Contextualizing formations of the commons and techno-optimism

Throughout the readings this week, I couldn’t help but consider Bakker’s (2010) observations regarding “ecological governance” of water as a “commons” in light of the critical conditions of drought in California. Notwithstanding the ecological importance of water conservation campaigns in curbing wasteful usage (like that which corresponds, for instance to what political ecologist Paul Robbins (2007) has termed an identity as “lawn people”), it is easy to over-estimate individual contributions to the water crisis, and to therefore gloss over industrial ones. By most estimates, total urban water consumption (which includes practices like personal use and lawn irrigation) accounts for less than 20% of all the water consumption in the state. Meanwhile, agriculture accounts for approximately 80% of water use (much of which is converted into food commodities, about half of which are discarded and never consumed).

However, to place blame entirely at the feet of a protean entity like “agriculture”, or even “industrial agriculture” would perpetuate an overly simplistic dichotomy between “public” and “private”, which Bakker notes is especially untenable with regard to water. A more productive approach would be to examine the historical configurations of water as a proprietary good within California, and which have collectively contributed to a failure of governance. For example, the state just recently passed legislation that requires, for the first time, that people and entities report the amount of water drawn from wells. Subsidence makes a particularly compelling case for political ecology, what Bakker (2010) describes as the recognition of the inevitable nesting of political and infrastructural interventions within the surrounding ecology. As a consequence of historically unregulated and unmonitored groundwater drilling without groundwater recharge, the ground beneath the feet of people in the Central Valley is literally sinking (see graphics below).  (http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/overdraft/index.html).

For my own research, I am especially interested in Bakker’s (2010) unpacking of ideas around “the commons”. I want to advance her argument for contextualizing and historicizing formations and political engagements within “commons” where the term is increasingly and explicitly invoked among “open science” publics which seek to engender participation in a vision of scientific databases as open-access commons. For example, the non-profit organization “Open Humans” allows people to “turn their data into a public resource” by uploading personal genotyping data, gut and environmental microbiome data, as well as other personal health data (openhumans.org). The potential implications of such massive, open-access stores of data for scientific research are fetishized as resources for reaching frontiers in technological and medical innovation. The configuration of the web-based organization appears to be such that governance – as described by Bakker (2010: 45) as participation in decision-making processes regarding resource distribution - is purposefully attenuated so as to facilitate easy and open access by researchers. However, infamous cases of biotech firms privatizing biomaterial and genetic data (see e.g. Skloot 2011), would underscore Bakker’s (2010: 175-176) observation that performances of “common resource allocation” do not preclude the possibility of unequally beneficial, and in some cases even violent, practices of re-distribution. By ethnographically engaging with such open-science publics, I wish to examine the ways in which such corporations anticipate (or disregard) the potential for such violence, and how their attempts to write-in safeguards to prevent against such violence via lines of code are nested within wider, "learned arrangements that constitute membership in particular communities of practice" oriented toward more open-ended infrastructures of data sharing (Star 1999:381, cited in Schwenkel 2015: 530).

References

Robbins, Paul. 2007. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Skloot, Rebecca. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 1st pbk. ed. New York: Broadway Paperbacks.