Disappearing Mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana

Abstract

This article details the epistemic politics that shape the climate adaptation of sea defense in Guyana. Rethinking the material arrangements of expertise in the Anthropocene, I track the work of a group of technoscientific experts participating in the Guyana Mangrove Restoration Project (GMRP). In an attempt to redesign sea defense around mangrove ecosystems, GMRP participants recognize that climate adaptation is not solely dependent on their well‐intentioned efforts. As research objects, mangroves are not only forms of evidence but also tools that guide expert action and distinctions in day‐to‐day labor. Moreover, mangroves draw out the explicit contingencies of modeling, placing expert groups in tension with one another as each seeks to advance their own ideas for mangrove protection, management, or change. I show that this relational ontology is emblematic of climate‐adaptation policy's broader operative logics, or what I call inverse performativity. This is a process whereby an unruly world forces one expert group to seek help from others, building a new ecology of expertise to adapt to a changing climate. Impermanent and wondrous, mangroves urge us to think more creatively about vulnerability to climate change and the kinds of practices that inspire knowledge about it.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Their efforts to keep at bay the inevitable burial of cities by desert sand illustrate what Zee calls “chronopolitics.” Citing Walter Benjamin, he explains that chronopolitics refers to “the various ways in which the political does not merely operate in ‘empty, homogenous time’ (Benjamin , 261), but rather … makes the manipulation, acceleration, or projection of time both the condition and ongoing goal of political and governmental intervention” (Zee , 218). We can see this form of politics at work across many of the essays cited above as well as in other work on environmental and infrastructural management that also demonstrates, along with Zee, how critical it can be to approach temporality in ways that can account for politics and scales that exceed the human (Degani ; Knox ; Vaughn ).…”

“…While Kelly and Lezaun demonstrate that a goal of better killing necessitates practices of care, Bocci argues that killing can itself be a form of care. Relationality in much of this work is also responsibility, a theme echoed in work on environmental care, exemplified by two essays on mangrove ecology by David Bond () and Sarah Vaughn () and in work on humanitarianism that I will turn to below . Bond's account of environmental care and mangroves shows how crude‐oil spills in the Caribbean in the 1970s both damaged mangroves and opened up new forms of environmentalism centered on their care.…”

“…The politics of time in many of these essays are also a politics of space, from workers whose words travel while they cannot (Mankekar and Gupta ), to traces of futures never realized (Ramsay ; Sandoval‐Cervantes ; Yarrow ), to the rapid transformation and attempted management of environments that will not stand still (Vaughn ; Zee ). Like the essays that foreground temporality but also implicate spatial arrangements, many essays that foreground movement and its limitations also implicate time.…”

“…The encroaching sand that Zee writes about might be productively considered alongside the mudbank migration theorized by Sarah Vaughn (); for a discussion of Vaughn's essay, see the section of this essay on relationality.…”

Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolizing Waste with the Black Soldier Fly

“…Helmreich 2007; Besky and Blanchette 2018; Hetherington 2019). Consider, for example, how mangroves are used as protection against storm surges (Vaughn 2017), or how an oyster bed is planted to clean up an oil spill (Olson 2018). In keeping with a broader valorization of the assumed lively agency of microbial life in regenerative processes, nature's capacity to facilitate decay or decomposition has increasingly become viewed as fundamental, inevitable, and (therefore) good (Paxson 2013; Jasarevic 2015).…”