UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation describes how the labyrinth of interconnected marine, brackish, and estuarine ecosystems—that once nourished biodiversity and indigenous lifeways in the Johor Straits—have been fragmented by successive state-making projects that created favorable conditions for unprecedented harmful algal blooms (HABs). Through fieldwork observations with coastal communities and collaborative scientific study with microbiologists, this work analyses how flows of material exchange across barriers that promote collective livability, were marginalized by waves of state-making projects that fragmented peoples and environments. Consequently, specific attention is paid to the humans and nonhumans that are often consigned to the margins of state-making practices of fragmentation, and in many ways complicate the margins themselves.

Two themes are explored: the idea of fragmentation as a sign of social and ecological crisis, and how human and nonhuman relationships at the edges of these crises negotiate and complicate their violent effects. This dissertation proposes that conditions favourable to recent blooms of toxic algae can be traced to the effects of two centuries of interventions by hydropolitical regimes in the Johor Straits. Offering a temporally and politically fractal and porous account of a ‘new’ environmental crisis not only challenges a presentist framing of environmental degradation but also complicates the humans and nonhumans framed as culprits and/or victims of environmental degradation.