New horizons for dredging research: The ecology and politics of harbor deepening in the southeastern United States

Harbor deepening projects in the southeastern United States illuminate a global phenomenon: navigable rivers and coastal estuaries have been dredged to new depths as port authorities and governments compete to accommodate and benefit from new generations of massive oceangoing ships. This urbanized region has dozens of ports situated in estuaries and deltas where major rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. It is also home to the majority of U.S. inland federal waterways, significant cargo traffic, and remarkable cultural and ecological diversity. Moving enormous volumes of underwater sediment is as much a social, economic, and political phenomenon as an intervention in hydrological and geomorphological processes. Therefore, dredging demands an analytical framework that bridges disciplines and spatial scales. Putting dredging research into conversation with scholarship on global shipping, logistics, and port development, we call for an analytical framework that draws upon political ecology and geosocial theory. We use this framework to examine large harbor deepening projects near Savannah, Jacksonville, Mobile, and New Orleans. Each project has been rationalized in terms of accommodating the megaships transiting an expanded Panama Canal and, more generally, linking local and regional economic development to global supply chains. An expanded and comparative framework reveals the geographical scale and variegated politics that characterize navigation dredging today. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Methods