The Daily Bulletin Archive

Please join the Biology Department and the Great Lakes Center today, April 10, for the seminar “Anthropocene Lakes: A New Hydrological Regime and the Redevelopment of Buffalo’s Outer Harbor,” led by Phillip Campanile, a Ph.D. candidate and graduate student instructor at the University of California Berkeley, at 3:00 p.m. in Bulger Communication Center 216. Attendees are welcome to arrive at 2:30 p.m. to enjoy coffee and cookies before the seminar begins.

Abstract
Ecologists now recognize that climate change has generated a “new hydrological regime” across the Great Lakes. From the perspective of human geography, this case study of Buffalo’s Outer Harbor examines articulations between the new hydrological regime, post-industrial redevelopment, and the region’s settler-industrial past. Since 2013, semiannual polar vortices have instigated a sharp rise in lake water levels, producing several record high levels. Combined with an increase in extreme wind events, high water levels have supercharged Lake Erie’s seiches—wind-generated wave events. Seiche waves tend to funnel directly toward Buffalo and cause significant damage across the waterfront. Buffalo’s manmade Outer Harbor was originally built to accommodate shipping traffic, and while it no longer serves that purpose, it does protect downtown against seiche damage. Environmentalists have recently proposed to develop the Outer Harbor into a nature-based solution: a wetland and barrier island that doubles as a resilient coastline and public park; however, a development corporation manages the 200-acre Outer Harbor and plans to turn it into a housing colony. This talk—based on interviews, fieldwork, participant observation, and archival research—ties Buffalo’s urban ecology together with its growth machine politics, demonstrating that a new hydrological regime is simultaneously a political and ecological phenomenon. In light of this political ecology, this talk argues for a place-based approach to the Anthropocene and puts forth a critical interpretation of restoration ecology, which gears ecological redevelopment in Buffalo toward a more just horizon.