The ecobiopolitics of environmental mitigation: Remaking fish habitat through the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project

Abstract

Environmental mitigation has become a catch-all term for efforts to avoid, minimize or compensate for the adverse impacts of development. Through an analysis of the expensive and complex plan developed to mitigate the anticipated impacts of deepening Savannah Harbor, I develop an ecobiopolitical approach to mitigation. Environmental mitigation is triage, involving difficult choices about which entities are worthy of concern and, thus, candidates for intervention – and, by extension, which are not. It involves decisions about which among the chosen deserve strict protection and which merit looser forms of care. As these processes move to center stage in twenty-first-century governance and politics, it has become important to understand what kinds of environments mitigation generates. What survives? What dies? What flourishes? This article focuses on initiatives designed to maintain minimally suitable conditions for non-human life. Insomuch as the object of habitat mitigation is the animal milieu, rather than the body or population, it can be understood as a form of ecobiopolitics. By contrasting the projected fates of three fish in the post-mitigation ecology of the Savannah River, I argue that the ecobiopolitics of habitat mitigation can be conceptualized at four registers. The first, comparity, highlights the value-laden processes through which some entities become candidates for mitigation and others do not. The second, hierarchy, underscores how candidates for mitigation are ranked in ways that shape the interventions pursued. The third, nonfungibility, foregrounds how problems of commensuration are negotiated in mitigation practice. The fourth, overflow, emphasizes how mitigation aimed at one entity can lead to other ecological changes.