The persistence of long facts: truth and consequence in Costa Rica’s aquifers

At the center of decades-long water conflicts in northwest Costa Rica, a particular fact has had a contentious status: whether the aquifers supplying the area hold sufficient water for collective life. I refer to this as the sufficiency fact, which has been established, debunked, and reestablished multiple times. To understand this peculiar dynamic, I zoom into discussions among community and business representatives about the future of these aquifers. There, in the density of social life, I show how as place-specific formations, facts are “long” entities that remain tied to their interpretations and, crucially, to their potential consequences. As opposed to the ideal of short facts that characterizes modern science, long facts reveal the rich social life that facticity takes in the twenty-first century. Long facts are always contested, explicitly political, and unable to be separated from their potential consequences. In contrast to scholarship that diagnoses the loss of the value of truth within the contemporary moment, I suggest it is critical to understand the abundance of regimes of facticity that surround us and what they make possible leaving behind assumptions of deficit and lack.