Dominic Boyer: “Infrastructural Futures in the Ecological Emergency”

is one of the key references when it comes to energy and environment environmental challenges he's a professor of anthropology with

backgrounds specifically in historical and political anthropology anthropology at rice university and beyond that however um

he has been part of uh incredibly fascinating project and i try to post you the the link um into the chat so

that you can see for yourself after the lecture of course yes and just to pick one out together with simon who

he produced and co-directed a documentary about and i hope it's the right spelling the first iceland glacier to fall victim to climate change and the title of this

movie is not okay a little movie about small glacier glacier at the end of the world and i really recommend that

in addition however he also served as a the founding director of the center of an energy and environmental research in

the human science at rice university and of his many scientific activities i would like to highlight two in

particular and the first is his current project on energy uh futures which deals with the fact that basically every decapitated decarbonization strategy is

linked to a significant energy expansion since energy ensures the status quo electric vehicles but also the digital infrastructures

so far however little attention has been paid to what an expanded reliance on nuclear or renewable energy means and what the implications

are for climate justice and secondly i want to draw a special attention to his latest book which he wrote together with timothy morton

and another title uh hyper subject on becoming human the two authors um continue timothy morton's book on hyper objects

philosophy and ecology after the end of the world but even in the first on the first page the two also state that a book on hyper objects

is actually unnecessary unnecessary because everyone and we all know such hyper object by now the corona virus

nevertheless hyperobjects are objects of such enormous temporal and spatial extent that they can hardly be understood and certainly not controlled

by us a black hole for example is a hyper object but also plastic bags and capitalism the most extreme example is the global warming

that means hyper objects produced by humans and themselves the new book tries then to make these dehumanized but human caused hype

objects human again to make them hyper subjects that they that are able to create their own possibilities of appropriation

among other things by for example revolutionary infrastructures that moves away from in inefficient supply supplies change of

fossil and nuclear energy to sun wind and biomass which get along with long without long supply chains

a key element of making ourselves hyper subjects that is what dominic says in an interview and i find it very

sympathetic a first step is and i quote him if we took ourselves less seriously it would help a lot

however dominic we will still take you and your talk and your thoughts very seriously and i hope i have done justice to your amazingly complex projects and

researchers and we are very grateful to have you here and looking forward to your talk so the floor is yours thank you so much zara thanks to all the

organizers for the invitation i'm honored and delighted to be with you today i wish i could be with you today uh but uh and i wish it could have been with you virtually uh more present but

of course unfortunately the timeline of the conference interceded with the settler colonial festival of the united states called thanksgiving and so most

of the past two days i've been either traveling or or over indulging in food with my family uh still nonetheless happy to be here as i was telling folks before we got

started today you're saving me from this terrible ritual of black friday uh that i hope that i hear is actually now present in europe too so i'm again sorry for another plague that the united states has unleashed upon europe it's

it's all too many so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and as so saying i'm not going to take myself too seriously it's the end of a long week for you i'm going to try to keep it lively uh but yet hopefully pithy at the

same time so one of the reasons i was delighted to be asked to speak to you about infrastructures and ecology is that it gave me a chance to pull

together some different threads of thinking and research that i've been engaged with over the past decade i like to say that i didn't go looking for infrastructure infrastructure came

looking for me and hailed me in a sort of altissarian way where at a certain point i had to begin to ask myself questions why why is everybody talking about infrastructure why now

what is it about infrastructure that expresses a certain type geist of our moment and it's a moment that's been enduring now for over a decade certainly and my first thought and i don't think it was necessarily my best thought but i

still would present it to you in with humility was that perhaps we were seeing something of a nostalgia for the keynesian moment in the mid 20th century after three or four decades of

neoliberalism when we find that the kinds of infrastructures that neoliberalism was interested in were principally those uh uh that that enabled its projects of global

expansion and especially at the expansion of the an intensification of the temporalities of finance capital so digital information and communication infrastructures for example are

neoliberal infrastructure par excellence but neoliberalism was much less interested in what many people conventionally regard as infrastructure when in the united states we talk about

an infrastructure uh bill that the biden administration wants to put together we're talking about highways and waterways and public schools and public housing these kinds of infrastructures that are really mid-20th century

infrastructures are the ones that have been deeply neglected over the past three or four decades so in some subtle way perhaps us intellectuals are as much a part of a

civil society as anybody else perhaps in some ways our unconscious expression of desire for a return to the mid 20th century is part of what informs our discussions of infrastructure but then i

also thought sts was far ahead of anthropology for example in the conceptualization of infrastructure and putting infrastructure forward as a interesting area of discussion and when you think

about who the leading lights of the infrastructural turn in science and technology studies were we're thinking of people like susan lee star of jeff bowker of karen rouleator and all of

them worked within digital information and communication technology sort of at the time the internet is being born and being popularized we find that the

infrastructure turn comes and so i think of it perhaps as part of a certain uh set of aspirations regarding digital futurity the promises of the mid-1990s for those of you who are old enough like

me to remember them were greater connectivity greater democracy uh greater flows of information perhaps a whole new uh set of creative industries

that would appear uh based in virtual worlds that would be a way of easing ourselves out of the industrial capitalist trajectory towards perhaps a better uh more just future now of course

