Coastal Precarity and Managed Retreat Shaping Global Asia

March 4, 2021, 8-9.30 am EST

Convener: May Joseph, Professor of Social Science, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York

Panelists: Nitya Jacob, Alexis Dudden, Godfrey Baldacchino, Sudipta Sen

Description: The oceans of the world are heating unevenly and the science of climate change is pointing to the accelerating realities of coastal precarity across the monsoon environments of the Global South. Barrier islands, minor seas, archipelago nations, riverine cities and deltaic regions are some of the coastal ecologies structuring the regional interdependencies of marine environments across Asia. This panel will examine key issues arising across the oceanic spaces of the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and South China Seas to the Pacific Ocean. The processes of storm surge, of transboundaries, of shared waters, of proactive risk and vulnerable adaptation, and the highly contested notion of managed retreat are propelling ideas that the participants will be asked to consider, in shaping the panel. What are the lessons in adaptation, in planning, in resilience, that coastal Asia offers? What are the intergenerational/intragenerational histories of water thinking informing local and regional approaches to climate change?

Webinar Chair: May Joseph, Professor of Social Science, Pratt Institute, New York

Presentations:

“Artificial ponds and Traditional Indian Water Practices,” Nitya Jacob, Director, Policy and Advocacy, Swasthi, Delhi (Author of Jalyatra)

India’s coastline of about 7,500 kilometres is a treasure-trove of traditional water practices. Between the land and the sea, coastal communities have developed ways to maximise rain water storage for farming and personal use. Depending on groundwater conditions, rainwater is either used to recharge aquifers or is stored on the surface in inter-connected ponds. Communities drawing water from these ponds have developed their own social systems that manage water. This paper focuses on one area, in southern Tamil Nadu, where people in this semi-arid zone have developed a system of inter-connected artificial ponds called ooranis to collect rain water. This keeps the sea water at bay while ensuring a degree of water security. The social constructs of appointing one or more families, usually of the lowest caste or Dalits, to manage the physical system are rooted in traditions and will also be included in the paper.

“How Okinawans Are Changing the Conversation,” Alexis Dudden, University of Connecticut (Author of Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States)

The still in-process additional American military base being built in the tiny town of Henoko on the northeast coast of Okinawa is now twenty-five years in the making (nearly the entirety of the Heisei era). Six helipads are under construction in Oura Bay’s emerald eelgrass and once-dugong filled waters. They are being built adjacent to the massive US Marine Corps base at Camp Schwab. Since its 1995 inception, multiple American and Japanese assessments have shown no military need for this new facility: the Henoko base is the result of a diplomatic bait and switch between Washington and Tokyo that is now simply a deeply divisive construction project. On top of this, countless environmental surveys have demonstrated that the concrete slabs necessary to support the unnecessary helipads are already sinking into the bay’s silty soils and annihilating its ecosystem, which, moreover, is a World Wildlife Fund site: the dugong is close to extinction. The final nail in this surreal coffin is that Okinawa prefecture does not have the right kind of soil to build the foundations for the helipads. The dirt is imported from the mainland, which, in some ways, best sets the stage for Okinawans are pressing for change. 

“The Writing is on the Map: Precarity rising in the Islands of the East and South China Seas,” Godfrey Baldacchino, University of Malta (Author of Solution Protocols to Festering Island Disputes: ‘Win-Win Solutions for the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands)

Even a cursory glance at a map of East Asia shows how the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s maritime ambitions, even as simply a regional power, are thwarted by geography. From North and South Korea, through Japan, and down to the Philippines on the east and south; as well as from Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia on the west and south; even where the PRC to have only moderately ambitious expansionist plans, they are thwarted by the land masses and exclusive economic zones of wary neighbouring states. The heavily navigated waters of the South China Sea also suggest that these international shipping lanes remain vital for the free flow of trade and cargo to all international actors, creating a point of friction. Taiwan, a renegade province of China as far as the PRC is concerned, adds complexity as long as it refuses the overtures of mother China to rejoin the nation, and counts on the US as a strategic ally.

