Making nature into infrastructure: The construction of oysters as a risk management solution in New York City

Abstract

This paper investigates how nature is transformed into infrastructure through an examination of New York State’s Living Breakwaters project, a $60 million risk management experiment to grow oyster reefs in order to better govern storm surge, rising seas, and coastal flooding. While oysters’ infrastructural nature is portrayed by designers and planners as an inherent natural property which now simply needs harnessing, in reality making oysters into infrastructure requires extensive concrete work—by humans and oysters. Drawing on historical research, site observation, interviews, and media and design analysis, this article traces this work required to make oysters appear, and then function, as a risk management solution. In part one, I trace the narrative work involved in establishing the idea of oysters as infrastructure. In part two, I look at what it takes to build this idea in reality, to make oysters actually function within desired governmental parameters. Making oysters into infrastructure, I conclude, is a kind of biopolitics, both in the traditional sense of making certain forms of human life live, but also in which the goal is to make nature live in a particular way, albeit one imagined as natural to the oyster. While biopolitics forwards a dystopian view of human and nonhumans as vulnerable to threatening environmental processes and heavily secured, it may be undermined by the inability to make nature’s imagined “vitality” appear.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…Finally, animals are co-opted into our responses to climate change. Wakefield (2019: 1) presents a vivid account of oysters as risk management infrastructure – an experiment to ‘grow oyster reefs in order to better govern storm surge, rising seas, and coastal flooding’. The project involves acknowledging that oysters may die; conditions may be wrong for all kinds of reasons.…”

The Political Life of Natural Infrastructure: Water Funds and Alternative Histories of Payments for Ecosystem Services in Valle del Cauca, Colombia

“…It also turns our attention to the work of constructing and maintaining infrastructural natures capable of sustaining and securing (certain forms of) human life -including the scientific work of modelling and monitoring; the labour of fence building and tree planting; the social and cultural work of building social networks and instilling new norms of conduct; and the 'hybrid labour' of nonhuman ecosystems (Battistoni, 2017). Through this work 'natural infrastructure' emerges not as a fact of nature but an ongoing project that may be variously advanced or subverted by participants (both human and nonhuman) in its infrastructural network (Wakefield, 2019; see also Anand, 2011;Fredericks, 2014). Attending to this work also reveals how such projects are embedded in existing hierarchies of difference: in areas of FAVS where the work of fencing streams is done largely by Indigenous women for very low wages, ecosystem service metrics risk obscuring the cheap labour that may ultimately underpin the 'business case' for natural infrastructure (see also Turpie et al, 2008).…”

“…For a recent example, seeWakefield (2019).50 Telephone interview, A. Calvache, 21 March 2018. See also https://waterfundstoolbox.org/project-cycle for the details on the recently-standardized Water Fund development process.…”

Infrastructural nature

“…The invocation of ecological infrastructure to refigure the city as its own solution is symptomatic, Wakefield suggests, of the rise of 'resilience infrastructures' in response to the 'new urgencies' posed by anthropogenic environmental change (Wakefield, 2019: 7). In this way, infrastructural nature's currency should be understood in the light of the general crisis of faith in the modernizing project heralded by the Anthropocene, as efforts to reconfigure nature-society binaries become matters of 'disaster management' (Wakefield, 2018(Wakefield, , 2019. Infrastructural nature seeks to mobilize the regenerative power of biotic life to reinvigorate the liberal promise of infrastructure, aiming to demonstrate 'that natural capital can be leveraged rather than liquidated through the development process' (Steer and Tuck, 2019: 1).…”

“…Our use of this term is distinct from adjacent terms like green or natural infrastructure. We emphasize that nature is not simply infrastructure, but -in keeping with the fundamental insights of political ecology -it takes work to make it function that way and to govern it as such (Wakefield, 2019). This includes the scientific work of monitoring and modeling ecosystem functions, regulatory and managerial work to guide investment, and the physical work of ecosystem restoration and stewardship (Carse, 2012;Wakefield, 2019).…”