In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among fog oasis conservationists in Lima, Peru, I show how emergent ethics of conservation become enmeshed with discourses on (in)formality. I demonstrate this by framing contemporary concerns about the endangerment of species endemic to Lima against the background of more long‐running understandings of informal urbanization as a threat to the city itself. However, whilst serving as a means to inhibit the proliferation of informal settlements, fog oasis conservation simultaneously affords a set of techniques for squatters to circumvent marginalization. Further, whereas actors engaged in land seizures are thought to mimic conservation practices to avoid eviction, conservation occasionally entails the adoption of illicit methods, which render conservationists themselves susceptible to denunciation by the very collectives they aim to marginalize. I argue that these momentary displacements of (in)formality unsettle the perspectivalist terms of comparison between self and other upon which anthropological analyses of informality sometimes rely.

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In coastal Peru, conservationists and scientists attend to fog as something that may be captured and transformed into water. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this atmospheric phenomenon as an alternative water source for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. As I demonstrate, experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists’ and other experimenters’ understanding about the connections between the atmosphere, vegetation, and the underground, thereby bringing into view a hitherto imperceptible environmental infrastructure of groundwater production. The infrastructural potentials of the landscape were in turn foregrounded by the conservationists through comparisons with other geographies well-known for their capacity to produce water. Against this backdrop, the article argues for renewed attention to the infrastructural as a comparative effect resulting from simultaneous fore/backgrounding. Rather than mere grounds for second-order processes, infrastructural relations can be understood as situated between foreground and background. As environmental calamities complicate the infrastructure–environment nexus, it is no longer clear what infrastructures consist of, nor what they are capable of doing. In this context, an understanding of infrastructures as comparative effects is useful for describing and speculatively amplifying potentially more sustainable infrastructural alternatives.

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His doctoral research is on fog capture and atmospheric attunements in coastal Peru. His email is chakad.ojani@ gmail.com.