Organizer: SEACoast

Description:

The shapes of coastlines around the world are the product of geomorphological politics and of their unintended consequences. In South East Asia, colonial port cities were established on unstable coastal river deltas: practices of dredging, land reclamation, and of clearing mangrove forests have reshaped coastlines. Coastal infrastructure building and upland agriculture alike have unintended consequences that are often manifested after long delays: the silting up of estuaries, the emergence of new land, coastal retreat, and the disappearance or emergence of mangrove forests. This set of readings helps us explore the long term processes that reshape coastlines across South East Asia, from colonial port building and dredging in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, to sediment trapping in dams built during the twentieth century, to the destruction of mangrove forests. Geomorphologists’ capacity to detect long term processes through attention to form can inspire us in our own research practices, as we think about the shapes of deltas, of landforms, and of mudbanks and drainage channels. For those of you with particular curiosity and enough time, you might care to read about the ways that geomorphologists help us imagine the ecology of Sundaland, which now sits beneath the South China Sea.

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