30 40 years later 20 let's say 25 or 30 years later those promises seem very empty right instead we're thinking of information overloads we're thinking about

post-truth politics we're thinking about algorithmic manipulation of political communities and political sentiments and in this era where we feel the

evaporation of the promises of digital futurity that were so revolutionary in the mid 1990s perhaps this informs our sense of wanting to tarry

with infrastructure longer to think with infrastructure as a way of asking what different kinds of trajectories could we enable in this moment what alternatives to the ecocidal anthropocene trajectory

could be imagined and that links i think to a more recent set of thoughts i've been having about the crisis uh in epistemic cultures among cultures of

experts sort of across across the the world regarding how much our systems of expert knowledge are uh our apps to the tasks of the

anthropocene trajectory and there's a wonderful article by sarah vaughan on mangroves in guyana where she talks about the inverse performativity of the anthropocene and i think this is such a

great way of conceptualizing it i'm sure all of you are familiar with the concept of performativity the idea that expert models co-create the worlds that they pretend to be taking a snapshot of that

expert models actually create the worlds they're trying to map uh well the inverse reformativity that von describes is about the fact that with this increasingly unruly unpredictable uh out

of alignment uh set and even chaotic in some sets a set of ecosystems and earth systems across the world that increasingly we don't have uh

relevant paradigms to uh to to to sort of capture uh and snapshot this change this rapidly changing world the world itself is forcing us to dramatically

adjust uh our epistemic work and in that way again the question of infrastructure comes up how can we conceptualize uh design plans for the future when in fact

the world itself seems to be so in such an unruly phase and in that sense i would link this perhaps to a a broader or deeper existential concern that ana singh and her collaborators have

articulated so passionately about the need to imagine and enact alternate futurities on a damaged planet i think all of this is part of the infrastructure turn all of this is part

of that what informs the interest in a conversation like the one that you've staged here in my view all of it is incredibly important and very much expresses art zeitgeist and so what i

want to suggest in this paper is that infrastructure is always enable it's really in the in the word itself infrastructure uh brian larkin has made a a wonderful uh intervention where he's

discussed that infrastructure infrastructures always mediate and i think that's often true but i would say more fundamentally they always enable but they contain within them different

subjunctive promises different kinds of futures that they imagine and promise us and thus they are organized designed if you will to enable different kinds of futures so

what i'd like to do in this essay and again drawing on my work uh as an illustration for each of these different modes i want to talk about three different modes of infrastructure i want

to talk about gray infrastructure green infrastructure and then what i'm terming revolutionary infrastructure each of which i think have different operational modes and each of which have different

subjective promises attached to them so without further ado i'm going to leap right in and talk about gray infrastructure which is conceived as human engineered material designs able

to produce predictable controllable effects gray infrastructure conceives futures that by and large reproduce present anthropocene relations and what i mean by that is the idea that there's

uh an ontological distinction between humanity and nature and that humanity has been gifted by some power the the capacities of reason and technology to

control nature and to uh predict its outcomes and thus to be able to design interventions that that move according to the spirit of yes

perhaps we have uh messed up the world with our industrial capitalism but humanity and only humanity is capable of designing the solutions uh that will remedy that so this idea of grey

infrastructure is really focused on a sort of command and control ideology and you'll see that uh coming into fruition in my case study of

houston it's a place that i live and it's a place that i do uh i've been working on anthropologically conceptually for the past several years and a particular

infrastructural complex has become a bit of an obsession for me the houston ship channel industrial corridor the largest assemblage a petrochemical infrastructure in the western hemisphere

you have to imagine a a wide river here and that what you're seeing with refineries and petroleum storage tanks and petrochemical facilities extends for

about 50 miles it's an amazing it's almost has to be seen to be believed as well as the the the terrible conditions under which the the human communities that live next to this infrastructure

what they have to endure but i want to tell you a little bit about the history of houston to talk a little bit about the history of its uh infrastructural ecology to contextualize what i'm

describing uh today and uh this is what houston used to look like before the petrochemical infrastructure came it was a region that was swamp in coastal prairie and pine

woodlands there were 20 riverine bayou systems that cross cut what is now houston and the lands and the waters that became houston were home to the

karankawa the akokisa and other indigenous peoples at least 8 000 years before spanish and later anglo conquest but houston has been an infrastructural

center since its inception it was nominally founded as a center of political infrastructure it was built to be the capital of a new republic of texas but mosquitoes and

yellow fever and floods soon drove the political culture west towards austin it didn't take long it took like two years for people to realize that houston was a hopeless place to have a government and

so everything went west but at the same time it thrived it thrived because of infrastructure because of the way its watery lands and landish waters allowed for a unique combination of

transportation infrastructure notably railroads and shipping that made it the key processing point for the proceeds of the plantation slave economies in the region and these are the the folks who

actually built houston the houston that we know working in the cotton and sugar plantations in what i like to call the texan plantation or scene

