This talk will interrogate the notion that groundwater is an inherently democratic resource by examining the historical development of the Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. Southern Plains. While aquifers are celebrated for their capacity to help reclaim new territories and empower small-scale water users, their persistent overextraction reveals a wider inability to sustainably govern this resource. Through a close analysis of the photographs and maps that have been used to build a visual record of the Ogallala aquifer, one of the most controversial instances of groundwater development, this essay explores how the politics of representation have been used to build racialized and gendered subjectivities centered on white male ownership and stewardship. These images, produced as part of speculative property schemes and regulatory debates, framed underground water as a tool for transforming both material and social relations above the surface. By tracing how this visual language took root, this essay argues that groundwater’s seeming resistance to sustainable governance is not a product of its physical properties, but rather the outcome of historically constructed power relations and capitalist logics.

Dr. Sam Hege is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG) in Department “Knowledge Systems and Collective Life” and a member of the “Environmental Knowledge in Times of Crisis” Research Group.

Comment: Dr. Rossella Alba (IRI THESys)