Sand-Hungry: Accumulations, Erosions, and the Self-Feeding Logic of Beach Renourishment

Abstract

This paper interrogates the metaphor of beach renourishment to show how this common coastal engineering practice feeds its own logic. In a coastal town in Florida, renourishment (the practice of dredging sand to combat erosion) shores up the coastline materially and, importantly, politically, as a wider beachfront protects coastal property, heightening home values and incentivising development. Accumulations, of sand and capital, come with their correlative erosions, of corals, invertebrates, and social relations in town. Thinking with the concept of metabolism, this paper argues that renourishment, like other modes of capitalist production, compels its own “systematic restoration” (Marx 1976; Capital, Volume 1). Renourishment is self-reinforcing, an insatiable hunger for sand and capital that locks the town in an ecologically damaging cycle of infrastructural repair, a sand trap. Climate change enlarges this cycle, worsening erosion while also being deployed locally to argue for more renourishment, recasting it as a mode of “climate adaptation”.