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Rob Holmes et. al., "Silt Sand Slurry: Dredging, Sediment, and the Worlds We Are Making" (Applied Research & Design, 2023)
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Brett Milligan
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Kelvin Vu
Hi, and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Kelvin Vu and I'm an architect, landscape architect and dancer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Today I'm speaking with Rob Holmes and Brett Milligan, two of the authors, along with Gina Worth, who's not with us today, Of Silt, Sand Slurry, Dredging, Sediment and the Worlds We Are Making, published by Applied Research and Design Publishing in 2023. Rob is Associate professor and Chair of the Undergraduate Landscape Architecture Program at Auburn University. And Brett is professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, and Vice Chair of the Department of Human Ecology. Both are founding members of the Dredge Research Collective. Welcome to the New Books Network, Rob and Brett, and thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today?
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Brett Milligan
Doing.
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Rob Holmes
Doing well. Thanks, Kelvin.
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Kelvin Vu
All right, just to introduce yourselves, how would you briefly describe the work that you do, how you got there, and how this project fits into that work?
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Rob Holmes
Main thing that occupies my time at this point is that here at Auburn, I direct a research lab called the Landscape Infrastructure Design Lab. We conduct research using landscape architectural methods into nature based infrastructure, primarily in coastal and riverine environments. So the overlap with sediment kind of comes in there. That work looks really different at different times in different places. Like right now we're for instance, in Charleston. We're working on a kind of community engaged landscape literacy effort that's kind of aimed at building the underlying support for natural infrastructure approaches. And at the same time, on the Georgia coast, we're working with the Army Corps Savannah District to advance physical and digital modeling methods in support of the design of a new island along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.
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Kelvin Vu
So.
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Rob Holmes
So yeah, that kind of work, which really kind of builds out of and extends the work that Brad and our colleagues have done in the DRC together. Yeah, that's what occupies most of my time. So Siltsand Slurry, in a lot of ways is kind of the story of how we got there. And I'd also say it's kind of a theory of landscape making that underlies a lot of the current work.
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Kelvin Vu
Cool, thanks. And how about you, Brett?
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Brett Milligan
Well, as you mentioned, I'm here at UC Davis and here I direct the Metamorphic Landscapes Lab, which I would say mostly does explore as multi benefit climate adaptation. I'm thinking about that.
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I would say generally what I do or try to do is exploring what landscape architecture might be, what kind of skill sets it might apply, where, and experimenting with that. And so for me, the book and all the things that we did behind that was about really testing the boundaries of the discipline and what it might have to offer in these sedimentary landscapes that we look at. And so that has led me on from there to experiment in other places. And most of my work now is based in the California Bay Delta. That's where most of my stuff is.
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Kelvin Vu
Great, thank you. Let's get into the book. So in the introduction you write, dredging is a clarifying act. It reveals how people intervene in the material flow and deposition of sediments that makes visible the technologies, cultural practices and values that are active in those material effects and feedbacks. Through dredging, we alter, destroy and create landscapes at the interface between land and water, often dramatically. For listeners who may be new to the concepts in the book, what is dredging and sediment and why do they matter? Either one of you can take it and we can just alternate from here.
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Rob Holmes
I can get this one, Brett.
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So dredging is basically the underwater removal of sediments. It happens for both kind of reasons where the removal of sediment is the purpose. So for instance, for kind of clearing navigation channels that ships and also for reasons where obtaining sediment is the purpose. So for instance, in like beach nourishment or marsh creation, dredging is often the mechanism by which the sand or fines that are used to construct those landscapes are obtained. I think for us there are a lot of Reasons why that activity matters. But they maybe start with, like, the kind of core value being not in the mechanical activity itself, but in the kind of landscapes that are produced through that activity. As landscape architects, that's probably really what fascinates and drives us. Those landscapes, they have ecological value, they have recreational value. They're often public landscapes. So they're places that have the kind of cultural and aesthetic significance that any other public landscape might have. Brett mentioned climate adaptation. Certainly, I think we would argue that one of the kind of key currencies of climate adaptation is sediment itself, that the kind of landscapes that are implicated in that work Whenever we're on coasts and rivers, require sediment as a substrate.
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So sediment obtains a lot of its value from its kind of role in producing the landscapes that have the capacity to both kind of adapt to and mitigate some of the consequences of climate change.
