The Uncertainties of Groundwater and Its Extraction in the Salar De Atacama, Northern Chile
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]RUNNING HEADS: VERSO: SALLY BABIDGE RECTO: SUSTAINING IGNORANCE[ ]t1[Sustaining ignorance: the uncertainties of groundwater and its extraction in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile ]t2[SALLY BABIDGE ]t3[University of Queensland ]abs[The extraction of groundwater and the regulation of its use in many parts of the world have been found to present a particular kind of problem. A contest involving mining companies, an ‘impacted’ community, and the state arising from groundwater and its extraction in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, provides a stark example. What marks the case are the many uncertainties about underground water and the quantities extracted. This article argues that uncertainty characterizes conditions of ‘late industrialism’ and that corporate practice that sustains ignorance is a form of powerful agency that in turn maintains the conditions for potentially harmful extractive activity. Critically engaging with the proposition that water may act in the relational process of unknowing contributes to the analysis of how corporate practice may sustain ignorance. This also suggests that alternative political responses to uncertainty are possible. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.12965. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. ]p[In 2016, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies commenced a year-long investigation into the environmental state of salt pans and glaciers, during which they received many submissions about the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile (Cámera de Diputados 2017). This area is characterized by significant surface water scarcity. It is ‘located in the most arid desert in the world’ (Ortiza et al. 2014), and annually ‘receives less than 20 mm’ of rain (Kampf, Tyler, Ortiz, Muñoz & Adkins 2005). The Salar de Atacama (or Atacama ‘salt pan’) is within the indigenous territory of Atacameño (or Likan Antai) peoples. In the late 1960s, North American scientists reported that they had found ‘large quantities of ground water in the *Salar de Atacama+ basin’ (Dingman 1967: 2). Since the Pinochet regime’s early enforcement of privatization measures to promote economic growth in the 1980s, the Chilean government has granted rights to individuals and to companies to extract groundwater in perpetuity. Today, the volume of total extraction rights in the Salar de Atacama basin amounts to thousands of litres per second (Babidge & Bolados 2018). Two copper mining companies – Minera Escondida (MEL, operated by BHP Billiton) and Zaldívar (CMZ, majority owned by Antofagasta Minerals) – own the majority of subterranean water extraction rights, and the bulk of their wells are in the southern surrounds of the Salar. Where there is water in and around the Salar, it flows underground from snowmelt in the Andean cordillera to aquifers, small lagoons, and springs. Atacameño peoples capture and channel springs in the foothills of the Andean cordillera on the east side of the Salar into irrigation systems that feed agricultural and pastoral oases. Their demands for greater regulation of subterranean water extraction within their territories have been increasingly vociferous, and distrust of mining company claims is widespread. As one man said to me: ‘The [mining This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. companies] know that when they take water from here [motioning to the mountains] they will dry out there [motioning to the Salar]. And they know it perfectly well! But they don’t say it . .’ (interview with don Geraldo, Peine, 5 November 2011).1 ]p1[The extraction of groundwater and the regulation of its use in many parts of the world have been found to present a particular kind of problem. The exploitation of underground water has been shown to exacerbate previously existing social inequalities (e.g. Budds 2013; Hoogesteger & Wester 2015; Oyarzún & Oyarzún 2011), and while providing short-term benefits for extractors, the delimitation, measurement, and control of aquifers is also expensive and complex (see, e.g., Blomquist 1992; Shah 2009; Theesfeld 2010). What marks the case I discuss here is that uncertainties about the extent of underground water, the exact quantities of water extracted and the associated effects, and how the basin replenishes itself characterize currents of dispute among members of the community and representatives of the state as well as industry actors. Recent important research has conceptualized the ‘hydro-social’ as a nexus of social and natural relationships in which power, agency, and contestation are prominent (Boelens, Hoogesteger, Swyngedouw & Wester 2016; Linton & Budds 2014; Swyngedouw 2009). The present article shows how, in the Salar de Atacama, the socio-natural relationships in contestation are particularly marked by uncertainty and unknowns in relation to underground water. I argue that water’s activity has political effects in contests among human actors over use and access to water and associated ecological things, especially given the way that the unknowns relating to water arise in corporate, state, and indigenous practices. Furthermore, the political dynamics encompassing water and water’s activity (as well as This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. being about water) contribute to the ways in which ignorance regarding the environment and impact may be sustained. ]p1[As I explain below, ‘lateness’ and the agency of the powerful are key to the conditions of unknowing in the case of the Salar de Atacama. I describe how these conditions are contingent on water’s material enigma, which is an active factor in relations of ignorance. I then trace the ways in which indigenous people, the state, and mining corporations each deal with the unknowns of underground water in the context of extraction, and how the deficiencies of state regulatory activity intersect with companies’ environmental ignorance practices. I show that this dynamic enables ongoing extraction of groundwater despite significant ecological uncertainties. Finally, I propose that uncertainty produced through these material and political dynamics might instead be responded to with alternate projects. ]ha[An anthropology of extraction and ‘lateness’ ]p[The analysis of water, community, and political and industrial life that I detail here has been formed during ethnographic fieldwork based in Peine, a small town of about 400 people in the Antofagasta region (Region II), Chile.2 That research has focused on the effects of the extraction industry on sociopolitical and ecological life in the southern Salar de Atacama. Peine is one of a handful of Atacameño towns situated in the foothills of the Andean cordillera on the east of the Salar, which are recognized by the Chilean state as Indigenous Communities. The Indigenous Community of Peine claims territory that ‘hosts’ This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. fields of water extraction wells and plants owned by a number of mining operations and thus engages in relations with each that range from legal contracts, which provide community development funding, to informal ‘good neighbour’ arrangements. In addition to the copper miners MEL and CMZ, two lithium extractors, Albermarle (a North American company) and SQM (formerly Soquimich, a predominantly Chilean venture), have water concessions for freshwater (and also extract litres of brine) on and around the Salar and within claimed indigenous territory. Three additional lithium mining ventures are seeking environmental approval to begin work on the Salar. It is predominantly MEL’s activities, and the Peine community’s responses to MEL as an extractor of water and a powerful corporate social relations machine, that I discuss in this article. MEL has had the rights to extract many more litres of water than other mining companies and also a long-standing formal agreement with Peine for ‘development benefits’3 and social and environmental impact reporting.4 As I outline below, neither MEL’s extraction in Peine’s claimed indigenous territory, nor the formal agreement between MEL and Peine, represent a fixed position or stable relation. ]p1[Extraction companies here (as elsewhere) maintain that their activities are ‘sustainable’, meaning in this case that company studies claim that sufficient volumes of water remain in the environment to endure ongoing extraction with minimal impact. While a public register of water concessions is available on-line, the Chilean private property regime and market for water means that concessions have not been independently monitored by the government authority (Bauer 2004; Budds 2013). Public protest regarding the potential environmental crisis brought on by industrial water extraction has been This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. building over the past ten years, and the lack of government oversight of water exploitation by mining companies has been central. Anxieties among Indigenous Community members and the broader public about the nature of mining ‘sustainability’ plays out in an environment that Fortun (2012; 2014) refers to as ‘late industrialism’, the contemporary condition in which the spectre of environmental harm and ecological crisis prevails and preventing damage seems overwhelmingly complex. ]p1[Temporalizing environmental,