Hydrocultures

It is impossible to think about energy without thinking about water. The world’s bodies of water are sites of energy extraction and subjected to some of petroculture’s most devastating violence, from Deepwater Horizon to the Niger Delta. Water is crucial to the extraction, processing, refinement and transportation of fossil and nuclear energy, often with less visible but equally long-term impacts on water supply, as recognised by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The impacts of fossil fuels on our climate are primarily registered in watery terms, through fears of rising sea levels and ‘water wars’. Access to fresh water, meanwhile, requires energy: water must be pumped, purified and delivered to point of use, a process that is becoming increasingly energy-intensive with the rise of desalination. Water, then, is deeply implicated in the fossil fuel economy. It also, however, provides the basis for alternatives. We might think first of hydropower dams, the dominant source of renewable energy, and a booming industry once again. Yet the ‘green’ credentials of big dams have justifiably been called into question, just as their production of displacement on a mass scale is now widely recognised. Nevertheless, thinking with water itself can have valuable ecological ends. Water provides a reminder of the inextricability of our bodies from the world and from each other, and a prompt to imagine different, non-exploitative relationships with nonhuman nature that renew the notion of the commons.