houston was spared destruction in the civil war but became an important hub of military manufacturers booming lumber cotton and sugar exports attracted and concentrated other kinds of

manufacturing and administrative labor cotton compresses and cotton oil seed mills brass and iron foundries car wheel works railroad shops and during the last decades of the 19th century it became

the urban industrial center of texas and was described in 1905 as the chief cotton concentration point in the world so you know houston if you know it at all as a center of the oil industry and

it's always been that but before it was the center of the petroleum industry it was the world center of the cotton oil industry which went on to create margarine and sort of all sorts of edible plant oil products that that

spread across the world too and that's a whole other story fascinating one but not one for today's discussion the next phase of houston's infrastructural ecology was summoned and

shaped by two fateful events the great storm of 1900 that left galveston in ruin still by far the most devastating hurricane in the history of the united states it rendered houston by default

the major port in southeastern texas the discovery of oil at spindletop the next year paved the way for houston to become the nation's largest petroleum and petrochemical export hub over the course

of the 20th century already by 1911 houston is described by contemporaries as the center of the oil industry and in 1914 a deep water port was completed

southeast of houston city center capstoning the 50-mile houston ship channel the ship channel would grow as i've discussed over the course of the next four decades into the largest complex of petroleum refining and

petrochemical manufacturing in the western hemisphere it also by the mid 20th century had become the hometown of rapid growth

petroculture in so many different ways ninety percent of houston's growth occurred during the automobile era houston sprawled like no city before it hyperactively lengthening its spines

eschewing ignoring infill ensuing density swallowing smaller surrounding settlements with relish eventually reaching 600 square miles the largest area of any major u.s city by far you

could drop all the cities in the northeast and the united states into the urban footprint of houston easily houston is also the large the only large

u.s city without a zoning ordinance the

u.s city without a zoning ordinance the effect upon urban space was profound and metastasizing mass of centers and peripheries guided by no design other than the competing opportunisms of

various real estate developers and there's this wonderful quote from a houston architect that i love to read because it epitomizes to me the houston you see depicted in the image on the right the more seemingly placeless

houston grows the more it can seem like houston if the generic colonization of sprawling settlements with little regard for local conditions can be said to have a hometown

here it is it also became during this period an epicenter of toxic unregulated infrastructure especially along the ship channel corridor it's home to some of

the most intense cancer clusters in the united states really the only ones that are worse are in louisiana sometimes the cancer rates of cancer incidents and

are 30 times as high in eastern houston or along the ship channel as they are in western he did let alone in parts of the country that are removed from this infrastructure so toxicity is integral

to this mode of grey infrastructure here but if we want to talk about grey infrastructure today and of course that's what i'm aspiring to do in this talk i need to talk about the hydropolitics of flooding because flooding is really what people talk

about in the gray infrastructural mode today um there have been two thousand year flood events in the past five years i'm sorry six years in houston and in addition there have been two 500-year

flood events so that's four 500-year plus flood events in just six years which makes you wonder well a 500-year flood event isn't what it used to be right but you begin to see why houston

is becoming obsessed with what we do to reduce risks of flooding while of course otherwise not wanting to change anything about its fundamental organization or model and this is where we have to think

about flooding together or where i find it helpful to think about flooding together with scholars like dilip de cunha from harvard who who make a case that

flooding is intrinsically a matter of infrastructural politics and imagination it's predicated on the belief that a rain-driven wetness as he puts it of a place like mumbai or houston

can be divided cleanly into watercourse on the one hand and dry land on the other as he writes the line transgressed is not simply a line drawn it's a line imposed furthermore this line does not

simply separate water from land it creates water and land on either side of it is entities that can be commodified and as such coveted made scarce and

violated so once you draw a river on a map once a water leaks out of that line people begin to say flood it's flooding but in fact the possibility of flood itself has been created by that

cartographic exercise in the first place and there is more and more of those cartographic violations coming as kasper bruniensen tells us an amphibious future is beckoning in cities

like houston and mumbai he writes after a few centuries where terrestrialization was in the ascendant the amphibious is gaining new life the um uh in many parts of the world water now seems to be

flowing back into land submerging coastal areas on a semi-permanent basis or creating recurrent floods making the insufficiency of terrestrial responses

increasingly apparent forbes magazine has celebrated houston as the city with the second most engineers per capita in the united states it it the only city to exceed it

is san jose where silicon valley is based so houston between nasa between the petroleum industry between the medical industry and of course universities like rice just chock full

of engineers so perhaps it's unsurprising because engineers love grey infrastructure as i found the hydropolitics of the city are dominated by grey infrastructural logics

and they range from very small projects projects of elevating homes to escape flood risk and you see here some images from my research of home elevation

projects where a mid 20th century modern home is about to it is tunneled under um and and put on hydraulic jacks and then lifted into the air two or three meters where pylons are put underneath it so

you can preserve the same home the same lifestyle but just elevated two or three meters into the air again without addressing any of the conductual conditions that would have necessitated

a flood escape in the first place yes um but it's not obviously just personal projects that are mad there are massive projects large-scale regional gray infrastructure projects composed of widened channelized

