Political Ecologies of Storage for the 21st Century

Abstract

New resource storage arrangements are proliferating rapidly both in terms of physical infrastructures—for the storage of things like “clean” energy, nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, fresh water, and data—and as part of a set of discursive moves that reinforce a vision of a near future world in which problems of climate change mitigation and adaptation in particular (but also issues like energy security, water security, industry growth, etc.) are solved through eco-modernist techno-fixes. This Symposium sketches the contours of a framework we term political ecologies of storage. In doing so, we treat storage as both a potent imaginary and a concrete arrangement of infrastructures and (lively) materials, developing storage as a critical analytic for examining a diverse range of resource configurations. The political ecology of storage highlights the ways in which different storage arrangements are both conditions and consequences of specific political economic dynamics, while at the same time inextricable from multi-scalar physical environments in which they are embedded.