The Reef as Rock: The History of Mining & Ecology in Sri Lanka, 1948-1998

• In Event: More-Than-Human Histories of Extraction: Violence and Care in the Technological Landscape

Abstract

Global reef science has not been truly global until rather recently, if at all. Even though Sri Lanka was seen as an island paradise by colonial scientists, and was a common way-station in the journeys of prominent ecologists en route to Australia, little attention was paid to its reefs. This remained true in the immediate wake of independence, when many foreign fisheries experts visited Sri Lanka. But the early postcolonial state, too, had a stake in dismissing what lay at the coast. It spurned local ecological and diving communities in favor of big development projects, and a burgeoning construction industry predicated on coral mining and the production of cement.
In this paper, I argue that Sri Lanka’s reefs must be seen in local, context-specific ways, but also that the local was made global by way of political economy; a “valuation” of the reef that depended on its presence whilst failing to acknowledge it. Beginning with independence, I trace the state’s developmentalist strategies at a time when it truly seemed uncertain how much was known. Mining boomed in the 1960s with the highly-productive Kankesanturai cement factory in the north, disproportionately affecting Tamil coastal communities and fishing labor. In later years, growing environmentalist concern, coastal erosion, and natural disasters would lead to the creation of the Coastal Conservation Department. But environmental damage had already twinned with ethnic strife in a country barreling towards civil war. The environmental consequences of the reef’s varied ontologies were profound: even when the reef was seen, it was as rock, to be mined or dredged for raw materials for cement or semi-precious metals. The epistemic consequences were dire: the Sri Lankan reef as an indeterminate and violent site—at turns living/non-living, land/sea—depends on the contemporary moment for it to be seen as endangered at all.

Author

• Kamil Ahsan, Yale University