Volume Out of Place: Governing and Containing Coastal Contradiction

This article examines how environmental governance in coastal Louisiana mediates the contradictions of development, land loss and restoration through volumetric regulatory regimes. Focusing on efforts to channel and contain oil, gas, sediment, grain, water and pollution, it argues that permitting frameworks treat development and restoration as discrete and governable interventions into the voluminous space of the coast. Ethnographic research conducted with environmental scientists and community organisers illuminates the ways this separation stabilises the coast for capital, authorising certain thresholds of degradation or destruction while rendering their cumulative effects external, accidental, or ‘out of place’. This analysis centres two interwoven cases: efforts to document pollution following Hurricane Ida in 2021, when catastrophic storm damage exposed the leakiness already built into regulatory systems; and opposition in a historically Black community to a proposed grain elevator. In both cases, permitting processes emerge as sites where the limits of volumetric governance are contested.