Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures,infrastructuring environments,and the infrastructure of infrastructure

Abstract

In coastal Peru, conservationists and scientists attend to fog as something that may be captured and transformed into water. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this atmospheric phenomenon as an alternative water source for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. As I demonstrate, experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists’ and other experimenters’ understanding about the connections between the atmosphere, vegetation, and the underground, thereby bringing into view a hitherto imperceptible environmental infrastructure of groundwater production. The infrastructural potentials of the landscape were in turn foregrounded by the conservationists through comparisons with other geographies well-known for their capacity to produce water. Against this backdrop, the article argues for renewed attention to the infrastructural as a comparative effect resulting from simultaneous fore/backgrounding. Rather than mere grounds for second-order processes, infrastructural relations can be understood as situated between foreground and background. As environmental calamities complicate the infrastructure–environment nexus, it is no longer clear what infrastructures consist of, nor what they are capable of doing. In this context, an understanding of infrastructures as comparative effects is useful for describing and speculatively amplifying potentially more sustainable infrastructural alternatives.