What Is Political Geology?
This volume delves into the politics of the earth. It aims to shed light on the mysterious forces within the wider discourse of geopolitics , thinking through the geological aspects of âvertical territory â (Braun 2000). It will expose the political to geologists with their rock hammers, seismometers , compasses, and maps, their multiple ways of making sense of the density and movements of what is below us and often too old and slow-moving for us to grasp, and that may be more readily explored in art and literature (Grosz 2008) . It will also open geopolitics to the sensory capacities of geophones and tilt meters, plumb lines and rain gauges and consider how geologists, with their tools, expedition equipment and teams, are themselves politicians operating in spaces, on behalf of others, and seeking authority (Coen 2013; Donovan and Oppenheimer 2015a; Hopwood et al. 2010; Rudwick 1985; Schaffer 2003; Shapin and Schaffer 1989). It follows these geologists as they enter into the depths of the geos of politics, its strata , veins, and structural tectonics, and exposes how politics movesâits frictions and alliances; and how its structures form and endure. The premise of this is to create a productive, generative symmetry between geology and politics that can be understood both as the politics of geology and the geology of politics.
The classical, and now often criticized, conception of the basis of geopolitics, drawing on the modern legacy of geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel , claimed that âthe basic concept is that the state is a particular spatial grouping on the earthâs surfaceâ (Dickinson 1969: 69). In this framework, the earth is a surface upon and across which unfolds the dramas of sovereign territories and their politics. Critical geopolitics (Dalby 1991; Tuathail and Agnew 1992) challenged this framework, demonstrating the hidden assumptions and biases of flat representations of the worldâand feminist geopolitics has interrogated the everyday implications of geopolitical machinations (Hyndman 2001). More recently, political geographers such as Bruce Braun (2000), Stuart Elden (2013), and Gavin Bridge (2014) have added thickness to this horizontal scope by demonstrating how state space is constituted vertically and the depth of political processes extend into and through the geos , while feminist geopolitics has also embraced the material world (Dixon 2016).1 Social and political space, in these renderings, is fundamentally geological. This means, more familiarly, that the basis of politics is in geological resources such as fossil fuels, minerals, and sand and is ordered by their appropriation, processing and distribution; but less familiar is the suggestion that geology too emerges in and through political processes, as it is demarcated, framed, and becomes an object of knowledge. This volume engages both of these processes as they reach the subsurface and the substance of geology : the earthâs organization into strata , and the depth of geological time and transformationâterritory in four dimensions (Bridge 2014). The essays here engage the contact zones between politics and the gradual but incessant transformation, production and destruction of the earthâs surface. We intend this volume to contribute to how we understand the relationship between politics and geology by pressing on the nature of their relationship: to ask what its substance is and how it has defined and continues to define our world and what is possible in it.
It is only recently that political geology has emerged as a framework concept. In 2012, a symposium was organized under the title, âPolitical Geology : Stratigraphies of Powerâ at Lancaster University in the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change that brought together (mostly) geographers. This was followed by two workshops with the title given to this volume, âPolitical Geology : Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life,â in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge in March and November 2017 that brought together the historians of science, theologians, anthropologists, political ecologists, and human geographers whose papers form the basis of this book. There has also been a slow emergence of the term in published papers as its analytical work begins to circulate and gain purchase (Swanson 2016; Barry 2017). For the most part, the term has been taken up by anthropologists and geographers, and as keywords can do when they begin to work, they do not invent whole cloth but channel existing energies and intuitions around them to make something newly sensible; in other words, to focus discourse and cross disciplinary registers: âthey clear a way through the complex and opaqueâ (Amin 2016).
One of the influences on political geology , as Nigel Clark, Bronislaw Szersynski and Simone Kotva demonstrate in their chapters here, has been the fruitful debates around the Anthropocene : a proposed geological epoch that explicitly acknowledges human impact on the stratigraphic record (Crutzen 2006). This has had profound implications for the ways that social scientists, humanists, and scientists conceive of humanityâs relationship with the planet, the history of politics in relation to geology , and how we inherit the legacies of Enlightenment humanism as it puts humanity on a par with the geological (Castree 2014; Dalby 2007a; Johnson et al. 2014). It also raises difficult questions about scientific and technological development and the human conquest of the earthâand of other humans. The term was first proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000 in the halls of geological societies and the International Commission on Stratigraphy , but it quickly opened the science of stratigraphy to social and political questions (Castree et al. 2014; Palsson et al. 2013; Szerszynski 2012, 2017a, b). By 2014, the Anthropocene was a keyword in the social sciences and humanities, speaking to pressing political, social, environmental, and geohistorical issues (Clark 2014; Clark and Yusoff 2017; Dalby 2007b; Johnson et al. 2014; Lorimer 2012; Lövbrand et al. 2009) . It resolved controversies within the social sciences and humanities raised by postmodernism and post-structuralism because the Anthropocene was a scientific framework developed by geologists and other solid-earth scientists that was redefining the human and presenting, as Jamie Lorimer (2012) has put it, âa more-than-human politicsâ. It seemed like the twilight of the modernist ontological distinction between humans and natureâand was sanctioned by scientists themselves: those whom social scientists, including Bruno Latour (2017), had argued were central in developing that distinction in the first place. Voices from establishment science were proposing the notion that the human was a geological force that would leave a trace in the stratigraphic record: the human would become one more layer of material among materials. As of the publication date of this collection in 2018, disciplinary formalities and debates are still to be resolved before the Anthropocene is officially adopted into the nomenclature of the geological sciences; and in the meantime, much of the fevered pitch of its original moment has settled as the term has saturated the academic industry and spilled into mass media films and newspapers.
Political geology has been galvanized by this flourishing of geological discourse brought on by the Anthropocene because it has surfaced new vocabularies. It has turned a new generation of social scientists and humanists onto scholarship in the history of the geological sciences as they have sought to understand how it came to be that the West understood what geology was, how the stratigraphic record became a narrative of the earth, and the role of geologists in shaping the ...