No One Can Hold It Back

Abstract

The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in water’s oscillations between non-life and the divine. Exploring these oscillations in a dam conflict in Chilean Patagonia, I argue that they allowed a flooding phenomenon on a river threatened with damming to be heard as a prophetic call to action. The uprising that followed produced a rare victory for dam opponents, suggesting that a theopolitics of life has powers that exceed vitalism.

Multiple territorialities and the shifting conservation frontiers of Patagonia

“…Other scholars have drawn attention to movements responding to mining and oil extractivism (Hadad et al., 2020). A sizeable literature now exists on the Patagonia Sin Represas (Patagonian without Dams) movement that contested the installation of hydropower dams on the Baker and Pascua Rivers in Chile (McAllister, 2020; Schaeffer, 2017; Silva, 2016). This movement challenged the attempt by an energy consortium and the Chilean government to represent the project as ‘green energy.’ Indeed, the very meaning of what we call ‘Patagonia renovable’ is a contested image that has already been the subject of intense politicking, movement activism, and legislation.…”

The making of a conservation frontier: Nation‐building, green productivism, and environmentalism in Patagonia

“…In the past four decades, Patagonia has been marked by overlapping processes generating investment opportunities, novel forms of commodification, and environmental conservation: contestation against megadevelopment projects (Carruthers, 2001; McAllister, 2020); a tourism boom built around the global fame of national parks (Mendoza, 2018; Nuñez et al., 2020); green grabbing and the growth of private protected areas (Holmes, 2014; Louder and Bosak, 2019); the introduction of co‐management and participatory conservation schemes with local populations (Araos, 2018; Trentini, 2016); and the strengthening of scientific research as a factor directing actions by public institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Barandiarán, 2018; Dicenta and Correa, 2021). These processes, which today enact the conservation frontier, remake the existing social orders of Chilean and Argentinian nation‐building projects across roughly the same spaces of Patagonia.…”