The metering of individual groundwater use has become a common feature of recent interventions in groundwater governance in many parts of the world, though its actual implementation has been largely unsuccessful (Molle and Closas, 2021). Such metering efforts aim to curb groundwater over -extraction by quantifying - usually for the first time ever - who is pumping groundwater, how much, when, and where. This analysis takes a step back from these management interventions and asks how we got here. How did groundwater pumping become such a 'black box' and individual metering become the exception? And what are the consequences of this data gap? This paper explores these questions in the western United States where the close accounting of surface water diversions makes for a useful foil to largely unquantified individual groundwater pumping. I synthesise biophysical, political economic, and epistemic aspects of groundwater development to examine groundwater pumping's un-quantification and I argue that attention must be paid to all three of these categories if we are to understand why groundwater metering is not more prevalent. I elaborate on these three dimensions - groundwater materiality, knowledge production, and power/profit - as I trace how groundwater's un-metering has been produced, widened and maintained in the region over the last 140 -plus years.

This paper grapples with the challenges posed to critical geography educators by STEMification, or the enshrinement of market-oriented forms of science and technology education as the normative ideal for education in general. In both reactionary and progressive contexts, STEMification decontextualizes scientific and technological activity and deepens existing hierarchies of knowledge based on quantification, perceived scientific rigour, commercialisation, and employability. Critical geographical knowledges often incur misrecognition, dismissal, and in some cases, outright prohibition under such conditions. Offering strategies for navigating and contesting STEMification, this paper draws on collective auto-methods, analysing narrative vignettes from our pedagogical practices as critical geography educators. We offer the notion of seeking leverage in the face of STEMification: protecting ourselves and seeking traction within our institutions by translating our goals into familiar or sanctioned forms, while using those forms to alternative ends. To that end, we highlight seven pedagogical strategies: (1) meeting students where they are, (2) using applied examples, (3) grappling with the limits of problem-based learning, (4) disalienating students from assessment, (5) integrating critique with alternatives, (6) anticipating both resistance to and desire for critical content from students and colleagues, and (7) recognising the limits of institutional environments.

Adaptive co-management (ACM) has been advanced as a climate change adaptation strategy because of its social learning and collaboration dynamics. But it remains unclear whether ACM facilitates climate change adaptation in practice. Because rivers have been important laboratories for ACM efforts and research, this study examines a 30-year-old flow program on the Upper Arkansas River in Colorado (USA) to learn (a) how it is being impacted by climate change and (b) how participants are responding. The program has been largely successful in achieving its ecological and recreational flow goals, but it is being challenged by two hydroclimatic changes: earlier spring runoff and reduced stream flows. The program's ACM dynamics are enabling adaptations that include efforts to communicate more proactively (social learning) and to compromise over the use of constrained flows (collaboration). We discuss these adaptations and pose additional questions about the future of the voluntary flow management program.

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.

This chapter explores the policy narratives generated by the arrival of a powerful new water user—the oil and gas industry—in the South Platte River Basin in Colorado, which is known for being semi-arid, hydrologically unpredictable, and crowded with water users. I investigate the discourse surrounding two questions at the heart of the debate over hydraulic fracturing water demands in the state: (1) how much water is the oil and gas industry using, and (2) at whose gain and whose loss? The analysis draws from local media coverage and interviews with energy and water stakeholders. Colorado's hydraulic fracturing debate is important because it illustrates the symbolic and political power of water in controversies over other resources, such as energy. I find that, as water and energy stakeholders have sought to answer and debate the questions above, they have also attempted to characterise hydraulic fracturing water demands as harmful or benign via the strategic use of varying volumetric and water competition frames. A close analysis of these narrations suggests that they are characterised as much by the unknown as the known, and that the uncertainties that both drive and limit public discourse reflect problematic disconnects between energy and water regulators.