water courses new bridges detention systems that seek to reduce flood risks and here's an example of what this sort of pure division between dry land and watercourse looks like in a

re-channelized bio here's another image where again so pristine so clean the water is staying exactly where it belongs right and then we have a green manicured lawn we have

beautifully elegantly designed bridges all of this is supposed to connote the sense that yes flooding is a problem but the engineers are ready to fix it to solve it flooding will no longer be a

problem once the engineers do their work some of this work is at an even larger scale the us army corps of engineers has engaged in interesting and i think it's always very concerning project of

speculative watershed engineering i mentioned to you the 20 bayou systems the army corps of engineers now wants to create ways to shift water between the bayou systems so that they can determine

uh if one area is flooding they can move water to it it all sounds good of course but not in the face of uh events like hurricane hardy that flooded all of the bayou system so there's a lot of time

and energy and money that are being invested in these projects and here's another one the so-called ike dike that was recently authorized which will

create a a barrier across the entrance to galveston bay preventing the storm surge that could be associated with larger tropical cyclones category four

category five hurricanes to sweep up uh we're talking maybe a seven or eight meter storm surge sweeping up the ship channel and beginning to compromise these thousands

of unregulated and uh basically unsecured uh petroleum and chemical storage tanks if even um some colleagues at rice have estimated this if even 10

of those containers were to fail during a major search event you would have the rough equivalent of the exxon valdez oil spill happening within the fourth largest metropolitan

center in the united states so you can understand uh the precarity of the situation and why these projects want to be built but again they're being built in the city that continues to refine 14

of the united the entire united states uh petroleum on a daily basis and that is something that is never being questioned or challenged so the most recent

grey infrastructure utopia that's worth learning a little bit more about is focused on the idea of constructing deep tunnels 20 or 30 feet wide 200 feet

below ground that could evacuate flood water from houston at the cost of 100 million dollars per mile yet the truth is even the engineers admit that this might reduce flood water flow by as little as

one percent but you wouldn't know that to read the local papers where people are very interested in these deep tunnels but remember houston itself is only about 50 feet above sea level so if

you're digging a a tunnel 200 feet below sea level the water has nowhere to go essentially you're constructing massive underground lakes rather than flood prevention but again this is something

that's beyond there's an irrationality a hallucinatory dimension to this that i really want to emphasize in terms of grey infrastructure it's hallucinatory in some ways fundamentally it always

could compel a repetition compulsion to seek an engineering solution no matter how expensive and unlikely they are to succeed houston has already seen hundreds of billions of dollars invested

into inadequate grey infrastructure and i can't think of a better way of describing it than what adriana petruna describes as diligent insanity we can consider grey infrastructure as a

materialization of what lauren berlant calls the cruel optimism in which the object of one's desire actually compromises one's possibility of flourishing

because more water is coming more water than any configuration of grey infrastructural ecology is likely to be able to manage um and if you look here uh

i'm sure you're aware that the world is on a pliocene pathway already perhaps even an eocene pathway again the amount of um atmospheric carbon dioxide already

uh in the atmosphere today has been correlated by paleoclimatologists with about 20 meters of sea level rise so if everything were nothing we weren't to add any more but we were sort of to keep

static over the next several centuries we would see sea level rise that would come probably up to about 20 meters and this is what houston would look like in a 20 meter sea level

scenario you see here it's largely underwater and it's not just houston this will impact hydropolitical utopias across the world one of the most successful of these utopias has been the

netherlands as you know um they've have uh you know and with good reason taking great pride in their hydrological engineering and in their hydropolitis which they export to places like houston

i can't tell you how many dutch water emissaries have come to houston in the past five years to talk about the dutch way forward and the dutch way forward is in a sense modeled on the dutch way that's been used in the past it simply

won't work in the future there's a scenario it just won't and so some interesting projects are beginning to develop this is by an urban landscape group uh whose project nl 20 2200 you

can look it up online if you're interested is a great mapping of the nation formerly known as the netherlands uh a scenario that's based on retreat to areas that are higher uh elevation

rather than um thinking about the ability to defend everything in its current terrestrial uh model where again dry land and watercourse can cleanly be divided from one another

i've become interested together with my partner simony howe in thinking about you know what a houston look like that sought to move away from this toxic

infrastructural history what would a houston look like that could embrace an amphibious future and we're working with a local designer ilsa harrison on visualizing what an amphibious houston

might look like of houston that accepted uh its situation and sought to thrive in an amphibious model rather than investing so much money so much time and

energy into trying to defend a model that's simply undefendable this is a bit more in the spirit of what i call revolutionary infrastructure later on so i'll stop there i want to turn now to

great infrastructure and green infrastructure you're quite familiar with in germany i know um because you're a world leader in it um the solar the

winds the geothermal among others kinds of infrastructures that are conceived as natural nature cultural interventions that bend and reflect uh hope ultimately

to defeat the anthropocene trajectory but i want to say that not all great infrastructures are created alike and i'm not saying that i dislike them all or i think that they're all problematic i have just found in the course of my

