Stephanie Mariko Ratte

STEPHANIE RATTE, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received a grant in October 2021 to aid research on “Before the Flood: The Politics and Materiality of Anticipating Climate Futures in Hawai‘i,” supervised by Dr. Paige West. This research investigated the planning practices of a flood risk management project in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, where officials and engineers warn that the city faces the possibility of catastrophic flooding in one of its central watersheds and in the artificial waterway to which the watershed now drains. Through ethnographic fieldwork across eighteen months, this research examined how the US Army Corps of Engineers and city engage in what they understand to be an attempt to save this landscape and those who inhabit it from the potentially ruinous effects of climate change-related storm, by drawing in part upon catastrophe’s temporal and moral authority. With attention to the relationship between the landscape’s temporal and material forms across scale — from everyday encounters with crumbling concrete to worries around a future sunken coast — the study offers a contrast to environmental examinations which tend to illuminate the effects and affects of disaster in its aftermath, by focusing on the timespace of flood risk planning “before” the catastrophe. It suggests that environmental anticipation related to climate crisis is increasingly unsettled by the material processes of breakdown and deferral that have come to structure urban life, producing new kinds of anticipatory practices oriented instead around slow decline.