Paper short abstract:

A Japanese coral island has been subject to dramatic landscape modification. This paper is an exercise in the political geomorphology of coral reef land/seascapes, that is, historicizing how human and more-than-human landscape-modifying projects shape coral reefs in and above the ocean.

Paper long abstract:

Kikai is one of the world’s fastest uplifting islands. Yet, this geologically unique Japanese island has been subject to dramatic landscape modification. This paper is an exercise in the political geomorphology of coral reef land/seascapes, that is, historicizing how human and more-than-human landscape-modifying projects shape coral reefs in and above the ocean. In Kikai, agriculture and infrastructure have altered the island’s coral reef terraces. Yet, these land projects’ impacts trickle all the way down to living coral reefs, too, and it is through groundwater that we can understand this invisible land/ocean connectivity. To think relationships through groundwater is also to foreground a local history of landscape modification, of which humans are not the only architects.

Based on anthropological fieldwork, this paper thinks with three geo-historical timescales. First, the island’s geological history invites us to imagine the protracted, hundred-thousand-year process through which coral reefs emerge above water and generate habitat for more-than-human terrestrial life. This scale overlaps with the second, colonial period over the last four hundred years: a feudal domain turns Kikai into a site of sugarcane plantations and forced labor. In the third, postwar time span of the last seventy years, this colonial crop becomes fully dependent on underground dams. These human land-use projects have been disrupting and contaminating groundwater flowing into the coastal coral reefs. Yet, humans are not exceptional in their ability to shape a landscape; reef-building corals do it, too. What kind of land/seascape architects might corals be teaching us to become in the Anthropocene?