Shale Energy development in the United States has made the community-level impacts of new energy technologies a national concern, resulting in a boom in attention from academics, journalists, and others seeking to learn from the community experiences. A meta-analysis by Walsh et al. (2020) depicts the uneven geographical footprint of research performed in these communities, possibly leading to a phenomenon of research fatigue in communities that have hosted a high number of social science research attempts. In order to better understand and address research fatigue, especially in energy boom communities, we use focus groups and an online-survey of Shale Energy community social scientists to explore the perceived scope, causes, and consequences of and solutions to research fatigue in social research on energy boomtowns. The results show that research fatigue is indeed a major barrier for many researchers in energy impacted communities, but significant geographical variability exists. Furthermore, respondents indicated numerous mitigation strategies to prevent or otherwise reduce research fatigue through better research design and community outreach; however, they also emphasize that real barriers in the nature of scholarly research and the structure of academia prevent the implementation of these strategies. Many of the respondents supported online trainings or forums to inform new energy social science scholars of ways to reduce or mitigate research fatigue and design effective community outreach programs.

In this article we examine an increasingly popular form of water activism - the source-to-sea river journey and its associated narrative - in order to understand its proliferation and implications for water discourse. We focus on source-to-sea journeys on the Colorado River because of the robust dataset that this river provides. On the Colorado, we find that, in addition to producing a compelling adventure tale, the source-to-sea journey has evolved to become an unofficial methodology for assessing the cumulative environmental impacts of human development on the river. This bootstrapped methodology challenges the epistemological status quo in the Colorado River Basin by establishing an alternative way of knowing the river and a new type of river expert. It does this by repositioning the observational scale at which the river is known: downscaling the resolution of environmental knowledge production to the scale of the individual body, while also upscaling it in extent to the scale of the full river basin. We discuss the implications of these journeys and narratives for water discourse, with an emphasis on what they render visible and what they leave invisible.

Two innovative educational products aimed at improving the quality of human-subjects research in and around energy-impacted communities are introduced here. The educational materials include: (1) a self-paced online education course titled "Understanding and Addressing Research Fatigue in Rural Communities" and (2) an accompanying workbook for research planning titled "Engaging in Energy Communities: The Role of the Researcher." We explain how two recent studies were instrumental in identifying the need for the online education course and the associated workbook. We conclude the paper with guidance on how to access these new resources, which we believe will be particularly useful for graduate students and early-career researchers. We invite feedback from users as well as from colleagues who may wish to use these educational materials.

The unconventional oil and gas (UOG) boom in the United States produced a surge of social science research activity about the industry's local impacts, the vast majority of which relied on local stakeholders to contribute data. Like UOG development across the United States, research on the local impacts of UOG has been geographically dispersed and uneven and mostly uncoordinated. The primary purpose of this systematic review of peer-reviewed articles and theses and dissertations is to provide an overview of the timing, spatial distribution, and methods used in research on local impacts of UOG development since 2000. The study identifies 167 unique human subject data collection efforts in U.S. UOG locations between 2000 and 2018. This overview—along with analysis of response rates and recruitment and engagement patterns—reveals risks that the recent boom in impacts research may have contributed to research fatigue on the part of some human subject research participants. The study also demonstrates challenges in deriving generalizable observations from local impacts research. Both problems are associated with the uneven geographic distribution of research across UOG locations in the U.S., researchers' tendency to arrive at the height of development activity, inconsistent and incomplete reporting on methods in publications, and an over-reliance on accessible research subjects. Future research and scholarly reflection should evaluate constraints and factors that influence research strategies. In the meantime, the U.S. research community faces an imperative to consider opportunities to enhance and coordinate research activities in energy communities.

This case study introduces students to the impacts that wildfires have on water resources as well as the challenges associated with managing these risks. By examining the development of a collaborative watershed group galvanized by the 2012 High Park Fire in Colorado, the case engages with the longstanding conundrum of how better to align ecological and social scales in natural resources management. It explores the role that collaborative groups are playing in addressing water resources problems at the watershed scale despite fragmented governance at that scale. A phased case study format allows students to investigate the motivations of diverse stakeholders and appreciate the challenges faced in watershed-based collaboration after a catalyzing event, such as a wildfire. Upon completion of the lesson, students will be able to (1) explain wildfires’ impacts to water resources and stakeholders; (2) assess the challenges and benefits of approaching management based on the physical boundaries of a watershed, rather than political boundaries; (3) identify and interrogate how collaborative watershed groups form as well as the factors that are key to their success; and (4) evaluate the outcomes of these collaborative efforts and their ongoing strengths and opportunities as well as their limitations and challenges. This line of inquiry is increasingly significant as collaborative watershed management groups proliferate in the United States, in many instances catalyzed by a disaster. Ultimately, this case study explores how collaborative watershed groups emerge and the role(s) they play in tackling long-term, multi-jurisdictional, and watershed-scale management challenges.

Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came “home” to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long typified by tensions over land and resources, identity and belonging, autonomy and authority. Since first touching down in the West, however, the “big tent” of political ecology has only grown bigger, incorporating new perspectives, epistemologies, and ontologies. At the same time, the nexus of environment and society is perhaps even more salient today, amid a regional conjuncture of populist revolt, climate change, and rapid political economic transformation. Here we reflect on three longstanding regional concerns – energy development, wolf reintroduction, and participatory governance – leveraging the pluralism of contemporary political ecology to better understand their contemporary incarnations. In so doing, we highlight the need to bring together insights from both “traditional” approaches and newer directions to better understand and engage contemporary challenges, with their heightened stakes and complexity. Such an approach demonstrates what we might learn about global processes in this place, as well as what insights regional praxis (often woefully provincial) might gain from elsewhere – new ways of seeing and doing political ecology. Our goal is to generate discussion among and between political ecologists and regional critical scholars, initiating new collaborative engagements that might serve the next wave of political ecology in the 21st century American West.

This paper explores how a novel and water-intensive method of energy production - high-volume hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a., "fracking" or "fracing") - has taken hold in a river basin that is over-appropriated, is managed via a water governance regime that did not anticipate hydraulic fracturing's idiosyncrasies, and where public concern about dedicating freshwater to hydrocarbon production is high. Via a grounded examination of hydraulic fracturing water use in Colorado's busiest oilfield and most crowded river basin, I argue that the practice has come to exist and persist despite these countervailing forces because it is an ephemeral energy-water assemblage. It is always in motion, is tough to monitor, and emerges only to disappear and reemerge again. This shape-shifting capacity distinguishes hydraulic fracturing from better-known energy-water couplings such as the hydroelectric dam and from historical surface irrigation practices in the American West. It also has consequences. While the uncritical energy-water literature suggests that these energy-water relations have been sufficiently characterized by volumetric gallons-per-well estimates, and the physical ephemerality of the hydraulic fracturing assemblage keeps its on-the-ground complexities elusive, an abridged and uncomplicated picture of hydraulic fracturing endures in the academic literature and public discourse. The partial understandings that result make this assemblage simpler to produce and reproduce. This study responds to calls for more nuanced analyses of energy-water relations. It also contributes to assemblage theory by examining the relationship between instability and stability in the lives of an assemblage, which underscores the importance of processes of disassembly and reassembly within assemblage-style analyses.

The drilling phase of oil and natural gas development is a growing area of environmental justice (EJ) research, particularly in the United States. Its emergence complements the longstanding EJ scholarship on later phases of the oil and gas commodity chain, such as pipeline transport, refining, and consumption. The growing scholarly attention to the EJ implications of drilling has been prompted by the surge in development of unconventional oil and gas resources in recent decades. More specifically, the oil and gas industrys adoption of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a., "fracking" or "fracing") as methods for extracting oil and gas from a wider range of geologic formations has simultaneously heightened oil and gas production, brought extractive activities closer to more people, intensified them, and made well pad siting more flexible. Here, we provide a critical review of the novel EJ research questions that are being prompted by these on-the-ground changes in extractive techniques and patterns, propose an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for guiding EJ inquiry in this context, discuss key methodological considerations, and propose a research agenda to motivate future inquiry.

As groundwater use has surged globally and computing power has grown, groundwater modeling has become a regular feature of subsurface-oriented governance. Our improved ability to "see" underground with models has not, however, generated epistemic consensus on the inner workings of subsurface systems. Here, I ask how and why that is the case. I pursue this line of inquiry in the context of groundwater governance in the American West. Specifically, I trace a decade of groundwater modeling at the heart of a protracted and legally influential groundwater dispute in the state of Colorado to show how models served as mathematical spaces for competing subsurface stakeholders to test and contest opposing visions of groundwater flows, rights, and responsibilities. Drawing from the Science & Technology Studies literature on global climate modeling, I argue that groundwater models are more than simulations of subsurface systems; they are tools of "world building" that embed, enact, and also circumscribe subsurface politics.