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Kelvin Vu
Great, thanks. And for people who aren't, I guess, familiar with landscape architecture, Dredging and sediment are pretty related, if not the same thing as cut and fill right above land and just below water. So you both helped found an organization called the dredge research collective in 2012, which I think unpacks a lot of the difference between these things, but also some of the similarities, and also, as you mentioned, Rob, the cultural landscapes, or just the landscapes in general that are produced by the activity of dredging. So. So you founded the DRC along with Steven Becker and Tim Maley in 2012. How and why did you establish the DRC, and how does the organization's work factor into this book in particular?
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Brett Milligan
Yeah, it's been quite a journey. I think when we started this, it was sort of what we did in our free time. I don't know if we actually have free time, but the way we. Outside of our regular jobs of trying to scratch an itch of some of these other areas of the landscape that were. That were kind of outside the realm of our discipline.
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And we got started with this whole thing around this idea of soft systems in the landscape. It was for a publication at the time, and just really, we just started to look at the magnitude and depth of how humans manipulate sediment. And this geologist we read about talking about humans as moving more sediment than all, you know, landscape natural forces. And so from there, we really got into exploring that. And so we started there, and then that evolved into these dredge fest events. And really, from going from one region to another to try to understand how all this works and all the people who were involved in it and, you know, the army corps, the regulators, all this whole other world that was really outside of the one that we were operating in. And so we were I think at first trying to understand it, fascinated by it, wanting to play a role in it, seeing just the magnitude, the impact of that whole world. And so we started off by trying to learn and trying to understand and see commonalities and differences across different geographies. And that's a lot of what you'll see in the book are these kinds of chapters that look at all these different regions and what we learned from them. And then from there, I think we've. We are ourselves very geographically dispersed. I'm on the west coast, you know, Rob's on, you know, the Southeast. And we've all kind of branched out into our own, I think, ways of doing more and more practice and actually working with these landscapes. And so it kind of went from a more exploratory, documentary, collaborative mode into a collaborative design practices. And so we all kind of do that in different ways now. Some of it's still related to dredge and sediment. For others it's doing other kinds of things. And other domains would be that development or whatever it is. But I would say that was kind of the general arc of how we've developed.
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Kelvin Vu
Thanks. So in the book and. Well, a. I love how you're branching from this kind of almost pilot or set of pilot projects and then as a way to study things and understand things, but then also branching into design practice kind of in the various geographical locations that you're in. But in the book kind of specifically, there's a really fundamental shift of how we look at sediment and the activity of dredging. So from dredging and sediment as waste to designing the sediment and recognizing its beneficial uses. So you write that the elements of the problem are the elements of the solution, which is, I think a lot of people would argue many of the elements of climate adaptation are very much in that sphere of problems and solutions. So how does this overlap of problem and solution both facilitate and complicate rethinking sediment design?
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Rob Holmes
Yeah, I mean, I think one dimension of it.
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Is that it requires really substantial shifts in the way that people think about and conceptualize the issue.
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And that both involves kind of like.
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Habits of.
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Thought, habits of practice on an individual level, but also the kind of.
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Patterns of practice and decision making, regulatory structures at much more institutional levels. So for instance.
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Regulations that govern the placement of sediment into water in most locales in the United States tend to center around, for historic reasons, center around the idea of sediment as a contaminant.
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And that has to do with the origin of our kind of environmental regulatory apparatus in the mid to late 20th century. At a time where concerns around contamination, pollution, chemical issues are really driving a lot of the development of that legal and kind of institutional apparatus. And it happens at a very. For good reasons at the time, kind of. There are concerns about, for instance, unregulated development that's going to infill water bodies and lead to kind of great ecological loss. That's appropriately opposed, but that's also produced institutional bureaucratic regulatory apparatus that's kind of aimed at preventing negative consequences of the placement of sediment into water and not necessarily looking for.
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The kind of benefits or the opportunities that might be associated with that placement. I think that's one that manifests in a lot of different discrete ways and varying geographies, bureaucracies, states. But I think that's one of the big dimensions of that conundrum.
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Brett Milligan
Can I add to what Rob's saying, too? Yeah, of course.
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Kelvin Vu
I just.
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Brett Milligan
I mean, just as a. I really appreciate what Rob said, and I think it's like. It just became. It's so clear you have to change the system. There's no way around it. And it's really trying to figure out where and how can you intervene. Because the system is so encompassing and it doesn't work very well. Whether it's from all the regulatory, bureaucratic stuff that Rob said, or what is valued or not valued or what you advocate for or what techniques are being used or. A lot of what we talk about is this notion of choreography. We can get into that later of, like, just more, like, ways that you can have more foresight and intelligence in how you do this. And so it just became so clear that the problem. You can't. The problem is the system. So all those practices and things that make this go around. And there's just better ways of doing that, but trying to figure out where and how you can intervene, I think.
