If You Smell Something, Say Something!: Sensing Underground Gas Leaks in Environmental Justice Organizing

• In Event: STS Underground - III: Sensing the Underground

Abstract

While the underground has long been understood as presenting epistemological, sensory, and accessibility difficulties, usually these are tied to sight, sound, vibration, and visualization. Each of these senses is frequently abstracted and made opaque by scientific epistemologies and technocratic management of infrastructure systems, presenting a political problem for activists seeking to contest extraction and transportation of fossil fuels. Sensing underground gas leaks presents a different sensory problem, as it requires an intimate ability to detect and represent changing urban "smellscapes." This talk follows ethnographically socialist and environmental justice activists as they attempt to "make smellable" (and thus actionable) aging natural gas distribution systems in Providence, RI and Boston, MA. Along with Washington D.C., Providence and Boston have among the most antiquated natural gas delivery systems in the U.S., characterized by cast iron pipes that slowly leak and less frequently explode. Yet activists do not want these systems simply replaced, as doing so would "lock-in" fossil fuel infrastructure. Can smell help make underground infrastructure into less of a background site of administrative management and more of a site of struggle over environmental and climate futures? Can smell connect our understanding of gas leakage and environmental justice struggle at hydrofracking extraction sites, liquified natural gas ports, urban infrastructure distribution systems, and private, monopolistic and exploitative energy companies? Drawing on geographies of infrastructure systems, underground worlds, and corporeal/affective/technic interfaces, I query whether and how gas detection orients activist bodies into interfaces with underground infrastructures, and with what political effects.

Author

• Kai Anthony Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth University