defined by water scarcity and water politics, all the while boasting cutting edge water technology. Drawing on a work-in-progress ethnography of care and water infrastructure in Jerusalem, this paper explores how emerging water technologies intimately frame broader questions of responsibility in this time of 'transition'.
The story begins with the desalination megaprojects on the coast and water-saving processes which shape water in Jerusalem. Reliance on these infrastructures means that those who use and manage Israeli utilities worry less about water access, but instead its quality. Because of its properties, water can be a site for contamination just as much as public health. A team at the Jerusalem water utility is dedicated to best practice in monitoring health and safety across the system. Public duty is practiced through digital models, sensors, and standardised lab tests.
But does responsibility enacted in this mediated way have limits or unintended consequences? How does it intersect with the mode of water management: centralisation, privatisation, and alchemy-like industrial-scale generation? How does this intervene in other places across the city where water is important for care: where it is vital for social relations, healing and mythology, or where alternative infrastructures are revived, created, or quietly continued? And if desalination is changing the contours of responsibility, how might we reconceive of the Anthropocene?