State of Disaster

Description

"Efforts to restore and protect portions of its coastal marshes, nearly always without regard for the people displaced by these efforts. With a huge budget and noble intentions, an entire state agency is dedicated to the grand enterprise of restoring the coast. Yet it has deliberately neglected the coastal populations who live and work on the state's soggy margins and who are already migrating landward without assistance. The state's plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices relatively small numbers of coastal dwellers who have maintained their presence in this perilous place for centuries despite floods, hurricanes, oil spills, and other disasters. This book provides a detailed, historical, and geographic examination of the numerous, disconnected adaptations to coastal hazards, exploring the consequences of such activity for the environment and the region's residents. The science-based modeling of coastal futures foregrounds biophysical processes in great detail, whi le largely ignoring the processes that underlie social and cultural adjustments to changing environmental conditions. The separation of biophysical and cultural processes contributes to plans that inadequately factor people into the equation, although it is these very people who will bear the brunt of restoration and protection projects. The book considers human adaptations and transitions at the temporal scale suited to those processes, not within the short fifty-year time span of the master plan. State of Disaster examines in turn the numerous disjointed environmental management regimes that contributed to creating the current crisis; the cartographic visualizations of land loss used to activate public policy directed at saving the coast (while neglecting people); the two main phases of public input into planning (early public hearings and more recent stakeholder engagement) and how they both failed to give voice to the citizens most impacted by various management regimes; and the re silience and adaptive capacity of those living through repeated waves of hazards. This long-term examination of how people dealt with dramatic environmental changes and threats will reveal the human side of the story neglected by the abundant science-oriented scholarship on the region. By focusing on the social-cultural processes, it will re-situate the discussion from one of deterministic models to an appreciation of the complexities in historical contingency in an evolving nature-society situation. While the state's coastal master plan is not a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, it is investing in projects that will protect some and neglect others. It will spend billions on schemes with limited life spans, all the while neglecting to consider how to factor in the needs and traditions of the people most affected"--

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