The pulse of the Earth. Political geology in Java / Пульс Земли. Политическая геология на Яве

​Political geology was created to bring together geology and politics in new ways. It developed largely within a mgeographers and was, in part, inspired by discussions surrounding the Anthropocene. But political geology also resonated with conversations across the humanities with shared interests in the social life of geology and the geology of social life. Political geology attempted to extend those interests by foregrounding the geos in the geopolitical at the very moment when many contemporary geopolitical analyses had forgotten that the geos of politics was actual material: grounded geological processes.
 Turning to a concerted analysis of the ways that the earth and geological matter became politicized dovetailed with emerging critical analyses of extractivism and modern state politics, which showed that the transformation of nature into a resource was a process that coupled epistemology and technology.
 Political geology could then foreground the ways in which the geological sciences were perhaps some of the most profoundly significant sciences in shaping the modern world because they provided the knowledge that drove extractivism. There would be no carbon capitalism, in other words, if not for the geological sciences. It would therefore be a mistake to try to give an account of the history of that earth-transforming capitalism without explaining how the sciences helped to define, prospect, and extract minerals, ores, and fuels. The political geology that is explained in this book, therefore, provides an expansive account of extractivism by explaining the social production of deep geological time, its context and controversies, and how it has been wrapped up with theology and cosmology. Extractivism, it might be said, is a cosmology. Providing such an account means acknowledging that the geological sciences were tools of European empire. <...>