Reclaiming landscape : coastal reclamations before and during the Anthropocene

This chapter addresses the history of reclamation in the Pearl River Delta in south-east China, a region which is home to an old and extremely extensive array of agricultural reclamations. A clear link between reclamation landscapes and the phenomenon of emigration emerges from research in the New Territories, Hong Kong, by James Watson and Patrick Hase. Eleven thousand kilometres of China's coastline is now under some form of reclamation, a sharp increase occurring since 2005, and almost half the country's coastal wetlands were lost to reclamation between 1950 and 2000. In stark contrast to the 'infill' reclamations emerging in the delta, the agricultural reclamations entailed no transportation of earthen material by humans. Many take the Great Acceleration to mark the onset of the Anthropocene, the term proposed for the contemporary epoch in which human activities have begun to alter fundamentally the Earth system.