UC Berkeley

This dissertation develops an urban political ecology of postindustrial landscapes for the Anthropocene era. Ecological concepts have been used to explain urban dynamics since the Chicago School in the 1920’s. When in the mid-1990’s, David Harvey declared that there was “nothing unnatural about New York City,” and that “New York City is to be construed as an ecosystem,” he was making a provocative claim whose insight requires reinvestigation. With the rise of resilience thinking and new materialism, it is increasingly common to treat cities as ecosystems: that is, as integrated totalities of living and non-living relations. Today, this perspective has developed into a municipal management strategy that naturalizes urban histories and futures. This dissertation argues that the use of ecological conceptuality to discursively frame postindustrial waterfronts in the Laurentian Great Lakes obscures their settler capitalist pasts and speculative climate futures. Developing critical geographical methods, this dissertation historicizes this ecological tendency and offers an alternative approach.

Since the 1970’s the concept of disturbance has become central to theories of ecological succession, as evident in the idea of resilience. Resilience theory takes disturbance to be endogenous to succession. Resilient ecosystems bounce back from disturbances and, in so doing, become better adapted to them. Interpretive and applied social scientists commit a naturalistic fallacy when they mistake settler capitalist forms of destruction for ecological disturbance. This organicism masks the fact that struggles over the right to the future city are taking place in and through the ecological discourse of urban- and coastal resilience. To spur waterfront speculation, the growth machine takes advantage of this elision.

This study reframes urban ecological discourse. It presents a “natural history of destruction” based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, participatory observation, and landscape analysis. In resistance to the functionalist tendencies of socio-ecological systems thinking, a natural history of destruction highlights the historical contingency of postindustrial landscape formation. It ruthlessly historicizes everything that appears natural. This includes ecological discourse itself, as well as its use as a foundation for municipal governance. A natural history of destruction in the Great Lakes demonstrates that the settler colonial process of transforming complex environments into infrastructures for commerce and speculation is an unnatural one requiring constant reproduction. It shows that the forms of destruction suffered along the Great Lakes coasts are beyond the conceptual framework of ecology. Since “coastal resilience” has become the auspice under which the future of the region is playing out, I unpack its many meanings and historical referents. Lake Erie is an ideal case study, since it is historically the exemplar of ecological destruction and restoration in the US.

The dissertation has four chapters that weave together environmental history, political economy, and landscape analysis. The introduction historicizes the physical integrity of Buffalo’s waterfront. It argues that even the most natural-seeming parts of it are infrastructures mediated by settler capitalism. Chapter 2 offers a theoretical framing for a “natural history of destruction” based primarily in the philosophy of Theodor Adorno and, following it, the literature of WG Sebald. Chapter 3 demonstrates the relationship between Buffalo’s “new hydrological regime” and waterfront real estate. It argues that regional developers are harnessing climate-related changes as an opportunity for speculative growth. Chapter 4 offers a history of the politics surrounding lake water-level fluctuation and stabilization programs. This doubles as a history of ecological governance found presently in coastal resilience management. Chapter 5 carefully traces the destruction and forgetting of wetland-dune ecology in the eastern Lake Erie basin. All five chapters demonstrate how the development of ecological thinking intersects with the postindustrial treatment of the Great Lakes.

The conclusion offers a critique of the perspective of the Anthropocene, which takes a geological and planetary approach that flattens global environmental crisis. A natural history of destruction, in contradistinction, develops a landscape-based analysis that emphasizes the incredible amount of geohistorical difference that the crisis continues to reproduce.