Groundwater Earth: The Hidden Frontline of Climate Change

For twenty years, architect and cartographer Anthony Acciavatti has been examining our astonishing and perilous thirst for groundwater. Tools for extracting groundwater from the earth, known as tubewells and borewells, have for decades allowed billions of people to thrive but threaten to bleed the earth dry. This reality sustaining life and threatening our existence is not so much a paradox as it is the consequence of over extraction. Hydrologists today estimate that nearly half of the global population drinks groundwater daily, and that over half of the world’s irrigated crops rely on it. In Groundwater Earth: The Hidden Frontline of Climate Change, Acciavatti combines social, political, and environmental analysis with decades of fieldwork to develop a framework for reorienting our relationship to the subterranean—one that helps us reimagine how we terraform the Earth’s surface.

Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the histories of science and technology. He explores the hidden underworlds of the earth and how they shape the way we live in cities and cultivate landscapes. Acciavatti is the author of the award-winning book, Ganges Water Machine, which is based on nearly  ten years walking over 15,000 kilometers across the Ganges to map it and to understand the historical conflicts over water for drinking, agriculture, and industry. His work on the Ganges is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  He has exhibited at the Milan Triennial, the Wellcome Collection in London, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, as well as biennials in Venice, Seoul, Rotterdam, and Quito. A founding partner of Somatic Collaborative, Acciavatti currently leads Ganges Field Lab at Collaborative Earth and is the inaugural Diana Balmori Associate Professor at Yale University.

Photo: "Jakarta Close Up" courtesy of Anthony Acciavatti