On environments of not knowing: How some environmental spaces and circulations are made inscrutable

Abstract

In this paper we develop the concept of “inscrutable spaces” to describe spaces that are made difficult to know by an interplay of biophysical, epistemic, and political economic factors, and whose unintelligibility has serious repercussions for environmental politics and everyday life. We also offer an analytic that can be used to examine how inscrutable spaces are produced and maintained. Together, the concept and analytic provide scholars with tools for examining how and why knowledge is not produced in some environmental spaces despite their importance, as well as how knowledge absences persist over time. After developing the analytic, we apply it to two case studies – one about airborne dust and one about aquifer management – to show how atmospheric and subsurface spaces were actively made inscrutable. A key component of the inscrutable spaces analytic is its inclusion of biophysical attributes in examinations of environmental unintelligibility. Rather than relegating biophysical dynamics to the background, the framework encourages analysts to investigate how biophysical factors interact with epistemic and political economic influences to produce gaps in environmental knowledge production that are persistent and consequential. The utility of this approach is three-fold: (1) working to tease these factors apart makes the impacts of each more discernible; (2) putting them back together again highlights how they interact to produce and maintain inscrutable spaces and circulations; and (3) leveraging a systematic approach to analyzing inscrutability allows for fruitful comparisons among case studies that can illuminate broader trends in the (non)production of environmental knowledge.