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’.

I fear that to many members of this society the subject of Coast Erosion will appear one of those which, though important enough to make it a matter of satisfaction that a paper should be read on it, yet it is hardly interesting enough for them to take the trouble to come and hear the paper.

(Bourdillon, 1886, p. 1)