Reclamation legacies

Coastal reclamations extend human terrestrial habitat into the sea by the mechanism of draining wetlands and mudflats or dumping soil, rock and dredged marine sediments into coastal waters to expand coastal terra firma or create artificial islands. The 're-' in the word 'reclaiming' implies a prior ownership, an implied claim that all space is incipiently human habitat. The privileging of human occupancy over that of other species, which has led to intertidal and marine space occupied by fish, crustaceans and seagrass being classified as waste (van Dooren 2014: 77), is mirrored in colonial practices of classifying Indigenous lands as waste or barren land, as seen in the colonial mapping of parts of the upland rainforest of Borneo (Peluso 1995; Tsing 1993) where the 'barren' classification has been a preliminary to the issuing of logging and mining licences. While the reclaiming of the littoral zone for agriculture has been proceeding for about 1,000 years in Asia and Europe, the acceleration seen in the rate of reclamation (for agricultural, industrial, infrastructural and residential purposes) over the last two to three centuries has been driven by the growth economics of capitalism. Whether it is Indigenous land or the littoral zone which is being colonized, the rapidly expanding rates of commodity consumption over that time have produced a corresponding expansion of the human ecological footprint, measured in terms of "the area of land or sea needed to produce the resources consumed by a given population and absorb its waste" (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 245; see also Moore 2015). Coastal reclamations are part of that expansion, forming an element of capitalism's "second nature" (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 22).