Aquapelagic Entanglements in the Panchagangavali Region

The Panchagangavali River Basin System (PRBS) is thriving with biological diversity and human communities that depend on the rich biocultural and biogeochemical processes of the tides and rain and are vital for absorbing inundations and other hydrological functions. In recent years, the PRBS has been facing dramatic transitions—climate change-related events, intense infrastructural development and aggressive forms of tourism brought in through a new Master Plan 2031. With new development projects, situated sustainable practices are being marginalised and rich nature-culture relations are threatened by new hard infrastructures that are destabilising functional intertidal/estuarine and riverine ecosystems vital for biodiversity and separating communities from their livelihoods. Coastal infrastructures are threatening the main shoreline and estuary, a critical nesting habitat for olive ridley turtles. Movement of soils from the mountains to the coast to make developable land from the wetlands is damaging these wetscapes, home to and their human and other-than-human inhabitants, while the Coastal Zone Management Plan seems inadequate for the environment. We attribute these dissonances to the practice of mapping that constructs information in a drawing formed by a distanced view from above, leaving out dynamics of a watery world. We position maps as inherited forms of colonial representations of places, instrumental in the planning practice to designate land uses and design policy for management of land and resources. As maps and plans are a mere snapshot in time of spatial utilisation, they omit spatial, temporal and material changes. This paper stresses the need to privilege environmental processes as underpinnings for development and conservation, so that the environment can be sustained. In this paper, we respond with different ways of representing complexities on the ground, through fieldwork and synthesis that offer new readings and documentation of relations to be considered for conservation and development.