POSTPONED: Aquifer Aporias: Towards an Anthropology of Groundwater Depletion

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This event has been postponed, and a new date will be shared soon. 

The world’s dry-zone aquifers are in rapid decline on all continents. It is no coincidence that these areas of extreme depletion are some of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, nor that they are often home to a variety of resurgent fundamentalist movements. Why is it so hard to hold these formations of loss, profit, and hate together in a single account of our planetary crisis? And what might a comparative anthropology of these zones of irreversible ecological destruction and hardening racial divides consist of today? To advance a provisional sketch of the anthropology now needed, this talk reflects on the authors journey back home. The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. Returning to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, Bessire tries to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. Bessire’s search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. This journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future.

Lucas Bessire is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman (2014) and Running Out (2021). His latest book, Running Out, was a finalist for the National Book Award.