Samantha Muka

In 1979, journalist Anne Simon asked “Who speaks for the coast—and who listens?” According to Simon, a “colossal acquisition of knowledge” about the coast, gathered by an ever-expanding academic, industrial, and government-based community of researchers, was being met with little change in federal policy. But why? This project seeks to answer Simon’s question by tracing the intertwining of conservation and waste management strategies in the New York Bight in the 1960s, when a variety of stakeholders began asking two seemingly opposite questions: how can humans clean up and protect that environment and how can humans more effectively use that space for waste disposal? Those speaking and those listening were often working on both questions at once. The history of these stakeholders and their treatment of the Bight, as both garbage dump and protected space, reflects the duality of human interactions with the sea in the Anthropocene.