research that a lot of what passes for green infrastructure today still fails to challenge the logics of industrial capitalist expansion relentless growth this idea of green capitalism i find

particularly pernicious the idea that capitalism can really effectively manage a transition to a sustainable future given that its own internal

dynamics are so incredibly unsustainable and and this is something that's not news andre gortz was writing about this in the 1970s in some ways we we have forgotten this and you have to keep rediscovering it

again so what i'll talk about today is a couple of different models of green two different shades of green let's say two different shades of green infrastructural imaginations that are focused on the research that simone and

i have done on wind power development in southern mexico and here is the context for that research the is-ness of tehuantepec you see with the satellite image that there's a little

uh gap in the sierra madre mountains here and that gap creates a natural wind corridor which because of the barometric pressure differential of the gulf of mexico and the pacific ocean

creates a wind tunnel in which the wind can on just a normal winter day without any kind of special cyclonic activity or storm front it can reach up to nearly tropical storm force this is wind that

will tear the paint off boats it can mangle tractor-trailer trucks uh it can knock roofs off homes with ease it's a very powerful wind

and it's a win that obviously has attracted the attention of people interested in capturing that resource but this area of mexico has been a resource frontier for five centuries ever since the spanish arrived and

decided it was one of the most lucrative potentially uh parts of of new spain another incident that i like to mention is that in the 1850s this nearly became

part of the united states as the united states sought to build what eventually became the panama canal zone one of the first places they looked was in the isthmus of tehuantepec and in fact the mexican government was ready to sell the

isthmus to the united states it was only because that the group that had organized this was based in new orleans and it was just on the eve of the american civil war and the united states

senate declined to ratify this treaty because they were afraid of giving the south still more economic power when everyone knew a conflict was brewing so um but for the the internal politics

of the united states the isms of taiwan tepec would be a united states uh uh property protectorate at this point and this betrayal of the of their land and

livelihood by the mexican government has been not forgotten by the indigenous communities of the isthmus of taiwan's effect these many uh decades later so um most recently the isthmus has

become a zone of what we call aeolian politics and desire the power of the wind and you see here in this map made by usaid where you see this bright red and

bright blue colors on the right hand side of the image this is wind resources that are literally off the charts that are above excellent in terms of their of how hard the wind blows and how

sustained the strength of the wind is um so it became very early on dating back to the 1970s an object of desire for international

wind developers and what really then helped to catalyze this was the realization that mexico the mexican petra state was beginning to fail in a significant way

that mexican oil production which had begun to seriously ramp up in the 1970s during the global oil crisis peaked in 2003 at 3.5 million barrels per day and

that has been declining ever since now is down 50 uh in less than two decades so this is a major crisis for a country where oil revenue provides the mexican state oil

sales i should say provides mexican state with up to 43 percent of its annual budget um of course it's not just uh this the cynical uh attempt to defend a failing

petrol state uh felipe calderon a president from 2006 to 2012 was also very aware of the challenges of the anthropocene for mexico and how it would

challenge what tim mitchell calls its carbon democracy so he built upon an earlier series of explorations of this uh resource uh the the first test projects the first

experimental prototypes of wind power were public projects that came on grid in the early 1990s but it was really only with the um the calderon administration that they began to

develop seriously and at large scale wind development and so it became an area of ppp or public private partnership investment in the 2000s as part of a strategy of privatizing

electricity generation that it's true had been part of the neoliberal turn in mexico more broadly but the politics and negotiations i'm sorry

that led to this more directly connect to um calderon's push on climate which culminated in the general lawn climate in 2012 that that actually laid out some i think not just in terms of the

developing world but in terms of the world as the whole some very bold goals 35 of mexico's energy is legally mandated this isn't a target it's law to

come from renewable sources or clean sources by 2024 with 50 of that estimated to come for wind power itself so you begin to see how important wind

power is to the model of decarbonization in mexico in the space of less than a decade theo smith of taiwan to peck came to host the densest concentration of onshore wind

parks anywhere in the world with 2.8 gigawatts of installed capacity plans to extend that to 5 gigawatts or beyond in the years to come all of the wind parks

are industrial self-supply projects in which large corporations walmart cemex femsa heineken finance green energy development to earn carbon credits and often to improve

their corporate image communities meanwhile the communities that are near the park as you can see here the communities like laventosa la venta uchitan

uh san diego tamar ixtepec these communities experience the industrialization of what hitherto been a very a vibrant agrarian and ranching

landscape but the electrical infrastructure benefits the state and high energy consumers most of whom do not live in this region but rather farther north and west in mexico meanwhile the rents that are paid by

wind companies to wealthy landowners have exacerbated in significant ways social inequality and social unrest in the region

this ppp self self-supply model mobilized resistance uh especially among indigenous benissa or zepatech activists

back in the mid 2000s and the logics of resistance were complex and fluid range from lack of local consultation and project design to food insecurity

concerns to rejection of mega proyecto or mega project level development to concerns about environment and species impacts activists were clear to

us in our research that they didn't reject renewable energy per se only the way it was being conceived and institutionalized the question of indigenous sovereignty was paramount for