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Kelvin Vu
Yeah. And something that you both spoke about just now is kind of looking at sediment as something that's a bit more complicated than we've looked at it in the past. Right. It's not just a waste or contaminant. It's not only a beneficial thing. It can be many of these things all at the same time. And oftentimes I think the problem is that it's not in the right place of where we need it to be. Or there's not enough of it in one place, or there's too much of it in another. But there's kind of an overarching logic in which we've looked at sediment and dredging in the past and especially with the work that the Army Corps of Engineers has done, looking at this concept of the least costly alternative as a guide for making decisions about what to do with sediment. So in the book, you quote the 2007 Erie Peer Management Plan writing that the least cost alternatives to dredged material are not necessarily the most cost effective methods. The currently identified least cost method of disposing of dredged materials, which is open water dumping, does not consider the environmental and social costs and does not consider the economic benefits of reuse. And so I'm wondering how does this logic and the dominance of this, the least costly alternative fall short in terms of recognizing the true cost of dredge disposal as well as the opportunity costs of not recognizing beneficial use?
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Brett Milligan
Yeah, I think broadly speaking there's a lot of flawed logic in how cost benefit analysis is done. And the problem is it's typically always been highly reductive and it's very, if I might say, self serving in how the equation is set up of what is accounted for and what isn't. And so a lot of people, I think have come to speak of this as the notion of externalities. So you know, the federal standard, which is what the Army Corps has to adhere to, which is this like, you know, you gotta find the cheapest way to do it, has a whole logic built into it that externalizes environmental costs, that, you know, externalizes impacts to communities that, you know, it's just, it's based on a very limited profit margin, capitalist kind of understanding of the landscape, which leaves out a lot of other things. And so I think if you. And that's both things. But also, I think it also at what timescale is being looked at. So if you look at it in a very short, like we need to find a place to put this stuff, you're not thinking long term about like, okay, where could this stuff be that is going to have benefit in 5, 10 years versus becoming somebody else's problem. So I think the real challenge is how do you really change how you think about these things that's more integrated, more holistic, and also thinks about these things across time, not just like immediate solutions which, you know, our culture has a hard time with that.
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Rob Holmes
Right.
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Brett Milligan
It's all like quick fix. But how do you, how do you really think about that? Like so many things that are done in a quote, efficient way, create massive efficiencies long term that then become somebody else's. Problem.
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Rob Holmes
Yeah, I definitely think that's a huge part of it. There's.
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I think, I think also this kind of.
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Assumption that cost benefit analysis is.
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Objective and that it is a kind of like apolitical means of decision making. That's like. I think that assumption comes out of kind of a technocratic 20th century mindset that says.
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We can set aside the kind of messier work of politics and value judgments and things that are not quantifiable in favor of like being able to make all of our decisions well on the basis of what ultimately becomes a kind of economic analysis. Right. So like we might factor in, I think the better cost benefit analysis that is done factors in ecological and social values and kind of tries to convert those into economic terms. And I'd say like, at some level there's fundamentally like a reduction in loss that happens in that process of conversion.
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That.
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Yeah, that ends up creating a lot of these kind of issues of like passing long term inefficiency and long term problem down the line in the way that Brett was talking about.
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I would say too though, like, on a kind of, from a relatively hopeful perspective, there has been a lot of movement both within the core itself and kind of more broadly in federal and state bureaucracies towards recognizing some of the limitations of the way that both the way that cost benefit analysis has been done and kind of more broadly of. Of that as a tool in general. And there's some very positive targets, like for instance, the core's 70 by 30 target that they set, which is basically like increasing the beneficial use of dredged material to 70% of the core's total dredging work by 2030, which, you know, those are. That's about doubling roughly the percentage that the core beneficially uses. And um, that's. That's kind of pulling some of the emphasis and weight back off of the least cost alternative so that that's not kind of dominating conversations around individual projects in quite the same way that it would have 10 or 15 years ago.
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Kelvin Vu
I feel like there's a lot of, like you said, movement in a direction that's, you know, shifting more towards dynamic relationships to both like cost but also to materials. And what I love about the book is that you bring in a lot of the different factors and the different qualities and characteristics of I guess, that whole sediment cycle. Right. The whole dredge cycle. So thinking about the cultural benefits and ramifications, the aesthetic possibilities as well as the regulations, the policies, the technologies, and kind of unpacking in a really beautiful graphic and is also narrative way, just unpacking all the stories behind these and the politics and the ways in which they really are very historically specific, very contingent right on the context, both geographical as well as temporal dynamics of it.
