Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future.
Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehl
Trade Review"... this volume offers an insightful evaluation of infrastructural complexity and an excellent starting point for thinking about amendatory futures." -- Melanie Ford * Anthropos *
“Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene is an ambitious and brilliant work of ethnographic analysis…. The book is a solid source for critical scholars working on the Anthropocene, offering ways to grasp such a complex concept through those of infrastructure, environment and life.”
-- Semra Akay * Local Environment *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction. Keywords of the Anthropocene / Kregg Hetherington 1
Part I. Reckoning with Ground
1. The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal / Andrea Ballestero 17
2. Clandestine Infrastructures: Illicit Connectivities in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands / Shaylih Muehlmann 45
3. The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene / Gastón Gordillo 66
Part II: Lively Infrastructures
4. Dirty Landscapes: How Weediness Indexes State Disinvestment and Global Disconnection / Ashley Carse 97
5. From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens against Eden: Plants and People in and after the Anthropocene / Natasha Myers 115
6. Leaking Lines / Nikhil Anand 149
Part III: Histories of Progress
7. Low Tide: Submerged Humanism in a Colombian Port / Austin Zeiderman 171
8. Oysterstructure: Infrastructure, Profanation, and the Sacred Figure of the Human / Stephanie Wakefield & Bruce Braun 193
9. Here Comes the Sun?: Experimenting with Cambodian Energy Infrastructures / Casper Bruun Jensen 216
10. The Crisis in Crisis / Joseph Masco 236
References 261
Contributors 293
Index 297
