Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Gary Wilder

Committee Members

Melissa Checker

Jeff Maskovsky

Jessica Cattelino

Subject Categories

Environmental Studies | Nature and Society Relations | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

climate change, adaptation, space, temporality, infrastructure

Abstract

South Louisiana is rapidly losing coastal land to the combined forces of subsidence, sea-level rise, and worsening storms, accelerated by the effects of flood control engineering and extractive industrial development. With erosion threatening homes and industry alike, the state has marshaled a response on a massive economic and geographic scale: its Coastal Master Plan recommends $50 billion in river sediment diversions, barrier island restoration, and other projects over fifty years. This dissertation is about the emergence of Louisiana’s coast as a place from this knot of human and environmental relations, as an object for governance and a container for political imagination. How we approach the proposition that planning is the solution to impending environmental threats is a question with far-reaching consequences: coastal planning initiatives in Louisiana and elsewhere are part of a growing global ecosystem of environmental and climate planning. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, I show how planning instantiates the coast and delineates it in time and space, weaving it into the crisis of land loss and the imperative­ of urgent action toward its defense. The results are constraints on critical engagement with the enabling con­ditions of land loss and on imagining coastal futures that break from them. I address these issues through the historical and ethnographic study of the production of environmental crisis and residents’ efforts to respond.

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