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Do you have one chapter in the book called Choreographing Sediment, which I think is a really fabulous chapter. So especially for me as a designer and a dancer. But in this chapter you argue that to respond to the multi actor, dynamic and indeterminate qualities of dredging and sediment landscapes, we need to intervene with movement, responsiveness and informed improvisation, which is again kind of going towards this dynamic relationship to things that we are recognizing as increasingly dynamic.
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And I think choreographing sediment is a way to get past just the problem of saying it's complicated. So I really appreciate that. So what do you mean by choreographing sediment and how does it help us think through sediment landscapes differently?
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Rob Holmes
Brett coined the term, so I should let him have the first crack at this.
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Brett Milligan
I don't know, but it's been mutually developed.
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I mean, I think you, I appreciate your take on what you got from the reading, because I think you pretty much covered a lot of it. And I mean, it really is sort of a dance with landscape rather than a command control approach that acknowledges.
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Rob Holmes
All.
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Brett Milligan
These participants that are part of the landscape. Whether that's, you know, the way sediment works, the flow of water, climate.
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All the different people. There's just so many different constituents and agencies and landscape that come together in a way. And it's really the choreography is trying to work with all these different landscape forces and to think about it across time, which is sort of, I think, the essence of choreography. Right. It's like patterned motion over time, how you make bodies move together across duration. And so that was really what we've. Where we were coming at it is how do you try to sort of guide, you know, the formation, creation of landscapes through design effort, without knowing you don't have full control, not expecting that, allowing for some of that, but really trying to guide and work with the forces of landscape rather than, you know, thinking you can arrest change or fully control like that is just, I think, just a very old paradigm that we've all come to understand does not work, actually. You end up having to deal with more force and more change than you had initially. So it's really trying to work with that.
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Rob Holmes
Yeah. I think just to extend the implications of the metaphor, one of the things we really liked about.
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The concept of choreography is that it necessarily implies a kind of openness to observation and adjustment.
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The choreographer and the dancer, for instance, are in a kind of back and forth relationship.
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And I think that seems to us a very appropriate way to think about the relationship between.
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Kind of design and decision making in sedimentary landscapes and that kind of full range of agents that Brett was talking about. Right. That there's. There's kind of direction and intention and decision that happens kind of across that full range. And that the work can actually be much better, much richer, lead to better results if it acknowledges and works with that difference. And that kind of.
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Shared input.
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Kelvin Vu
Reminds me of. I worked with a choreographer once who used to tell us that listening before listening to your body and the context around you before telling your body what to do is kind of the most important thing. And that yielding is such an important skill to be able to. To kind of wield in an everyday practice. So I love this idea of choreographing. I think there is a really beautiful humility to it without reducing things. Yeah, but so you kind of casually mentioned Brett that. Or Rob, you casually mentioned that Brett had coined the term choreographing. Sediment. And I want to just get to this idea of kind of the collaborative nature of this book. So you co wrote it with Gina Worth and Sean Burkholder. Brian Davis and Justine Holtzman also contributed as well as sort of a number of assistants in the graphic production and in the research production. So I'm wondering what was the process of co writing the book and how did it shape the trajectory of the project from the start?
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Rob Holmes
Yeah.
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Maybe the most obvious word for it is long. We took a really long time to write the book together.
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And also I'd say the book was a very Taurus project in that we were doing a lot of other things both on our own, but especially together. Whether that's like dredge fests that happened during the period of the writing of the book. We at one point decided that essentially the book to be kind of satisfactory in providing the kind of conclusion to the argument that we wanted, that we needed to have a strong example to show of kind of what does the approach that we're advocating for look like when it is put into practice. And so that led to us taking basically a full year off of the writing of the book to participate in this design competition in California that became the Public Sediment project.
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So quite porous to a lot of other things that we were doing. But for me, in retrospect, I think the length of the development and the porosity of it were really two of the great strengths that made that kind of project very satisfying. And like.
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I think when we like look back at that period, we could definitely find moments of like, there's always like frustration and tension in working together on things.
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Brett Milligan
Right.
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Rob Holmes
But in retrospect, I think it was a delightful project and I think the fact that we did it together made it much richer in the end.
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Kelvin Vu
That's great. I think. Well, a congratulations on the output of all of that time and porosity. I think it's an amazing book and it includes a lot of different kinds of storytelling. Right. So it includes graphics, visual essays, as well as more reflective writing, interviews, other modes, more expository writing, which I think reflects both the sort of multi author nature of things. But I think also, if I'm reading into it correctly, also the sort of multi audience approach to it, that in the sort of realm of sedimentary design, there's a lot of people involved. Right. Or you're trying to involve a lot of people, which can require some code switching or kind of switching registers for different audiences. So I'm wondering, how did you decide to format the book the way you did and how did you decide to include these various modes and mediums in the book? And how do they reflect this kind of code switching dynamic?
