Protectors of the Subsurface
Though impervious to most direct human experience, subsurface features like aquifers, caves, and a variety of natural resources have become intense objects of controversy, with emerging publics demanding environmental conservation. How are these diverse groups who value and protect the underground reshaping conservation knowledge and practices? Scholars have recently examined “subterranean extraction” as a site of “science, knowledge, and uncertainty” (Kinchy, Phadke, and Smith 2018, 23). As publics grapple with how to understand the scale and depth of human interventions in earth systems, they encounter not only extraction, but also a variety of incursions. Wastewater, pipelines, roads, and carbon dioxide injection are perceived to be disturbing the subsurface, with consequences for surface life. Emergent public understandings of the subsurface combine technical and scientific knowledges with spatial and cultural representations of mystery and intrigue--“underground environmental imaginaries” (Hawkins 2020, see also Williams 2008). Yet most subsurface realms themselves are not environments or ecologies in any traditional sense. Their opacity to sight and experience necessitates instrumentally- and scientifically-mediated knowledge as multi-modal sensation (Ballestero 2018). Consequently, advocacy for the protection of these spaces also differs from “traditional” US environmentalism, which is often understood to emerge from phenomenological experience of nature as ecological interconnection. Protection of the subsurface entails a combination of instrumental technical knowledge and data collection, intervention into regulatory bodies, and socio-cultural imaginations. The objective of this research is to generate data about how such environmental “protectors of the underground” intertwine data collection and environmental imaginaries in contesting the oil and gas supply chain, thus inventing new forms of environmental protection practice through new knowledges and imaginaries.
publications:
2021. "The crack in the earth: environmentalism after speleology" in A Place More Void, eds Anna Secor and Paul Kingsbury. The_crack_in_the_earth_environmentalism_after_speleology (PDF)
Contemporary liberal environmentalism relies on notions of wholeness, interconnection, equilibrium, and life to derive the moral certitude to contest resource extraction. But when confronted with the fractured spaces of the underground, we are forced into unfamiliar encounters with the fractured and the inorganic, mirroring gaps in our own subjective perspectives rather than the equilibrium promised by environmentalism. This paper asks - how do caves split environmentalism's ethics and politics? Theoretically, this paper contests the 'new materialist' understanding of Deleuze that mirrors this environmentalism of interconnection and wholeness by building instead on his psychoanalytically-inflected works to establish the relationship between the gap in the subject and the crack in the earth. Empirically, this paper examines the effects of the crack on subject-formation through interviews and participant observation with spelunkers, speleologists, cavers, scientists, and tourists at Jewel Cave and Wind Cave in western South Dakota, respectively the third and sixth longest caves in the world. I argue that the cramped, holey space of the cave offers an anamorphic environmental ethics and politics, not necessarily more effective but certainly more attentive to its own fault lines. This paper thus contributes to political and cultural geographies of the underground, environmentalism, and psychoanalysis in the Anthropocene.
2020. "Feminist Geography in the Anthropocene: Sciences, bodies, futures." In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, eds A Datta, P Hopkins, L Johnston, E Olson, JM Silva, 445-454
2017. “Thinking permeable matter through feminist geophilosophy: environmental knowledge controversy and the materiality of hydrogeologic processes.” Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 35(1): 21-37. thinking_permeable_matter_through_feminist_geophilosophy (PDF)
In this paper, I argue that encounters with hydrogeologic processes encourage feminists to rethink the permeable surfaces between human bodies, ecological systems, and political events. Contemporary geographical accounts of environmental knowledge controversies are insufficiently attentive to how geologic processes exceed and undermine instrumental deliberative political solutions to environmental problems. Through a mobilization of feminist geophilosophy, I argue instead that the limits of instrumental knowledge are not merely produced by uncertainty or lack of evidence, but by the inhuman forces that condition feminist thinking itself. An investigation of a controversy surrounding the permeability of underground materials near a proposed in-situ recovery (ISR) uranium mine in South Dakota demonstrates that subterranean spaces have the ability to heighten a sense of the openness of our bodies to geological forces. Public and expert testimony of the hydrogeology of the region creatively extended scientific accounts to draw conclusions about the meaning and force of geology for the politics of uranium extraction. This essay contributes a unique account of environmental controversies in which materiality does not become instrumental or experiential knowledge, but instead produces a creative understanding of permeable geologic materials which provokes feminist thought.
