Hannah Burnett

Preliminary abstract: This project will interrogate the history and politics of ecological restoration science in southern Louisiana, tracking a shift towards pre-emptive and future-oriented thinking in the context of global climate change. In a landscape infamous for losing an average of one football field’s worth of wetlands per hour to sea-level rise and subsidence, restoration scientists in Louisiana plan have planned controlled diversions of the Mississippi River, mimicking ‘natural’ flood events in order to rebuild land. Yet, results from this project likely won’t be visible for another 100 years. Each of these radically different time frames brings a different set of responsibilities and ecological relationships among humans and nonhumans into focus. By investigating the communities and actors drawn together around large-scale restoration projects, this research seeks to understand how people think about the future environment when previous temporal frames no longer seem to be adequate.