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Brett Milligan
We definitely wanted to have, I think, a diversity of voices and perspectives.
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Within the book, also kind of looking at multiple ways of knowing and exploring and I think also different ways of storytelling because different, you know, the way you tell the story kind of hit people differently and so forth. So we kind of have all of these there in the book. And you can kind of another thing too is we're like, you don't have to read it sequentially. It's kind of different of a book that way. You can just go look at an interview or if you're really interested in technology, go read the technology chapter. And it's kind of designed in a way that you can, you know, find your own entry point. So it's kind of allows, I think, for multiple ways of reading it, which kind of. It's a book about theory of the landscape and making the landscape. But it's also like the book kind of does that itself and the way it's set up, which is part of what I think we were going for. You don't have to like read from front to back to get it. And I'd say with that, each mode kind of gives you different things. And.
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With the visual chapters, we're really trying to tell the story of these regions and how they, you know, what the sediment shed and the choreography is like there and how that's different from another one. And so I think visually maps and a lot of the really beautiful things that Gina created in those chapters are trying to tell the story that way. And then when you, in contrast, then you go into some of these really kind of meaty text chapters that, you know, are a little bit more of like, well, okay, let's talk about this in a sort of theoretical context, what other people have said. And it's a very different mode of delivery and a different type of telling the story through. Through the words. And so. And then we have these other shorter little essays of, you know, like, that are sort of like a, I would say, little provocations or like a little different way of taking it. And so you kind of get pulled all over in a way that I think all those things add up to a greater whole. So that's. That is my interpretation of how the book came together. It kind of offers you a different, you know, there's not one way to read it.
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Kelvin Vu
No, when I first read it, I read it, you know, sequentially, beginning to end. And then when I went back to the book, I just did in the opposite way and it read just as well. And I think, you know, in the ways in, you know, you had kind of motioned with your hand in a meandering river kind of way. And I think the book really does that. It's also what I really love about the book is that it, there's so much information in it, right? There's an incredible sort of breadth and depth of information, but it also feels quite personal. Like each, especially the, actually all of the chapters feel very personal. It feels you can kind of feel a person who wrote it, which I really appreciate, especially in this kind of multi authored way of working.
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One thing I want to unpack is this idea of time and that things work at different timescales, which I think is really a really complicated dynamic and concept to understand. And you wrote in the introduction that one thing we learned is that many sediment systems are formatted for conditions that no longer apply values that have changed in performance, criteria that are outdated. So through each of the chapters you lay out really clearly how ecology and other sciences, policy, institutions, infrastructure, activism and design are all entangled. Yet they are often at odds because of each has its own sense of inertia as well as its own rate of change and development. So over the course of this book and also in the work that you're doing now, how do you mediate these different rates of change to think about different timescales, especially with this kind of impending the climate disaster that's accelerating?
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Rob Holmes
Yeah.
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I know.
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One thing that has been very significant for me. The, the Public Sentiment project is probably like the place where this way of thinking.
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Kind of originated for me, because in that project.
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We were really, I think, confronted by a set of circumstances that when they are projected long enough and considered on a long enough timescale, become kind of overwhelming. Right? The kind of gap between the volumes of sediment available to the kind of wet, marshy fringe of San Francisco Bay and the amount of sediment needed to both maintain existing landscapes and achieve the kind of, I think, appropriate restoration targets that the region has set for itself. There's just such a, such a gap between these two things, right. And it can, I think, be very overwhelming to try to respond to the entirety of that gap, especially when you think about.
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Not merely decadal, but more century length responses to those issues. So I think one of the things that we tried to do very consciously in public sediment was to.
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Kind of work on the problem at the scale of the available responses. Right. And so like, to say that we did not feel a need to solve the entire complex of circumstances.
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For the Bay Area in order to like, make a meaningful contribution. So to think about, like changing the trajectory of something rather than thinking about kind of finishing something, as well as to maybe.
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Be comfortable with responses that make sense on a 20 year, 30 year timescale, and to think of that as a kind of meaningful, achievable goal in which, um, buying two decades of time, three decades of time is actually very.
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Very significant. Right? It's not. It's not nothing. A lot happens in 20 years. A lot of life happens in 20 years.