Other publications:
Bosworth, K. 2018. On the material excesses of feminist geopolitics; book review forum on Deborah Dixon's Feminist Geopolitics: Material States. Dialogues in Human Geography 8(1): 82-84.
Bosworth, K. 2014. “Review: Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy." Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/woodard-2013-kai-bosworth/
publications:
2021. "The crack in the earth: environmentalism after speleology" in A Place More Void, eds Anna Secor and Paul Kingsbury. The_crack_in_the_earth_environmentalism_after_speleology (PDF)
Contemporary liberal environmentalism relies on notions of wholeness, interconnection, equilibrium, and life to derive the moral certitude to contest resource extraction. But when confronted with the fractured spaces of the underground, we are forced into unfamiliar encounters with the fractured and the inorganic, mirroring gaps in our own subjective perspectives rather than the equilibrium promised by environmentalism. This paper asks - how do caves split environmentalism's ethics and politics? Theoretically, this paper contests the 'new materialist' understanding of Deleuze that mirrors this environmentalism of interconnection and wholeness by building instead on his psychoanalytically-inflected works to establish the relationship between the gap in the subject and the crack in the earth. Empirically, this paper examines the effects of the crack on subject-formation through interviews and participant observation with spelunkers, speleologists, cavers, scientists, and tourists at Jewel Cave and Wind Cave in western South Dakota, respectively the third and sixth longest caves in the world. I argue that the cramped, holey space of the cave offers an anamorphic environmental ethics and politics, not necessarily more effective but certainly more attentive to its own fault lines. This paper thus contributes to political and cultural geographies of the underground, environmentalism, and psychoanalysis in the Anthropocene.
2020. "Feminist Geography in the Anthropocene: Sciences, bodies, futures." In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, eds A Datta, P Hopkins, L Johnston, E Olson, JM Silva, 445-454
2017. “Thinking permeable matter through feminist geophilosophy: environmental knowledge controversy and the materiality of hydrogeologic processes.” Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 35(1): 21-37. thinking_permeable_matter_through_feminist_geophilosophy (PDF)
In this paper, I argue that encounters with hydrogeologic processes encourage feminists to rethink the permeable surfaces between human bodies, ecological systems, and political events. Contemporary geographical accounts of environmental knowledge controversies are insufficiently attentive to how geologic processes exceed and undermine instrumental deliberative political solutions to environmental problems. Through a mobilization of feminist geophilosophy, I argue instead that the limits of instrumental knowledge are not merely produced by uncertainty or lack of evidence, but by the inhuman forces that condition feminist thinking itself. An investigation of a controversy surrounding the permeability of underground materials near a proposed in-situ recovery (ISR) uranium mine in South Dakota demonstrates that subterranean spaces have the ability to heighten a sense of the openness of our bodies to geological forces. Public and expert testimony of the hydrogeology of the region creatively extended scientific accounts to draw conclusions about the meaning and force of geology for the politics of uranium extraction. This essay contributes a unique account of environmental controversies in which materiality does not become instrumental or experiential knowledge, but instead produces a creative understanding of permeable geologic materials which provokes feminist thought.
Other publications:
Bosworth, K. 2018. On the material excesses of feminist geopolitics; book review forum on Deborah Dixon's Feminist Geopolitics: Material States. Dialogues in Human Geography 8(1): 82-84.
Bosworth, K. 2014. “Review: Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy." Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/woodard-2013-kai-bosworth/