Science and the Politics of Knowledge Production Along the Saw Kill

Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2018 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2018 Knowing Water: Science and the Politics of Knowledge Production along the Saw Kill Carlo Diego Raimondo Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018 Part of the Environmental Monitoring Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Other Anthropology Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Water Resource Management Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Raimondo, Carlo Diego, "Knowing Water: Science and the Politics of Knowledge Production along the Saw Kill" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2018. 190. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/190 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Knowing Water: Science and the Politics of Knowledge Production along the Saw Kill Senior Project Submitted to the Division of Social Studies of Bard College By Carlo Raimondo Annadale-on-Hudson, New York May 2018 Dedicated to Elias Dueker and the rest of the Bard Water Lab Acknowledegements To my academic advisor, Yuka Suzuki, who braved the tumultuous waves of my writing, providing an incommensurable amounts of guidance and insight to this project. In entertaining my theorhetical tangents, challenging my overexuburant use of jargonistic language, and finding value in my voice, I am extremely greatful. Thank you for guiding me these last three years at Bard, I cannot imagine how different my life would have been had I not taken ‘Intro’ with you. To Laura Kunruether, for pushing me in class and introducing me challenging theories that I would have never pursued myself. Out of all my professor’s at Bard you were the one that pushed me to articulate myself as best I could. Thank you for introducing me to the invisible Ratu Kidul and the ever perplexing cyborg, I will hold them close to me as I continue on. To Michele Dominy, for always showing interest in my work and pursuits outside of class. In my short carreer as student of anthropology, you have taught me to go beyond anthropological literature and find inspiration in the outside world. To Eli Dueker, for essentially enabling this project, your openess and willing to enage with me is something I wish to embody as leave Bard. Thank you for teaching me that science is for everyone, or at least it should be. Your lessons in and outside of the classroom have been invaluable both to my ethnographic positioning and to my own development as a student and community member. To Jonah Rubin, thank you for giving me the ethnographic techniques to take on the challenge of senior project, without them I would have never been able to approach this project. To my Bard Water Lab friends, I will miss those monthly chats we had while processing samples and listening to the Dixie Chicks, I will definetly return to the lab soon! To my fellow advisee group, Indy, Belmy, and Avalon, the laughs and kind smiles as we passed eachother on Campus. Your critiques and suggestions were undeniably helpful in writing this project, and I cannot thank you enough. To Deldar, thank you for all your wisdom and love. For teaching that is was okay to be vulnerable but not lose site of my security. Thank you for the late hour phone calls and kline conversations, you are amazing human being and I look forward to reading your senior project next year. To Emma and Riley, thank you for delighting in my sleepless delirium, for raging about those who shall not be named, and for reigning me in when I went down into my daily theorhetical rabbit holes. To Olivia, for subtle winks and laughter, your relentless work ethic and your passion inspire me everyday. To Zoe, my Tivoli Pie partner, thank you for listening to my weekend rants and coming to my room every morning, seeing your smile always brightened up my day. To Inga, my cat-eyed sea witch, for checking in on me when I was lost in the intellectual perils of this project. To Shahong, I will miss not having your dry wit around, I will try and channel your hustling ways as I go out into the world. To Stella, my tiny sultry angel, your kindness knows no bounds and I will miss not hearing your giggle fill the air. To Sarah, aka Swallock, thank you for all the dance parties, movie nights, massage trains, raunchy jokes, and packy. I hope you know I will be living under your bed next year Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!..... I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them…. No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. - Mark Twain, Exerpt from Life on the Mississipi, Two Ways of Looking at a River. (1883) Navigation Introduction: Emergence 1 Chapter 1: What is Water? 12 Chapter 2: The Field and The Lab 39 Chapter 3: Sampling the Saw Kill 53 Chapter 4: BWL: The Manifested Lab 73 Conclusion: Clean Up 92 Bibliography 96 1 1 Introduction: Emergence Showers and Streams My introduction to the Bard Water Lab (BWL), an environmental monitoring collective observing water quality on the Saw Kill, began many months before I was actually introduced to the collective, and years before I considered it a potential field site for my senior thesis. It all began on the last days of my post-high school summer, August 11th, the day all incoming freshman at Bard College were required to report to the then humid Annandale-On-Hudson campus for the renowned Summer Writing Program, Language and Thinking (L&T). A miasma of humidity and mosquitoes drowned the campus the first days, a condition only exacerbated by the air condition-less dorm that housed me my first year. One option was to open the windows, to let in a somewhat ineffectual night breeze, and with it, pesky mosquitoes. There were screens, but our insect assaulters were driven and in a feasting frenzy. The other option lay just down the hall to the left, the glorious shower, which spewed out cold water, washing away the adhesive-like sweat that glued arms to hips, hair to neck, left calf to right shin. Letting it envelop me, protect me from the looming humidity that I suddenly, once again, was oblivious to. A magical substance conjured from some seemingly faraway place, which was actually so very near, this water became my salvation. Traversing a network of subterranean pipes webbing culture, walls of filters, and diverse materialization of water, from freezing shower jets to constructed koi ponds, all can be followed back it's more natural course: the Saw Kill. As the source of all water on campus, aside from commercially bottled water, the 2 liquid jetting out of the showerhead was in many ways unrecognizable from the coursing splendor that I would soon immerse myself in both physically and academically. The hyper-chlorination that cleaned water so that it could clean me dried my skin over the period of summer. Such purifications mark an abstraction of water out of its landscape, not just physically but compositionally, a moment where invisible microbes and dissolved ‘muck’ were filtered away. And yet, in its chlorinated glory, this water washed away the sweat, oils, and soap that signified my own presence within the humid summer landscapes of a Hudson River Valley. This epidermal cleansing was symbolic of my initial submerging into the Saw Kill, not yet aware of it but completely contingent on it for survival, it took that summer ‘stickiness’ back with it. I would soon follow that water, if only figuratively, back to the Saw Kill, where cool water would soon envelop me once again. Providing shelter from the blaring heat of the summer, it became a place of relaxation and play, as we climbed up the waterfall, dived off rocks, and swam under the protective shade of Hemlocks. The Saw Kill once again took something from me, washing me, welcoming my dirt and sweat into its currents, but unlike that initial submerging, this one marked by something gained: the contextual ‘ground,’ for my social and academic development at Bard.

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