Pumping the Future Dry: Expansion, Expertise, and Collapse in the Irrigated Grapelands of Argentina, 1950-1990

MARK HEALEY; FACUNDO MARTÍN

Philadelphia

Conferencia; Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Technology; 2017

Society for the History of Technology

In the arid province of Mendoza, every dream of modernity has begun by imagining an abundance of water. For over a century, Mendoza and the neighboring province of San Juan embraced a sociotechnical imaginary of ever-expanding irrigation, and this engineering project produced a robust political and material infrastructure. As the project of expansion began to exhaust the supply of surface water, the provinces doubled down on the logic of this sociotechnical imaginary, seeking to draw upon groundwater as a solution. But this attempt to maintain the larger infrastructure of production would lead to a rapid drawdown of aquifers, an overproduction of grapes, and a combined ecological and market collapse that would unravel the model of irrigated agriculture and the infrastructure it rested upon.