SEED seminar - Dredge capital as mud-moving geoforce

This seminar will focus on the activity of dredging. This is the often unrecognized, even unseen activity of digging up large masses of mud, silt, and sediment from the bottom of rivers, canals, and ports to either keep maritime transport humming along without interruption—or, to build things; from protective dykes and storm barriers to new “reclaimed” land on which industrial activities can flourish. Often using massive and highly specialized ships with 24-hour shift crews, dredging is today a continuously ongoing activity with massive environmental, social, and economic implications. Indeed, as argued by Lewis and Carse (2020), dredging forms “a precondition for shipping and, by extension, economic globalization.” On a planet facing climate change and sea-level rise, and with global transport of oil, gas, minerals, and consumables continuing apace, the “underbelly-work” of dredging is key for today’s modern economies—but also increasingly seen and framed as a key activity to adapt and protect from climate change in coastal and river regions.

In this seminar, we will build on the recent but still limited critical environmental scholarship on dredging (Carse and Lewis 2017; 2020; Lewis and Ernstson 2019; Gustafson 2021; see also Wiering & Arts 2006; Korteweg, 2019) to develop a political ecology account of some of the fascinating aspects of dredging as an earth-and-water-shaping force. More specifically, we will use early field observations and archival findings in The Netherlands and Southern USA to try to account for the emergence of “dredge capital,” an industrial assemblage of companies, ships, and crews that today dredge in all corners of the world. Since its humble and communal beginnings in the 1700’s, dredging became increasingly organized and articulated with industrial capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic, not least in the Rhine-Meuse River Delta in The Netherlands and Belgium and along the Mississippi River. We will argue that one way to effectively understand why dredging became dominated by a handful of Dutch-Belgian companies, now in increasing competition with a rapidly growing Chinese fleet, is to trace “dredge capital” across three modalities of world-making, namely energy provision, logistics with water transport, and environmental adaptation. We will use this seminar to reflect on some of our early findings from field work in The Netherlands, paired with earlier field work in coastal Southern USA.

If you want to prepare for the seminar, we suggest you read Carse and Lewis (2020), and if time allows also, Lewis and Ernstson (2019).

Carse, Ashley and Joshua A. Lewis (2020) New horizons for dredging research: The ecology and politics of harbor deepening in the southeastern United States. Wires Water e1485.

Lewis, Joshua A, and Henrik Ernstson. (2019) Contesting the Coast: Ecosystems as Infrastructure in the Mississippi River Delta. Progress in Planning 129: 1–30.