Oil and gas exploration and development have a long history and remain important in the American West. The region supported 150,000 well completions from 2000 to 2017. In the same timeframe, unconventional oil and gas development in the West's Niobrara and Bakken formations contributed 28% of United States shale oil production and 14% of shale gas yields. This essay introduces the concept of "impact geography" as a guiding framework for synthesizing literature on social impacts of unconventional oil and gas development and deploys the concept in a review of recent published literature on social impacts in the region. The impact geography approach reflects the fact that that social impacts are generated by, and contingent upon, interactions between economic cycles, geology, technology and local context as they occur in particular spaces and places. This review of social impacts, broadly defined, is organized around three major impact geographies: rural and remote; (sub) urban; and sovereign nations. Within these geographies, we identify a variety of places-boomtowns, industrialized countrysides, borderlands, petro-suburbs, and focusing sites - and survey the impacts that stakeholders within them have experienced as they have been reported in the academic literature.

Research on unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development has focused so intently on hydraulic fracturing that it has overlooked “fracking's” partner technology, horizontal drilling (HZD), which now enables operators to drill more than 2.5 miles. This innovation merits examination because it generates opportunities and challenges – in tension – for regions experiencing UOG development. HZD allows operators to condense their surface impacts by drilling multiple wells per pad. This consolidation benefits the many in a given extractive area, but at the expense of the few who live near intensified sites. HZD also allows operators to more flexibly position these large well pads. Combined, these drilling innovations are further splintering an already fragmented UOG governance space and creating novel procedural fairness challenges, especially in cities. This study offers the concept of “piecemeal participation” to describe these challenges, drawing from a case study in Colorado. Piecemeal participation occurs when governments structure public input on a site-by-site basis, while operators, leveraging HZD's reach and flexibility, plan drilling and weigh alternative drilling locations at the scale of the city. The analysis evaluates piecemeal participation using standard procedural fairness criteria, generating findings of broader relevance as urban areas anticipate UOG development and HZD worldwide.

Wildfire may be the clearest example to date of a socio-natural hazard that is being exacerbated by climate change, making wildfire an essential lens through which to investigate learning and adaptation in the Anthropocene. Here, we study discourse about simultaneous and recurring catastrophic wildfires in Colorado newspapers. We find that the wildfires’ anniversaries served as opportunities for critical reflection on hazard causality and mitigation in local media, particularly the first anniversary and especially for a community that experienced two catastrophic wildfires in a row. Two mediated prospective memory practices—invoking hindsight as foresight and recognizing a new normal—contributed to this discourse. However, learning and adaptation discourse faded in local media at later anniversaries. These findings contribute to learning and adaptation scholarship by connecting the concept of mediated prospective memory to disaster-related media studies and attending to the intricacies of anniversary commemoration under circumstances of simultaneous and recurring disasters.

Whether due to climate change, human development in risk-prone areas, or other factors contributing to vulnerability, communities globally face risk from hazards that can lead to disasters that impact human livelihoods. Some disasters become focusing events that can catalyze a search for solutions to the policy problems uncovered by disaster. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to provide policy scholars with the tools to analyze the role of narratives in such policy debates. The NPF, however, has not been systematically applied to narratives surrounding hazards and disasters. This study examines media coverage from two cases of catastrophic wildfire in Colorado, the United States, to understand the evolving policy narratives over time, with specific attention to three key NPF variables: policy problems, solutions, and characters. Findings indicate that narratives concerning disasters are different than other policy issues in ways that are vital to understand as scholars apply and refine the NPF.

Many communities face increasing vulnerability to the risks posed by natural hazards, such as floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. In the public policy literature, natural disasters can garner the attention of the public and elites and therefore become focusing events that can open windows of opportunity for policy change to reduce community vulnerability to local risks. Past decisions by governments to ignore or leave hazard risks unaddressed can also be viewed as policy failures when the disaster results in loss of life or property. Whether risk from such disasters persists depends on whether governments learn and adapt based on their experiences with disasters. This research examines two catastrophic wildfires that occurred in Colorado, USA, to determine how policy narratives about these events may influence policy change. Media coverage is analyzed as a measure of the policy narratives within communities. Findings indicate that patterns of policy narrative construction in these cases may preclude public dialog focused on mitigating wildfire risk through policy change.