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Silt

Silt Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/11/2/461/700281/461ritson.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 31 March 2022 LIVING LEXICON FOR T HE EN VIRONME N T A L H UMA N IT IE S KATIE RITSON Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany nour ageofshiftingbaselines andunstable climate, the ground beneath our feet I seems unreliable. Melting icecaps, tsunamis, and warming water temperatures are eating away at our ideas of stability. But in some places, the ground was never quite sta- ble in the first place. On the seashores and on the coastal lowlands, the ground is a half- liquid, seeping, shifting edge between land and water: a mutable boundary of mud, sand, and silt. People have lived on these littorals for millennia, adapting or rebuilding their settlements along with the flux of the tides and the movements of the land. In re- cent centuries, human inhabitants have tried repeatedly to stabilize and expand the land by means of drainage and dikes, but rising sea levels and increasing storms are forcing a new appreciation of the dynamism of the coastal and fluvial lowlands. In his seminal “Four Theses,” engaging with the idea of humanity that is in transi- tion to the Anthropocene, Dipesh http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Environmental Humanities Duke University Press

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Copyright
© 2019 Katie Ritson
ISSN
2201-1919
eISSN
2201-1919
DOI
10.1215/22011919-7754556
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/11/2/461/700281/461ritson.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 31 March 2022 LIVING LEXICON FOR T HE EN VIRONME N T A L H UMA N IT IE S KATIE RITSON Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany nour ageofshiftingbaselines andunstable climate, the ground beneath our feet I seems unreliable. Melting icecaps, tsunamis, and warming water temperatures are eating away at our ideas of stability. But in some places, the ground was never quite sta- ble in the first place. On the seashores and on the coastal lowlands, the ground is a half- liquid, seeping, shifting edge between land and water: a mutable boundary of mud, sand, and silt. People have lived on these littorals for millennia, adapting or rebuilding their settlements along with the flux of the tides and the movements of the land. In re- cent centuries, human inhabitants have tried repeatedly to stabilize and expand the land by means of drainage and dikes, but rising sea levels and increasing storms are forcing a new appreciation of the dynamism of the coastal and fluvial lowlands. In his seminal “Four Theses,” engaging with the idea of humanity that is in transi- tion to the Anthropocene, Dipesh

Journal

Environmental HumanitiesDuke University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2019

References