Category Archives: restoration & reclamation
Vibrant Matter and Relations of Things
“-No one really knows what human agency is, or what humans are doing when they are said to perform as agents. In the face of every analysis, human agency remains something of a mystery. If we do not know just how it is that human agency operates, how can we be so sure that the […]
Levee Glyphs
Blooms of cyanobacteria weave through remnant levees adrift in Klamath Lake’s eutrophic waters. Stripped of their engineered function, the string of islands continue to serve as an inscription of their own layering of compounded histories: ….(1) the shape of the pre-anthropogenic river delta the levees circumscribed: [Aerial photograph of the Williamson Delta in the 1940s, […]
Advancing Deltas II [N42 30.041 W121 57.522]
Welcome to the Williamson River Delta in Southern Oregon. The image above shows our path in and around this delta, via a GPS track meshed with Google Earth. The track was made last month (August, 2011) and the landscape looked quite different from what it does here, as current Google imagery predates October of 2007. […]
Advancing Deltas
[USGS Diver Deploying a Transect Marker at the Mouth of the Elwha River in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. "The primary goal of the dive survey is to learn how underwater plant and animal life react and adapt to the downstream effects of dam removal and provide scientists a more detailed and complete picture […]
Architectures of Hybrid Migrations
Although very likely not submitted to this year’s Animal Architecture Awards, the design for the “Selective Water Withdrawal Tower” on The Deschutes River could have been a candidate for the prize, or at minimum, a poignant contribution to forums discussing “the myriad issues arising from the complex interactions between animals and human society“, and how […]
Becoming of the Sea
The U.S. Geological Survey recently published a map showing land area change in coastal Louisiana from 1932 – 2010; a more comprehensive survey than their previous efforts. Using integrated data from historical surveys, landsat imagery, and national wetland inventories based on aerial photographs, their findings conclude that Louisiana has undergone a net change in land […]
Decade Hillside: The Sigirino Depot
[Point cloud visualization of existing and constructed hillside in the Sotto Ceneri mountain range] As described by Christophe Girot in Topos’ current Issue (Building With Landscape), the Sigirino Depot is “the landscape byproduct of the largest infrastructure project in Swiss history, where a series of tunnels are transpiercing the Alps from north to south to […]
A River of Words, Acts and Cubic Feet per Second
[Prelude to the creation of the lower Mississippi's floodways: emergency dynamiting of a levee at Caernarvon to create a 'crevasse' spillway, releasing pressure on the larger levee system, 1927. Courtesy of NOAA's image library.] Given the current inundated state of the Mississippi, our attention has been unavoidably drawn there. In perusing the coverage of the flood, […]
Sand Engines and Super Nourishment
Moving a lot of sand to where it will strategically move itself: “The Sand Engine project will involve depositing 21.5 million m3 of sand in the sea in the shape of a hook that rises above the water line. The base of the hook will be connected to the coastline at Ter Heijde. Wind, waves […]
Archipelagos of Discards (Foundational Forests III)
[Array of islands in the Florida Everglades overlaid with contemporary networks of dykes and roadways. Landsat courtesy of NASA] According to paleoecologist Gail Chmura, the paramecium-shaped islands rising from the flat expanse of the Everglades are “just one of a number of cases where people and human disturbances played a major role in landscape development.” […]
