Marantha Dawkins

Unstable Ecologies: Designing Landscape Dynamics for Climate Adaptation

My research explores how designing landscape dynamics can structure climate futures. Disordered environmental change and extreme coastal pressure have produced landscapes where strict boundaries between time and space scales; and between plant, animal, human, and machine have become incoherent. The technocratic solutionism that has traditionally characterized protection against coastal change flattens the challenges of uncertain landscapes into inflexible infrastructures and rigid optimization processes, but the medium of global change is a world teeming with complex ecological relationships. Because vulnerability to climate change unrolls in uneven and unstable ways, climate adaptation must be informed by studies of specific ecological interactions.

The inherent complexity of landscape change makes it a dynamic medium for ecosystem and climate reorganization. Designing effective infrastructures requires a careful tuning to space and time scales, in both vibrant presents and uncertain futures. This tuning calls for epistemological and methodological shifts: a living and changing, rather than stable and mechanistic, model for adaptation and evolution. My work explores the role of climate models, the ideology of climate risk, theories of ecological complexity, and nature-based infrastructural techniques through applied experiments that test scales, media, and methods for coastal climate adaptation. These experiments span from computational algorithms for agent-based ecological evolution to submergent oceanic landforms for coastal defense. The raw materials of these ecological assemblages – mud, roots, hydrological forces – are held together in my work as synthetic wholes with the capacity for self-organization and patterned progression.