them and wind park resistance indeed helped prompt an indigenous political renaissance across the southern islamists during the period of our field work including not only zapotec communities but hikots or huawei

communities as well a critical watershed in the renaissance was the plan of an australian lead consortium called mourinho renovables to build the largest single-phase wind park

in latin america would have been 396 megawatts the project developers proudly described the park as a globally significant contribution to the green energy revolution the park was designed

to be built on a sandbar communal land of the akuts town of san diego del mar accessible by road only from the binisak community of the sandbar was also an area to which

fisher folk across the lagoon had traditional access rights during 2012 and 2013 the project catalyzed a resistance campaign of a scale the isthmus had not seen in

decades bringing together for the first time it was said ikotsan binisa people in a common project of self-defense against external influence and exploitation assembles or political

assemblies began to proliferate around the region promising not only the end of one wind park but a challenge to the extractivist logic of ppp self-supply more generally

the resistance promised a new era of political autonomy involving the end of political manipulation by local bosses and political parties new community police organizations and indigenous

language radio stations came into being voting booths were prohibited in some communities as part of a push to re-establish communal political institutions known as usos

it's the uprising evinced what uh nashoni anthropologist audra simpson has termed an indigenous politics of refusal a mexican and oaxacan state sovereignty

aimed at defeating the cunning of recognition that's beth pavinelli's term practiced by settler multicultural liberalism and just to bring the story to a

conclusion in late 2012 blockades were set up at both ends of the sandbar um they faced violence from states of police and from supporters of the park project we personally bore witness to

this violence when we visited um the community of alvaro obregon on the day of the dead in 2012 and uh saw that the state police had just minutes before we arrived broken the

blockade to allow developers topographical crews to begin work they used tear gas to disrupt the blockade and detain several individuals but later that day a larger group of several

hundred protesters returned to chase the police off and reestablished the barricade the company's trucks were seized by the uh by the um the by the protesters and ransomed or in one case

destroyed as a culminating event of protest against the wind parks as one of the leaders of alvaro's new assembly communitaria community assembly said the blockade would continue

indefinitely he said if they want to see blood in the sand let them come and the tragedy of this you know from the point of view of those of us who care about renewable energy development believe that it's necessary if not if

not sufficient part of bending the anthropocene trajectory is that renewable energy had become synonymous with exploitation and dispossession it didn't need to be that way but neither the government nor the project

developers could honestly fathom why we had very honest conversations with the lieutenant governor of oaxaca and with the uh the chief um negotiator of mourinho renovables who

simply couldn't understand the basis for people's concerns and in part because they didn't understand the history and they were really concerned with the community interest at a basic way

to make a long story short the blockade held the mourinho project was cancelled the oaxacan government desperately tried to relocate the project and eventually did create a wind park of a similar size

in a community not far away that had a private property regime rather than a communal property regime but unless we thus we focus only on the exploitative side and the extractive side of renewable energy which of course

is there and it's serious and it's a serious concern especially on projects um in in the so-called developing world there was a project a kind of a unicorn lone project in mexico at that time that

drew our attention because it was an effort to imagine wind power beyond the ppp self-supply model a green and i mean this a light green you can't quite tell from the image a light green uh

infrastructure project that sought to promote indigenous sovereignty and reinforce traditions of collective land use and management which was called the yansa ixtepec project yantsik stepec had been in the work

since 2009 it was a unique collaboration between an ngo that sought to export the danish model of community on wind to the global south and a group of comoneros

who who saw the the potential to leverage the ism wind to spur social development and to create a future for ixtapex youth that that that was beyond

their agrarian and military past the project it had been allowed to proceed would have cost 185 million euro which they thought they could raise very easily through development bank funding

and european social investments it would have produced 102 megawatts of renewable energy and the key thing is it wouldn't set 50 percent of its estimated 3.5 million euro annual profits to a trust

established by the community assembly in ixtapec that would have funded a retirement scheme for farmers and also new investments in women's and youth projects and this was so striking this 50 percent because the current profit

share for communities working with privately financed wind parks is only about two percent and as such yams is actively thwarted by wind industry leaders invested in ppp self-supply

because of course they realized if you were offering communities the option of 50 return for social development investment or a 2 return that would largely go to already wealthy individuals to increase social

inequality the communities would have always chose the 50 it would have literally uh brought down uh the entire model and so what happened instead was that the government and especially its

parastatal electricity utility cfe dismissed yansa ixtapec as a fully utopian venture cfe refused to allow the partnership to bid for grid interconnection because it could not

demonstrate 25 million euro in the bank uh already sort of ready and obviously an impossible standard for a poor farming community

but the story gets more complex uh cfe had also occupied extra pecking communal land critics said illegally to build the largest electrical substation in mexico

to evacuate all that wind power from the ppp parks uh the communa challenged cfe in court and won an injunction from a federal judge in 2013 to investigate both the refusal to allow youngs to

expect a bid as well as what happened with his so-called squatter substation and unfortunately several years later the case remains mired in legal technicalities and difficulties formally

