Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences and the Structuring of Environmental Decision-Making

Abstract

What this chapter tries to show is that particular decisions concerning global environmental change are deeply conditioned by the power structures I discussed in the previous chapter. I develop these arguments through an analysis of the history and contemporary politics of sea defences in Eastbourne (a medium-sized town on the UK’s south coast) in particular, and the UK more generally. I discuss below the particularities of the decisions surrounding the replacement of Eastbourne’s sea defences in 1994–97. I try to show how the particular decisions were structured by a variety of political, economic and discursive constraints on both Eastbourne’s local government bodies and on the producers of the timber in Guyana. I will give a summary of those arguments later in this chapter. Before that, however, I want to develop more general points concerning the way that sea defences are themselves embedded in the specifically modern twin projects of the human domination of nature and of some humans by others, and in the dynamics of capital accumulation, or ‘economic development’.KeywordsCoastal DefenceHuman DominationTimber CompanyRiver ControlDiscursive ShiftThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.