Shifting rocks, shifting risks?
Along the world’s coastlines, the effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, as well as man-made disasters that accelerate coastal erosion, pose major challenges to the well-being of coastal communities threatened by these coastal risks. In response to coastal erosion and flooding, hundreds of kilometres of India’s coastline have been armoured by dumping rocks to create sea walls. Especially after the 2004 tsunami, which devastated many coastal areas, hard engineering options were promoted by both governments and development agencies to control erosion and protect against future tsunami disasters. While these coastal protection measures have often accelerated erosion and beach loss, the consequences for the many quarry sites remain largely hidden and under the radar.
This series of photographs explores these transformed landscapes, which form the backbone of coastal defence, and provides an insight into the realities of transferring large granite boulders from one ecosystem to another. The underlying processes of transformation are linked to various lobbies as the driving forces behind many interventions without a scientific basis and without consultation with local communities. Because of the demand for more stone, many quarries in southern India are being leased, cutting into agricultural land, with more and more trucks dominating the scene. But in the name of corporate social responsibility (CSR), water is being pumped out of the open pits to grow trees in the increasingly dusty area. On the coast, sand, moved by wind and currents, continues to sink rocks into the sea, creating a ‘sustainable business model’ for more rock extraction in the hinterland. Contractors, engineers and local politicians profit from the dangers of the coast.
The project also focuses on traditional fishermen who depend on access to the beach for their livelihoods. Beach space is needed for boat landing, repair and maintenance, catch drying, net hauling and mending, as well as auctioning and selling fish. However, the construction of seawalls forces fishermen to deal with rocks in their workplace, which often makes venturing out to sea more precarious. While seawalls protect, they also disconnect from the land-sea interface, raising questions of protection versus identity for the fishing communities affected. This series was shot in the Pondicherry region of the Coromandel Coast, where rapid coastal erosion and cyclones have led to a devastating history and vicious cycle of displacement of fishing communities and extraction of rock to stabilise a highly dynamic coastal environment.
Related paper: Disrupted Sand Flows, Artisanal Fishers, and the Making of Coastal Protection in Southern India
Bio
Dennis Schüpf is a documentary photographer and environmental justice researcher concerned with the
attempt to visualize socio-natures, revealing power relations that form contested land- and seascapes. In his pictures, these spaces appear to be deeply inscribed in the identities of people struggling for their
livelihoods in the face of natural resource exploitation. He has a degree in International Development
Studies (M.A) and is a PhD candidate at IDOS (German Institute for Development & Sustainability)
studying the implications of coastal sand extraction in the context of climate change adaptation.
