Renewable Reefs

Creating "useful" resource outputs from otherwise "empty" or "functionless" marine space is a defining rationale for artificial reef development. The Museo Atlantico generates dive tourism revenue from a purportedly "empty" patch of sand, traditional Japanese fishing rigs create new habitats for fish that expand the harvesting capacity along the shoreline, and landfills or coastal expansion …

Coda

I didn’t think I’d be back to Lanzarote, ever. It was one of the few ostensibly permanent goodbyes I was willing to let myself make last year, or at all, really. Maybe that’s why it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. In the not-time of the internet and this blog, Lanzarote was my …

Resilience

Resilient. It's a word I use a lot. I picked it up for work, really. In terms of climate change and coastal development, resilience is a term to describe and deploy socio-ecology. How to we make life, animal or vegetable and everything else, last in some recognizable form in the face of both slow environmental degradation and …

Art Islands

Art Islands: Ecological Thought and Mass Tourism in the Redesigned Canary Islands When modern artist and architect Cesar Manrique returned home to Lanzarote, the northernmost of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, after a twenty-year sojourn abroad to study modern art in 1964, he returned to an island in flux. Energized by a …

Brexit at depth, or Building Sovereignty

If you thought you were going to get a comprehensive understanding of Britain's recent disavowal of the European Union here then you, dear reader, have been duped by a pun masquerading as clickbait. I can always count on puns.    I am not qualified to explain or predict the impacts of Britain's exit, but I …

Las Salinas de Janubio

Welcome to Las Salinas de Janubio, a salt farm on the Western coast. Like the senmaida of Japan's Noto Peninsula, the salt fields are an agricultural heritage site. It has fewer visitors, however, and I'm not sure why. Las Salinas has neat squares of my favorite colors, celadon and rust and nothing quite white, and …

Landed, VII: Lanzarote, Canarias

The last site, tying it all together.

After China

The last days in China were a blur. With only a week off in-between the installation of the nursery and the arrival of TNC's Global and China Board Members, we all took breaks and time to explore. Except Jun. Jun doesn't really "take breaks."  The board arrived and was hosted by the developer sponsoring, in …

Wet Picket Fence, Aquaculture Lawns

A late afternoon in a village sitting on aquaculture pens.

Wuzhizhou

Mass tourism and Chinese diving