- [37:31]
Brett Milligan
Keep going with that a little bit. I think it's this. In general, time is plural. Like just this unified notion of time is just. Does not really apply in the landscape. And it's, you know, whether it's like, what is your time of concern when you're designing, like what horizon as well as, you know, what spatial scale you're at, but there's also the time. And you have all these different things interacting in different prospect ways. They unfurl. And I mean, this gets back to our notion of choreography. I think of how do you. You're kind of choreographing multiple rhythms into something and that's what you're trying to do. So I think it's this like, it's really trying to. It's really, I think a set cultural thing. You know, time is this like absolute thing. It's not. It's your perception of it, the ways different things are happening and trying to work with that.
- [38:22]
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- [39:50]
Kelvin Vu
See center for details Inside of I think both of what you were talking about and kind of the plurality of time and also working at the scale of the available.
- [40:03]
Responses. I love both of those phrases. The plurality of time and working at the scale of available responses. I think there's so much kind of wisdom and humility in that. And another thing I really appreciated about the book is that you really talk about sort of democratizing the process and kind of unboxing the black box nature of things. So there's so much about dredging and sediment that are that are really not available or accessible to the public because they're very technical or because, you know, they are obscured for one reason or another. But so later in the book you describe your efforts to build what you call sediment publics through the Dredgefest series, and you also write about how expanding and democratizing the actors in the making of sedimentary landscapes both requires and leads to new aesthetic sensibilities for sediment as infrastructure. So a there's a lot to unpack just in this little in this one sort of sentence. So first, what is Dredgefest? And then how do you understand a sediment public? And then what are these new aesthetic sensibilities for sediment as infrastructure? So all related. But yeah, let's unpack some of that.
- [41:23]
Brett Milligan
Can't remember Maya or Rob, you sure?
- [41:28]
Rob Holmes
What is a Dredge Fest? Well, the Dredge Fests were four events that we organized together with our colleagues in the drc.
- [41:40]
Aimed really at, I think, a for us as a group of kind of landscape architects interested in this world of dredging and sediment. Not totally familiar with it at the outset because this is, you know, these are not topics that are typically at the core of landscape architectural curricula or practice.
- [42:06]
So the first thing that they really were for us was an opportunity to.
- [42:12]
Discussions and activities that would allow us to kind of almost like build a bespoke curriculum for ourselves, like the people we wanted to hear from to Ask them the questions that we wanted to hear answers to. So you could think of them as, like, in a lot of ways, events that were kind of guided by our own curiosity about. Brett referred earlier to kind of the.
- [42:38]
Scale and strangeness of the world of dredging and sediment management. And I think that is, like, that fascination really guided the events. So we were kind of trying to understand that for ourselves. And then at the same time, trying to kind of, like, open that world up to others. Right. So to kind of, through the events, make it possible for others to see the kind of range of activities and circumstances and.
- [43:07]
Strange landscapes that were so fascinating to us.
- [43:12]
They were also an opportunity to kind of put.
- [43:17]
Unexpected partners into dialogue. Right. To have, say.
- [43:25]
The author of a book about kind of the phenomenological experience of.
- [43:34]
These islands that are the artifacts of the creation of the Atlantic intracoastal Waterway in Florida into conversation with.
- [43:44]
An army corps.
- [43:47]
Dredging project manager. And to have a kind of strange discussion where these two people who might work in the same types of landscapes, but see them in very different ways, kind of responding to one another and kind of, I think, kind of working through the process of, like, we work with the same thing, but we see it in such different ways. Yeah. I mean, Brett, you want to talk about sediment publics and aesthetic sensibilities. Sure.
- [44:15]
Brett Milligan
I'm glad you took part of it, because I didn't want to take all three of them.
- [44:21]
I mean, the idea of sediment publics is. I mean, it builds off what we were trying to do with the dredge fest, which was you going into a region and really trying to highlight, like, what's going on with all the sediment. And how are landscapes being destroyed and made through all these processes. And.
- [44:39]
This notion of aesthetics is somewhat being politically based. Like, what do you have access to and what don't you, you know, if you don't have. If you can't experience it, it's, you know, it's. It's off limits in a way. And there's. Sediment is so interesting that way. Because, you know already, if it's underwater and it's granular, it's. It's stealthy and out of sight. So you, you know, how do you even get access to that? Or even, like, trying to walk on a mud flat that you sink in, or, you know, there's a. There's a lack. There's, you know, the question of accessibility. And then you have that, as what Rob was saying, too, around professional siloization or regulation that doesn't even allow you to go to these landscapes and things.
