Three Ecologies of Abandonment

Abstract

Scientists are drawn to abandoned sites as spaces of epistemic potential. In this paper, we focus on abandonment and the role natural scientists play in constructing futures for “empty” spaces. We bring together ethnographic work with researchers in the urban wastelands of Berlin, the spectacular ruins surrounding the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and the deserted Atlantic archipelago of St Kilda. Through these three cases, we draw attention to how scientific knowledge production is intimately and non-innocently entangled with producing spaces of anticipatory “nothing” and shaping the lives of their more-than-human inhabitants. In Berlin, we trace ecologies of abandonment as politically charged sites where scientific knowledge production and speculative capital entwine. At Chornobyl, we examine how intense scientific debate on radiation on more than-human health is mobilised in spectacular ways to advocate for reinhabiting a toxic space. Finally, at St Kilda, we show how permanent abandonment attracts scientists as interested in nothingness as they are in research. Drawing these insights together, we interrogate the wider ethics and politics of the scientific translation of ecologies of abandonment by asking who benefits from the revalorization of such minor spaces, places, and ecologies and the politics of knowledge, and non-knowledge, they produce.