...practices of reappropriating of the power to negotiate with tremendous, mysterious, terrifying, fascinating, life-giving and life-taking forces, beings and things.
Modern infrastructure promises to liberate us from the danger, uncertainty and labour of this negotiation. But in doing so it also transfers the authority to shape these relationships elsewhere—to experts, institutions, technologies, property regimes and increasingly complex systems.
What is dispossessed, then, is not only land, water or common access, but the ability to experiment with the form of our relationships to the things upon which life depends.
This is, for me, at the very heart of power—or more precisely, authority: the capacity to participate in determining, making and remaking those relations.
The deeper problem is the dispossession and exclusivisation of this space of experimentation, where only certain forms of knowledge and institutions are authorised to prescribe what water, land, nature or infrastructure are and how we should relate to them.
This is also at the heart of the destruction of worlds we now call the extinction crisis.
