Aquifer Ethnography: A Reading from "Running Out"

The extreme depletion of the Ogallala aquifer condenses the most urgent conundrums of the contemporary into a single drama. It also poses a significant challenge to many conventional modes of interpretation and intervention. In this reading from Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton UP 2021), the author traces the competing intimacies, genres and scales through which aquifer depletion gains meaning and force. This, in turn, invites a wider conversation about the status of anthropological writing today and our capacity to reckon with the destruction of the natural resources on which our futures depend.