unresolved but no one really believes that the park project will go ahead meanwhile the energy energy ministry sunair has given cfe its blessing to move ahead with projects to building

more electrical grid infrastructure in ixtapec what's come out of this has been a real global conversation including the united nations about what constitutes legitimate consultation and informed

consent in negotiations between developers the government and indigenous communities and it's essentially for ceased wind park development in southern mexico

capital has decided it's too risky and would prefer to move investments elsewhere and again we can think about this in many respects but but again uh the failure to develop this resource in

a way that was not viewed as extractive by communities shows that green infrastructure can fall all too readily into the habits of of settler colonial the grooves as i say of settler colonial

institutions rather than seeking alternate trajectories forward and this image uh in a in a small uh a small house in a out of the way street of

laventosa for me captures this feeling of being dispossessed by wind parks as they preside these husk-like figures preside over an era desiccated land and

an indigenous boy seeks to extract some nourishment from the last bit of corn so this is where green infrastructure can take us that isn't necessary that it takes us there but green infrastructure

i would say especially green infrastructure that operates with grey infrastructure as its backdrop is often the issue here and i want to move now in the final and i won't be too much longer i promise in

the final minutes of my presentation to talk about revolutionary infrastructure which is a concept i've written about in a couple of different places and probably in ways that have been generally found to be insufficient

inadequate gestural instead of definitive and unfortunately you're going to find that this is more of the same what i'll say about revolutionary infrastructure is that its infrastructure conceived less as

engineered structure with predictable controllable impacts and more as an experimental enabling relation as redirection of the potential energy

contained within existing systems and as transformative opportunity projects of revolutionary infrastructure are diverse they're locally attuned and

often invisible to conventional infrastructural politics and this is in part because they adopt a humbler political ontology but also because they operate at a different scale like gut

bacteria i'd like to say we couldn't do anything in our lives without our gut bacteria yet we never think of them as agents and ever think of them as agents of our abilities but in this way i think

revolution infrastructure works within existing gray and green infrastructural ecologies hacking redistributing releasing stored energies to infrastructure alternative trajectories

to those of the plantation a scene the capitalist scene the anthropocene you choose your scene there's a recognition here as dolores once put it quite brilliantly that these so-called social

material systems and i've been using this language i'm as guilty of it as anybody but are thinking about these systems as being systemic uh is is inadequate to the

reality of our situation systems are leaky and porous compositions drillers used to say the system is leaking all over the place there's much less to them than they purport to be their supposed

grand scales are often a mirage and the work of revolutionary infrastructure is as sorrow was saying before it's hyposubjective rejecting the transcendent hypersubjective command and control

thinking in favor of experimental substance and re-becoming and what's meant here with the distinction between transcendence and substandards is transcendence is the sort of the and the moving above and

out of relationships it is in a sense the attempt to establish the god's eye view the archimedean point uh beyond the networks of enabling relations in which

we exist so that we can design so that we can scheme and control and sort of pull the marionette strings from above substance on the other hand is the is the process of moving back into

relations is of being present and situated in networks of relations and of engaging of projects often very humble projects of re-becoming so what i like to say about

revolutionary infrastructure is that it doesn't have a clear categorization or a clear definition it doesn't really have a proper typology or theory but i think we discover it as we feel our way

forward on non-ecocidal non-genocidal pathways again they don't have to be massively scaled in fact the most uh the most intimate of pathways or sometimes

the most important we can embrace emergence for our time of emergency so what i'll do in just the last few minutes here is just to talk briefly gesture in a few of the emergencies that i've been fortunate enough to

participate and i can't talk about all of them at the length i'd like uh but as director of sens at rice i was able to be involved in a number of different more kind of creative artistic projects

and i'll just highlight this one here in the upper left making the best of it signal foods for climate chaos this was a collaboration with the new york-based artist marina zirco

and zirco was interested in the future of oceanic ecosystems and with the stressing of ecosystems because of oceanic acidification because of

industrial fertilizer use the dead zones she was fascinated by the way that ancient species like algae and jellyfish species that sort of thrive in low oxygen environments have returned to the

fore and the ways in which they will constitute the future of seafood in many ways so she created a line of shelf-stable jellyfish snacks together

with a houston um chefs and the idea was to create a food truck that would sort of go around houston uh offering jelly fish snacks and engaging people through the sort of

simple acts of eating uh commensality uh information about talking about the future of oceans and and the future of oceanic uh ecosystems through again the

humble act of eating together and sharing food i think it's a beautiful way to think about how one can be more present for the relations of a damaged

planet not simply to sort of push them aside and say we're gonna fix this but rather to own it to become part of these relations again and uh the project is to mine mine's still one of the favorites i

had a chance to work on in that context some of you are aware of the podcast that we did again an attempt to create a humble space for communication for processing for sharing information

involving artists and humanists and scientists and politicians talking about the energy and environmental challenges of our era but always in a mode that tried not to take itself so

seriously again i really want to underscore this point that zara has very perceptively picked up about my own approach to revolutionary infrastructure is that it's good to be small and humble

