Taking responsibility for humanity’s imprint on the biosphere requires us to not only understand biophysical changes in the environment, but to also reflexively account for our knowledge about these changes. Long term monitoring of biophysical attributes provides an important foundation for understanding the magnitude, rate, and causes of ecological change, all of which are essential for composing effective environmental governance. However, while monitoring is widely acknowledged as a crucial component of environmental management, it has largely remained unproblematised, considered a technical rather than social task.
Here, I draw on interviews with environmental scientists, regulators, and practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand to excavate the logics that shape what is monitored and known about freshwater. Freshwater monitoring is shaped by, inter alia, what is required by legislation, what is easily measurable, what can be measured consistently, what is interesting to specific science staff, what is enforceable, what is statistically sound, and what responds to local political priorities. Collectively, these logics and their metrics constitute the epistemic infrastructure through which knowledge about New Zealand’s freshwater estate can be generated. Through this infrastructure, the scope of the freshwater ‘problem’ is delimited in advance even before biophysical measurements are ever taken.
Epistemic infrastructures such as environmental monitoring draw attention to certain parts of the environment over others; these selectivities are shaped by social logics and generate consequences for environmental politics. Epistemic infrastructures are important because they enable authoritative claims to be made about the environment, and because they endure. By helping to elucidate the goals, values, and makeup of our epistemic infrastructures, geographers can better account for the social and biophysical underpinnings of environmental knowledge in the Anthropocene.
Mots clés : politics of science|critical physical geography|political ecology|environmental politics|freshwater management
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