The Savannah Harbor Expansion Project, a billion-dollar effort to improve port access for huge containerships by dredging the Savannah River estuary, was completed in 2022. It was a typical harbor deepening project in many ways. The Georgia Ports Authority, state and local governments, and the private sector hoped the project would drive the growth of Savannah’s logistics hub—already among the largest in the United States—and, by extension, economic development. But one thing made this megaproject stand out: half of the billion-dollar budget was dedicated to an array of measures designed to mitigate its anticipated environmental impacts. The river was rerouted. A tract of wetlands was purchased and protected to replace those expected to be lost due to rising salinity. A fish passage was planned 170 miles upriver to offset the loss of critical sturgeon habitat in the estuary. A hundred-million-dollar oxygen injection system was installed so that the river would meet baseline legal water quality standards.
What, exactly, is environmental mitigation? From the Latin word meaning soothe or alleviate, mitigation signals providing relief or lessening the trouble caused by something.1 Today, that can be traffic, violence, noise, cognitive bias, disease, or environmental damage. In contemporary environmental management, the term refers to two different modes of intervention. The first encompasses activities intended to minimize the impacts of calamitous events like hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts on human communities. Crucially, this mode of mitigation—preparedness—is not focused on preventing disasters. It is, as Andrew Lakoff argues, a government rationality that deploys imaginative practices like simulation and scenario-building to generate anticipatory knowledge about vulnerabilities and minimize potential damage.2 The second mode of mitigation encompasses efforts to manage routine environmental impacts associated with development. In many countries, laws and regulations require environmental impact assessments and mitigation plans before a proposed action (like a harbor deepening project) can proceed. What these two modes of mitigation share is a temporal orientation: the object is damage that has not yet occurred—and, ideally, will not occur.
The environmental humanities provide conceptual tools that might enrich scholarly and public conversations around mitigation by illuminating the two-way traffic between anticipated futures and the mitigated present. Inspiration can be found in how humanistic inquiry and critique have informed conversations about ecological restoration. While many restorationists are forward-looking, restoration is by definition concerned with relationships between the present and the past. For example, the choice of a restoration baseline (defined historically, biologically, or functionally) raises questions of value and interpretation. When should a landscape or ecosystem be restored to? Before people? Colonialism? Modern industry? Why then? By grappling with how—and for whom—the past is brought into the present, historians and ethicists have revealed the assumptions that underpin restoration efforts, making them subject to deliberation.3 I believe that we should think about environmental mitigation along similar lines.
Environmental restoration and mitigation are often lumped together in the lexicon of environmental management, but they have distinct temporalities. While restoration signals a return from the present to an earlier state, mitigation implies a different backward motion: from a damaged (but still unrealized) future to the present. Here, the goal is to secure the status quo. For example, “no net loss” is a policy goal for wetlands, biodiversity, and habitat mitigation in a number of countries.4 The management of loss depends on models and simulations that make the potential impacts of a project or action legible and, thus, governable. By means of anticipatory practices, the potential environmental futures attached to multiple scenarios are brought into the space of the present in ways that shape project planning, political deliberations, and ecologies.5
To make sense of our mitigated present—what Anna Tsing might call the “not-yet”—we must grapple with the assumptions, values, and priorities that underpin the environmental impact assessments and models that make potential futures actionable now.6 Some are explicit, others tacit. Which life-forms and environmental entities are (not) candidates for assessment and intervention in the first place? Which, among the chosen, are prioritized for robust forms of protection and expensive interventions versus looser forms of care? In the case of Savannah, for example, we might contrast the extensive mitigation to maintain sturgeon habitat and dissolved oxygen levels in the river with more limited interventions to protect striped bass and air toxics around the port. As this suggests, we should ask both whether mitigation measures meet their stated objectives and how the mitigation process redistributes ecological burdens and benefits.7
I find it useful to conceptualize environmental mitigation as a form of anticipatory repair.8 Purposefully contradictory, this phrase captures the knotted temporalities that characterize mitigation processes and outcomes. While some mitigation efforts focus on avoiding or minimizing anticipated damage, many work by predicting the impacts of a project and then attempting to offset them through equivalent gains. Consider the “mitigation sequence” or “mitigation hierarchy.” Encoded in European, US, and Australian environmental law, this ethical and procedural standard proceeds in three stages.9 First: seek to avoid adverse environmental impacts by seeking alternative sites or solutions. Second: design and execute projects to minimize adverse impacts. Third: where impacts are unavoidable and minimization is inadequate, compensate. This final option—compensatory mitigation—includes efforts to replace lost or damaged entities through restoration, preservation, or offsetting. A last resort in theory, compensation is common in practice and emblematic of a transformative mode of anticipatory repair that effectively expands the scope of intervention, rather than reducing it.
With this in mind, let’s return to the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project. Recall that the US Army Corps of Engineers proposed a complex plan to mitigate the anticipated damage of dredging the Savannah River estuary. The plan was informed by computer models that predicted changes in key environmental parameters (salinity, dissolved oxygen, and temperature) and potential impacts on resources like wetlands and fisheries for various project alternatives. Some major mitigation proposals—rerouting the river and installing the oxygen injection system—were then added to the models. But even after modelers accounted for those minimizing measures, the predicted impacts remained significant. Per the mitigation sequence, the Corps of Engineers was required to conduct compensatory mitigation. A tract of wetlands was purchased and a fish passage was planned to offset the remaining losses. Over time, the mitigation became a parallel infrastructure project, just as expensive and potentially transformative as dredging the harbor. How, then, do we grapple with the externalities and second-order effects of mitigation itself? Even if the efforts to mitigate damage in Savannah achieve their objectives, one wonders about the unpredictable ways that efforts to stabilize the environment will change it. What will survive in a deep-dredged, highly mitigated river estuary? What will die? What will flourish?
Notes
Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “mitigation.”
These problems are thoughtfully explored in Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species, and Hennessy, On the Back of Tortoises. See also Cronon, “Riddle of the Apostle Islands”; Jeon and Kang, “Restoring and Re-restoring the Cheonggyecheon”; Hall, Restoration and History.
On the significance of anticipation as a mode of planning and governance, see Adams et al., “Anticipation.” On anticipatory practices and the future in environmental politics, see Randle and Barnes, “Liquid Futures”; Haines, “Imagining the Highway”; Weszkalnys, “Anticipating Oil.” For an introduction to environmental futures, see the Living Lexicon entries by Granjour and Salazar, “Future,” and Mathews and Barnes, “Prognosis.”
Even if it is never realized, the potential frontier, project, or damage has material implications; see Tsing, Friction.
For an in-depth discussion of these questions, see Carse, “Ecobiopolitics.”
On environmental repair, see Crosby and Stein, “Repair.” Repair and maintenance have become the subject of lively conversations in the social sciences and history. See, e.g., Jackson, “Rethinking Repair”; Ramakrishnan, O’Reilly, and Budds, “Temporal Fragility”; Russell and Vinsel, “After Innovation.”
