Disentangling Intrusion: A political ecology of saltwater and property in coastal North Carolina

Keywords: climate change, saltwater intrusion, absentee ownership, landscape
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

“The solution to intrusion is exclusion,” a resident and farmer from coastal North Carolina recently explained when discussing the need to build physical infrastructure to keep saltwater off of her land. Saltwater intrusion due to rapidly rising seas has become a major concern for farmers along the coast as well as biologists concerned with the rapid conversion of coastal forests to saltwater marshes and swamps. It is well known that the extensive drainage ditches that were built to remove water from the land for agriculture contribute to saltwater intrusion as these become the channels through which saltwater moves inland. In this paper, we will provide a political ecological framework that works to scale climate to the shifting geographies of capital and property in the region and focus on the moving terrain of landscape management practices and their politics. We will begin with current concerns over the increasing control of land by out-of-state landowners then move to disentangle the longer history of corporate interests in the region. In this way, we will track the larger social and political histories of intrusions and exclusions that are largely absent from discussions about saltwater intrusion. This work will also engage with literature that works to integrate traditional concerns of political ecology with more-than-human approaches (ex. Besky and Padwe 2016) as well as critiques of theoretical approaches that begin and end with an ontology of entanglement (Povinelli 2021).