ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Living with Depletion: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the Making of a Visual Politics of Groundwater

• In Event: Legitimating Agricultural Risk: Science, Bodies and Knowledge Across Global Farming

English Abstract

While aquifers are widely celebrated for their capacity to help reclaim new territories for farming and other forms of development, their persistent overextraction reveals a wider inability to sustainably govern this resource. Nowhere has the tension between groundwater’s possibilities and limitations been more apparent than in the Soutern Plains of the United States, where water from the Ogallala Aquifer has been used to sustain one of the most intensive agricultural schemes in the twentieth century. Through a close analysis of photographs documenting the first efforts to mine the Ogallala, this essay explores how increasing concerns about groundwater depletion were resolved through the construction of a racialized and gendered visual politics that centered on white male ownership and stewardship. These images, produced as part of speculative property schemes, framed groundwater as a tool that would not only eliminate the risks of farming in a region with a highly variable climate but empower white landowners within a rapidly diversifying agricultural economy. By tracing how this ideology took root, this essay argues that historically constructed power relations and capitalist logics have and continue to preclude the development of robust conservation interventions in groundwater governance.

Author

• Sam Hege, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science