Anthropocene World / Anthropocene Waters: A Historical Examination of Ideas and Agency

Scarpino, Philip V.

doi:10.1525/luminos.43.h

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Or perhaps just too awkward to draw? Philip Scarpino ( 2018 , 105) recalls the inscription of extinction events in sedimentary rock, as a fossil record “in effect serves as the ‘database’ or the ‘archive’ that documents the evolution of life on earth.” Groundwater is not like a geological record. As Shannon Mattern ( 2017 ) observes: “the climate archive (like most archives) gets wilder and dirtier the deeper you go.” In the case of groundwater, the archive is sufficiently churned and bowed just below the surface, such that it is almost impossible to understand as neatly-delineated strata.…”

Section: Three Relational Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Relational Materiality of Groundwater

Powis

2021

GeoHumanities

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This paper is part of a larger research project which draws out ways of knowing and thinking with groundwater from Chennai, south India. The (under)ground or (sub)terranean environment is a thick and complex, three-dimensional space of "nothing but change," but whose utility is essential to sustaining urban life above it. This paper looks at multiple, specific, and contradictory ways in which the materiality of groundwater is understood and intervened in. Using the case of the ongoing Chennai Metro Rail construction project, and its disciplinary cultures of representation, I bring attention to the ground and its waters as a composite system in both balance and unrest, and an active, vital component of the city. Through unpacking established concepts of strata, porosity, and pressure, I will cast groundwater not as an objective fact, always pictured by, and relative to, a human subject, but as an actual being which humans (and others beyond) perceive, relate to, and come into contact with. I close by drawing from this account a possible further set of concepts which groundwater generates-dynamic states which are common to human and material lifesuggesting that a relational theory of groundwater materiality, based on leaking as opposed to bordering, might better respond to the ways in which groundwater troubles knowledge.

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Section: Three Relational Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Relational Materiality of Groundwater

Powis

2021

GeoHumanities

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“…Philip Scarpino might refer to this process as terraforming, appropriating the terminology of science fiction to describe the historical shaping of the environment. 29 The move is suggestive, for the project of imperial modernity portrayed by George in the 1902 album is thoroughly concerned with the future. George shows us the Island of Philae from a significant distance, including not only the reservoir around it but also a great stretch of the banks (Figure 5, left).…”

Section: Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mastering the Nile? Confidence and Anxiety in D. S. George’s Photographs of the First Aswan Dam, 1899–1912

Grinsell¹

2020

Environmental History

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The first Aswan Dam was built at the dawn of the twentieth century and celebrated as a triumph of imperial engineering. Five years after its completion, workers returned to extend the dam. Photographer D. S. George recorded both the building and extension projects for the Egyptian Public Works Department in a series of images that give a unique insight into the place of engineering in the imperial imagination. The dam was built at the same time as Britain was seeking to secure its domination of the Nile Valley, having recently seized control of Sudan. Mastering the river’s water was vital to expanding agriculture in Egypt, a central plank of British policy in the region. Representations of the dam speak to a larger history of empire and power in northeast Africa. This article examines the tension between bombastic confidence and nagging anxiety in the ideologies of empire. Drawing together water, engineering, and environmental histories, it explores the connections between attempts to control the politics of the Nile Valley and efforts to harness its waters. The key themes found in the albums—nature, technology, work, and conservation—will be used as lenses through which to scrutinize the peculiar form of modernity that engineers attempted to forge on the world’s longest river. This analysis reveals that imperial officials sought total mastery of the environment but that the difficulties faced in realizing such grand schemes also generated persistent anxieties and so helps us understand the fears that accompanied the ambitions of imperial modernity.

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Anthropocene World / Anthropocene Waters: A Historical Examination of Ideas and Agency

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The Relational Materiality of Groundwater

The Relational Materiality of Groundwater

Mastering the Nile? Confidence and Anxiety in D. S. George’s Photographs of the First Aswan Dam, 1899–1912

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