The festering disputes – notionally over islands and islets and reefs – in the East and South China Seas are evidence of ‘precarity’ in the region, and reflect a tense period of potential ‘hegemonic transfer’. Irrespective of whether the US, Japan and other countries invest and assert their military muscle, China will not be held back. 

A ‘4-player’ epistemology to the Senkaku shima (尖閣諸島) / Diaoyu Dao (釣魚台列嶼) ‘dispute’ in the East China Sea can serve as an illustration of what is going on here; the tensions and risks of escalation and conflict; as well as opportunities to usurp the dangerous binary paradigm that plays into the hands of the hawks on either side.

“Deltaic Bengal in the Age of New World Empires: A Foray into Amphibious History,” Sudipta Sen, UC Davis (Author of Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River)

The greater Ganges Delta, formed by the drainage basins of two formidable rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga, lie at the overlapping margins of deltaic and maritime history. This has always been a forbidding and volatile landscape of forests, mud, salt-flats, and sand, with very few channels deep enough for oceangoing vessels except for the mouth of the Hugli River. A plethora of natural impediments discouraged settlement and cultivation: salinity, undergrowth, cyclonic activity, and capricious tides. This paper explores how these relative backwaters of history were unlocked between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries for markets, commodities, and shipping lanes with the advent of Arakanese pirates, Portuguese fortune-hunters, and the Dutch, French, and British maritime empires. It also looks at how the low-lying islands and the mangrove-rich fans of the greater Sundarbans became the site for early surveys and revenue settlements of the East India Company, marking their eventual transformation from the gateway of oceanic trade to the forlorn and abandoned periphery of a sprawling colonial agrarian empire expanding westwards across the Gangetic Valley.

Biodata

May Joseph is Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, New York.  Joseph works on water ecology, global environmentalism and critical ocean studies.  She is the author of the ghosts of lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York; Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minnesota, 1999). She is editor of two book series, Critical Climate Studies (Routledge) and Ocean and Island Studies (Routledge). www.mayjoseph.com

Nitya Jacob is a policy, advocacy and knowledge management student who has worked on water, sanitation and hygiene. He has worked with several non-profit and international organizations on research and advocacy on these issues. He led the national advocacy and research team at WaterAid India and worked as the water programme director with the Centre for Science and Environment. He has designed and run courses on rural integrated water supply and waste water management. He coordinates the India Chapter of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, a leading international knowledge resource on sanitation. He has written books, notably Jalyatra, on traditional water practices in India, and contributed numerous articles to journals. Other book topics include rural governance, trends in rural development and a chapter for the UN-sponsored publication Water Voices From Around The World. He has a master’s degree in mass communication and an advanced certificate in integrated water resources management.

Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean, and international history. She publishes regularly in print and online media and is completing a book project tentatively called, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020. Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. Since 1985, she has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea. 

Godfrey Baldacchino is Professor of Sociology at the University of Malta, Malta; formerly Canada Research Chair and UNESCO Co-Chair in Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada; Founding Editor of Island Studies Journal (2006-2016); President of the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA) (2016- ). Author or editor of dozens of books and hundreds of journal articles and book chapters that explore the intersection of islands, geography and politics. He proposed the category of subnational island jurisdictions as a focus of scholarly inquiry and policy concern. He has researched the dispute between China and Japan (and involving Taiwan and Okinawa) with regards the Senkaku Islands / Diaoyu Dao, mainly to prove that island studies doesn’t deal only with soft topics. He is the editor of Solution Protocols to Festering Island Disputes (Routledge, 2017), on which he will base his contribution to the NYU event.

Sudipta Sen, Professor of History and Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, University of California, Davis, is a historian of late-Mughal and early British India and the British Empire. He has taught at Beloit College WI, University of California, Berkeley, and Syracuse University, NY, and is the author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge 2002), and Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale U Press & Penguin Viking, India, 2019).