- [45:21]
Rob Holmes
So.
- [45:23]
Brett Milligan
Sediment Publix is really trying to build constituency around understanding, experiencing the importance of sedimentary landscapes. And so I kind of feel like we went from Dredgefest, actually just like trying to extend that broadly into the landscape is I think, what we've all kind of tried to do in a way. How do you, how do you get more access? How through design can you, you know, highlight these things or call attention to them? And so in many ways it's about trying to increase access knowledge of those things through various means.
- [46:04]
Kelvin Vu
I love that you're pitching design and designers as kind of really good players within this idea of building, building sediment publics and building constituencies. And Rob, you had mentioned before or alluded to the fact that a lot of the work in this book isn't sort of classically part of the landscape architecture curricula, and it's not. And the ways in which you guys have been working isn't, you know, the standard or at least when you started it was very much as you said, in the free time on the sort of outskirts and the margins, you know, So I, I had written a question about like, why is that? But I guess I'm more interested now in like, what that looks like looking forward. You know, you had also said that a lot of life happens in 20 years and a lot of life has happened in like, one. So, you know, looking at kind of the ways in which political and technological landscapes have changed drastically in the last year. Right. So I'm wondering how you see kind of this pitch for designers and design within dredging and sediment management. How does that kind of fit into today's or how you understand today's politics and today's landscape and if that has changed in ways that are beneficial, in ways that are a little bit more detrimental. Yeah, I'm just really curious.
- [47:22]
Brett Milligan
Oh, that's a hard question.
- [47:29]
Can we just say some values have shifted and, you know, sustainability is not a top concern right now on popular culture. Profit really is. Oligarchy's in vogue. There are a lot of really tough things that push against a lot of some of the things we're proposing in this book. And I think it really, I hope it's a call to action and a challenge for designers that we have to really push back on some of that because, you know, those, those powers have always been there and.
- [48:04]
And you know, going back to cost efficiency or like how these things are calculated or how they're positioned, you know, there's a way that that's going, you know, we're losing our regulatory agencies where, you know, they're all, you know, federal government is a radically different thing right now. And so I think it, it's a really, really, dare I say, scary and interesting time from a design perspective of what is design now. What actually matters is I think really a hard introspective question. The other thing I would say.
- [48:38]
Rob Holmes
Rob, go ahead.
- [48:40]
Brett Milligan
Automation. Automation is coming to the landscape and how that's going to happen I think is a really interesting thing.
- [48:47]
Rob Holmes
Interesting. Do you mean worry? So.
- [48:51]
I.
- [48:51]
Brett Milligan
Well.
- [48:54]
Nuanced. Nuanced. I think it is.
- [48:57]
Rob Holmes
Okay. I'd probably be comfortable with. Worrisome.
- [49:02]
Yeah, I don't think anything has happened in the last year or I guess two years since the book was published.
- [49:15]
That makes me question or.
- [49:20]
Think that the kind of views that we were advocating for or the kind of insofar as we kind of.
- [49:33]
Describe.
- [49:35]
A set of.
- [49:38]
Forces that were. Have been producing.
- [49:45]
The kind of combination of both.
- [49:50]
Social inequities, economic injustices.
- [49:55]
And kind of broader.
- [50:00]
Landscape and world threatening environmental trajectories. I think that analysis holds pretty well.
- [50:09]
Yeah, certainly like there, there are challenges in terms of like maybe pushing through, through that. But.
- [50:21]
I, I'm inclined to think more that like those challenges are being revealed rather than, or unmasked rather than they are like being created. If that makes sense.
- [50:35]
Kelvin Vu
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think you're definitely right. I think the arguments of the book and all of the strategies that you kind of put forth for designers and for people interested very much hold. Right. Working together, understanding nuance, listening, trying to build constituencies in ways in which we can actually experience the world around us and think about how we might.
- [50:58]
Continue to experience those things. I think they definitely hold. So that's great.
- [51:05]
So I guess on a more hopeful note and to kind of wrap things up, what are some things that maybe you're looking forward to working on right now or kind of coming up for both of you?
- [51:15]
Rob Holmes
Well, I mentioned we're designing an island. We're looking forward to seeing that island hopefully and somewhere within the next two years.
- [51:27]
The probably like that island is part of a larger research initiative called tidelens.
- [51:36]
Which is a partnership between my lab at Auburn and then Brian and Sean, the contributors of those essays, their labs at UVA and Penn respectively. And we Penn's essentially working to, I'd say like the larger purpose of it is through a series of design projects on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts to really kind of try to like refine, codify and be able to share the Tools that we think landscape architects need in order to really be effective in this kind of work of designing with sediment and participating in the construction of natural infrastructure. So I think we've been working on that project for a little over two years now and we're really excited to be moving towards the point where we'll be starting to kind of share results and share work out of the project.