and not take yourself too seriously thus perhaps we were attracted to the story of york the small humble forgotten glacier that became uh famous as the first major icelandic glacier the first

named glacier to disappear because of climate change and here's an image of the little documentary film we made about it including a strange talking mountain other projects one of them called low

carbon leisure low carbon pleasure it's a project that we've been simmering for several years including some events in texas that have been talking to people about how to

remind ourselves that there are forms of leisure and pleasure uh that are could be abundant in a context that was reversing the anthropocene trajectory um many of the

best things in life love laughter play typically don't ruin the world they can be enjoyed even too into abundance as our colleague lyceum johnson says it's important to remember that joy is a

form that justice takes a lot of environmental messaging is about austerity and we know that that works well for highly disciplined people in certain kinds of contexts but part of the obstacle we face is that in addition

to overwhelming people emotionally with this discourse of ruin and apocalypse that also um we somehow seem to be telling people that there will be no joy in in a low

carbon world and that's absolutely patently untrue so it behooves us all to think about those pathways and to practice this and most recently we've developed a small card game together with some

artists in scotland that focuses on sort of creating a practical simple how-to guide to sort of find uh low-carbon leisure and pleasure pathways under

today's circumstances on the spirit of coming into new relations with the damaged planet i do enjoy our own glacier tour where we took people to the site of valkyrie on a couple of different occasions to engage

with this place of absence where a glacier once was that project in turn inspired the making of the ocular club memorial which was by far our most successful project i

suppose in terms of popular resonance but the thing that i think made it work was the fact that it's quite an intimate statement the text written by our collaborator the wonderful um

icelandic writer andre magnuson whose most recent work on time and water is some one that i would highly recommend to anybody interested in these thematics his letter to the future creates a small

appeal across generations to hold us in account for what we know today and our ability or our failure to act on that knowledge

and i do think that the intimacy of the appeal and the familiarity of a memorial were things that brought people into this conversation and community of feeling

around climate change that that might not have come otherwise and finally because hyposubjects was mentioned too i think i'll mention that this this has been one of the more fun

projects that i've had a chance to work on together with tim tim morton um it was judged on its first set of reviews to be both flimsy and chaotic which were we took that as a as the badge of honor

could precisely flimsy cast is what we're all about we've been describing this project as something called improv philosophy and i'll read you these two just to bring us back to houston where we started i'll read this as part of the

conclusion um these are from not from the book but from another article we've done recently what tim and i do in this is we actually talk we have a conversation we record it

we mash the the dialogue together into an insane uh sort of monologue that seems to be arguing with itself and talking across purposes uh as a way of

destabilizing the the sort of the um expert subject position of the sort of all-knowing author philosopher and rather into this strangely uh chaotic

space out of which still we hope uh it creates a kind of a haunt a a refuge that still could be interesting for people especially those of us and i would hold myself in this group who

really don't have it all figured out who really are as much as anything being buoyed and buffeted by the uh by the elements of our time so anyway this is what we say about houston houston is

constantly wilding it's a substandard space in the sense that it's really not one place at all but a constant thrum of places of becoming and coming apart a lot of houston isn't in texas at all everywhere you see an eight-lane highway

you're experiencing houston everywhere you find yourself in a suburban-ass cul-de-sac you've just phased into houston i would even say this of the ship channel which is probably the most hyperactive objective part of houston

the operational center of petroculture where the hyper object of petroleum tendrils into every aspect of high-energy modernity it's a metastasizing place clearly but it also seems to be ultimately quite success

susceptible to becoming unmade there's so much happening here that doesn't have anything to do with the world of oil and petroculture in a way the reason why this town exists paradoxically is the cancer of what some called

petromodernity then the body evolved or evolved around the cancer and now the cancer could be removed and the body would be fine without it exactly in a funny way the cancer was never the real point even though it was maybe the

important resource we found here on the settler frontier it's all led to the amazingly wonderful broken funky town quality of houston it's something that i absolutely love when people come to visit and look at this place they go i

could never get used to it here and i say to them neither could i and in that spirit one last collaboration this one very much in the making working together with simony

again on developing a television series set in uh houston called petropolis that's really examining what ties us to the ecocidal trajectory what the desires

and the forces of unreason are that hold us to a a style of life that is is undermining and destabilizing and ultimately destroying so much of what's

wonderful in the world in the name of of continuing just a day a week longer the the the pleasures of petroculture which are many um to be fair but on the

other hand we know that the thrill just like an addict we know that the thrill can't last and that this more and more and more can't go on and yet here we are still tethered to this in some way and that's where i'm

gonna stop um because again there's a lot to say and i'd rather have the conversation that keep prattling on at you endlessly about my thoughts on infrastructure but there you have it so

three paradigms we could talk about and we could talk about anything else and if anyone's interested on the subject of metastasis i'd love to share with you a wonderful story about the man i met recently who cured

cancer uh he's not known but his story is amazing in some ways symbolic i think of thinking about what it takes to unmake the infrastructural ecology uh

that is uh again destabilizing so much of what we hold dear but i'll stop there thank you