Public Lecture: Entirely New and Very Old Water

New Earth Histories, UNSW

How have humans altered the environmental relationships between the Atacama Desert and the waters of the Andes and the Pacific?

Metcalfe Auditorium, State Library of New South Wales

Entirely New and Very Old Water: Elemental Shifts in the Atacama Mining Desert’s Relations with the Pacific, the Andes, and Chile A﻿ free public lecture followed by drinks in the Macquarie RoomDescription:This talk addresses the entangled histories and elemental shifts of the Atacama mining desert in northern Chile, one of the driest places in the world. Though the desert’s industry has been making crucial contributions to national income for two centuries, Chileans have positioned the region as their faraway periphery. Today, the desert “wanders south,” encroaching both climatically and ideologically on Chilean society. Chile’s temperate central provinces including the capital of Santiago have in recent years felt the tightening grip of extreme drought. In this context Chilean citizens discuss drafting a new constitutional paragraph to protect glacial and permafrost environments in order to maintain the little ground water there is in the desert’s aquifers. Moreover, cities on the edge of the desert have been marked out for desalination plants. Like the constitutional reforms, this public sector infrastructure binds the desertic north of Chile to the country at large. In her talk, historian Andrea Westermann gives a fuller picture of these entangled histories and explains the elemental shifts in the Atacama mining desert’s relations not only with Chile but also with its neighbouring landscapes, the Pacific, and the Andes. Bio: Andrea Westermann is senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Konstanz. She specialises in the history of earth sciences, environmental history, Anthropocene studies, and the history of material culture. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and is currently working on a book about global tectonics, scientific labor, and the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess.Recent articles include: “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene: Sliding up and down Temporal Scales with Plastic,” in Dan Edelstein et al. (eds.), Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (University of Chicago Press 2020); and “Enrichment and Dilution in the Atacama Mining Desert: Writing History from an Earth-Centered Perspective” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 46 (2020) 4.

Public Lecture: Entirely New and Very Old Water

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Public Lecture: Entirely New and Very Old Water

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