- [52:41]
Kelvin Vu
That's really exciting. How about for you, Brett?
- [52:44]
Brett Milligan
Yeah, I'm kind of similarly in the midst of projects, a couple of them. I think the one that probably occupies the most of my time is.
- [52:56]
A project called just Transitions in the Delta, Drought, salinity and sea level rise. And that's like a UC multi campus grant around climate adaptation. And we're three years in, in a four year project. It's a participatory scenario planning project. And main thing we're looking at is salinity and salinity intrusion into the delta.
- [53:18]
Rob Holmes
Where.
- [53:20]
Brett Milligan
With increasing sea level rise and things. And it's really complex to talk about changing when water is going to actually come or is it going to come as snow or rain and all those influences. You get salt coming into the delta. That salt is really tied to our massive water infrastructure and fresh water supply and all that. But the thing with salinity, it's really interesting, it's so complex, it's tied to everything and all these other climate change impacts and things like that. So we have been working on a set of scenarios of how might you deal with that? And those again are based off of public input, experts and things like that, a very extensive public engagement process. And they're kind of driving our research process and trying to do that as a kind of transdisciplinary project. So I have found that project extremely challenging and I've learned a lot. And I have one more year where we're trying to model hydrodynamically and across different parameters economically, how these different scenarios and what they inform the public or how they might inform public decision making. And then after that, I mean, we're starting to produce some things that we're going to share out. But my hope is when the project completes to then have some time to really unpack and share what I've learned and the ways the project worked, the ways it failed. And Rob knows this already, but I think one problem with design is we like to rah, rah, rah everything we did, right. But I like to point out the things that we didn't because it's what we learned the most from. So I will be trying to think about how I might position that and potentially a next book or something like that.
- [54:58]
Kelvin Vu
Yeah, I really like that kind of understanding the full range of the things that we produce. Right.
- [55:04]
So last question for our listeners. What is a book that you might recommend either about dredging in sediment or unrelated.
- [55:13]
Rob Holmes
I'll say coast related, not about dredging in sediment, but this book, Floating coast by Bathsheba Demuth, it's an environmental history of the Bering Strait.
- [55:26]
I unfortunately didn't read it until after we'd finished the book. I'm sure that it would have found its way into the book in some ways if I had. It was published in 2019. But it is a kind of incredible synthesis of like, the.
- [55:47]
Kind of life of both people and other species around that kind of frozen landscape of the Bering Strait with the kind of historical force of two 20th century kind of technocratic systems, one capitalist and American, the other Communist and Soviet, and the way they kind of interact with that landscape with creatures like whales at Caribou, and of course, with the indigenous people of the Strait as well. So it's a really.
- [56:28]
Incredible work of history and also just like the most delightful read. The language is incredible.
- [56:34]
Kelvin Vu
All right, how about you, Brett?
- [56:36]
Brett Milligan
I'll also start with a historical one, battling the Inland Sea. It's by Robert Kelly and it's not current. It was done in 1989. And I've been going back and rereading it, but it's really about how.
- [56:52]
How the Sacramento Valley or the Central Valley was terraformed. People think it's just the way it is. But flood control, the whole notion of flood control, taming of the Sacramento river, which is one of the most volatile rivers in the country. And it's just a really interesting history. And it kind of reads in a way like science fiction when you read read it. It's just really interesting of just how. Just how California was remade, because I think most people don't see just how the depth of how the state has been engineered. So it's a really interesting history. And then second one I was going to say is this book the Future of A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism. This is, I think, just a really interesting book to read at this time where we're going very much in the opposite direction as a counterpoint to that, was the ones I'd recommend.
- [57:47]
Kelvin Vu
All right, thank you guys so much for the recommendations. And I would definitely put those books in your book in conversation, you know, thinking about books that explain a lot, but that do it in a way that's, you know, beautiful storytelling. Yours also does it in a really beautiful graphic way. So, Rob and Brett, thank you so much for talking with me today and sharing your insights about the book and the project and the process. And congratulations to you and your co authors on the publication of the book. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you.
- [58:18]
Rob Holmes
Likewise.
- [58:19]
Brett Milligan
Likewise, likewise. Thanks for the interest. Appreciate it.
- [58:22]
Kelvin Vu
And finally, thank you to the New Books Network and to all of our listeners. Until next time, take care and enjoy reading.