Just one month after the DredgeFest NYC symposium, Hurricane Sandy ripped through the New York/New Jersey Harbor sending surges of water and sediment through the city’s boroughs. In its aftermath, the symposium’s discussions on climate change and coastal resiliency took on a difference in meaning and poignancy. Sandy became a catastrophic and costly event for understanding the dredge cycle’s processes. Rather than being approached as a natural disaster by popular media, Sandy was interpreted as at least partially made by us through alterations in the earth’s atmosphere. Just after Sandy, the New York Times published an article contending that beach nourishment–the industrial dredging and re-application of sand to keep dynamic coastlines locked where we have decided we want them–will become prohibitively expensive and technically unfeasible with sea level rise induced by climate change.12 In such futures we might simply run out of enough usable sand, considering that 80 million cubic yards of it have already been mechanically placed on 54 of New Jersey’s 97 miles of developed coastline, averaging out to a truckload of sand for every foot of beach.12 This is an example of the dark and vibrant feedback of the Dredge Cycle, where in many instances, the
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy it was easier to envision how coastal development, loss of dunes and wetlands, rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, flooded subways and postPanamax shipping channels are at least partially interconnected and quasi-designed. Here quasi implies that although these particular elements may be rigorously considered, the networked gestalt of their interactions is often not. Such assemblages exceed the effects and borders of their constituent parts. Process diagrams such as the dredge cycle are a method for articulating the expansiveness of networked ecologies, which in turn may lead to more effective siting of design interventions within them, be they political, material, communicative or other. Such charts are inherently speculative and partial, a type of propositional geography that isn’t necessarily the definitive authority on such dynamic assemblies of stuff. Rather, the charting of material trajectories opens up spaces and sightlines for more focused or detailed ontographies within them, “processes of accounting for the various units that strew themselves throughout the universe.”13 These diagrams are not teleological, as they are as multiplicative as they are reductive. As an example of an ontographic machine, the dredge cycle articulates “a profusion of particular perspectives on a particular set of things.”14
Nutrients Consider another massive microcosm, this one on the other side of the United States. Upper Klamath Lake is located on the eastern flank of the Cascade Range in southern Oregon. With a surface area of about 80,000 acres, it is considered one of the largest lakes in the United States. The lake is extremely rich in nutrients, or hypereutrophic. During the summer it is saturated with thick masses of cyanobacteria called Aphanizomenon flos-aquae,
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more we construct and reorder hydrogeologic and atmospheric flows on a grand scale, the more we ironically end up with less control over those very processes. At times like these we are forced to go back to the drawing board, or to our computational models, and reconsider our strategies. Climate change is perhaps the most vexing feedback we’ve engendered thus far, as the scales of effects are unprecedented.
“Dredging is primal infrastructure, the malleable earthen substrate over which other support systems are built and operated. As such, dredging is perhaps one of the grandest landscape architecture projects in the world, yet it goes largely unrecognized as the design leviathan it is.”
of Engineers, the NYC Economic Development Corporation, a geologist and a designer discussed the larger implications of ever-expanding dredging in an era defined by human agency. What are the operational and environmental limits to this hulking geologic infrastructure? This question led into the second session, Circularity and Feedback, where we examined new methods for working with sedimentary flows that integrate waste streams and operational contingencies. Here the EPA discussed design challenges encountered in implementing its Beneficial Use of Dredge Program, followed by private sector experts in environmental imaging who demonstrated the analytical and forecasting rigor required to design soft and more responsive forms of sedimentary infrastructure. The final session, Regeneration and Public Participation, explored engagement with sediment as a more open-source platform for environmental regeneration. Tactics introduced included grassroots campaigns for citizen oyster gardening (for the creation of reefs to stabilize channels and improve water quality) and efforts to bio-inhabit the industrial banks of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.