Slippery ontologies of tidal flats

Abstract

Tidal flats are a type of coastal space that flood at high tides and are exposed at low tides—not quite land or sea. Distinct from open waters or seabeds, tidal flats’ in-betweenness gives them particular materialities that constantly frustrate our efforts to know them. Inspired by the provocation of recent scholarship on “wet ontologies” while simultaneously recognizing the nuances within water worlds, I argue for the slippery ontologies of tidal flats and explore the implications of this approach. Specifically, this paper shows how tidal flats’ dynamic and ambiguous materialities resist attempts to place them into modern knowledge systems.

Drawing upon the particular case of South Korea’s tidal flats, called getbol, I first interrogate the in-betweenness of tidal flats, a major source of their material and conceptual slipperiness. I then discuss the similarities and differences between tidal flats and other types of land–water spaces. Next, through several interviews with those who produce modern scientific knowledge of getbol, I examine how tidal flats’ unique compositions interfere with modernity’s efforts to measure their boundaries, matter, and verticality. I highlight how both non-humans and humans contribute to tidal flats’ slipperiness. Finally, I show how the slippery nature of tidal flats has threatened their survival. In South Korea alone, more than half the tidal flats were removed due to reclamation efforts in the past century. In this context, I contend that fully embracing tidal flats’ slippery ontologies may prevent them from further endangerment.

Keywords

Wet ontologies tidal flat South Korea Yellow Sea land–water spaces

Introduction: Tidal flats, another water world

“Water worlds” are gaining attention in human geography. Rather than treating the oceans and seas as an inferior counterpart to dry lands, recent scholarship on these spaces is “turn[ing] to the ocean itself: to its three-dimensional and turbulent materiality, and to encounters with that materiality, in order to explore how thinking with the sea can assist in reconceptualising our geographical understandings” (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 247–248). This new emphasis on the materialities of water worlds not only expands the field’s theoretical and empirical spectrum beyond a “de facto territorial study” (Anderson and Peters, 2014: 3) but also strengthens larger currents of the “ontological turn” or “material turn” in the social sciences (Bakker and Bridge, 2006; Bennett, 2010; Dittmer, 2014; Escobar, 2007). Thinking with ontology, i.e. the study of being-in-the-world, shifts the subject matter from how knowledge is socially or culturally constructed to how knowledge and power affect and are affected by the particular materialities of beings (Anderson and Peters, 2014; Blaser, 2009; Yates et al., 2017).

The rising wave of critical marine scholarship has the potential to challenge modern thought that prioritizes singular and objective knowledge over multiple, disputable knowledges (Boucquey et al., 2016; Jensen, 2020; Martin et al., 2007; Probyn, 2018). Modern knowledge systems have secured knowledge in a stable form so that it can be abstracted, accumulated, and generalized. Anna Tsing explained this in terms of scalability: “the ability to make one’s research framework apply to greater scales, without changing the research questions, has become a hallmark of modern knowledge” (Tsing, 2015: 38). Others have made similar observations, especially in science and technology, that solidified knowledge, rendered comparable and transferable, claims authority over other forms of knowledge produced by indigenous people, citizen-scientists, more-than-humans, etc. (Bobbette, 2018; Haraway, 2016; Reddekop, 2014). As Tsing and others argued, however, such knowledge systems are not limited to certain fields. Modernity itself is premised on the idea of stability, which then allows for clean divisions of knowledge and judgment of what is true or false.

In this light, Steinberg and Peters’ seminal work on “wet ontologies” (2015) has demonstrated how water worlds can expose the limits of modern knowledge and help us imagine new understandings of space and power. For example, the immense volume of seawater in the ocean and its liquid properties make us more attentive of the limited applicability of certain geopolitical, economic, and administrative lines drawn on sea surfaces (e.g. Acton et al., 2019; Bear and Eden, 2008). In turn, the oceanic logic of volume, radically different from its terrestrial counterpart, can offer us a new grammar to express how state or supranational power operates (Elden 2013). Steinberg and Peters’ open-ocean-oriented wet ontology, for example, suggests numerous other materialities that we can think with, such as churning, drifting, and turbulence.

Inspired by their provocation, this paper further explores water world ontologies—but not based on the open oceans. After all, Steinberg and Peters’ version of wet ontologies opens the door to vastly diverse water worlds. Pelagic oceans, deep ocean plains, ridges, trenches, and continental slopes show considerably varied physical/biological/biogeochemical materialities. Among these plural worlds, this paper focuses on the spaces bordering between land and sea, which I call “land–water spaces”. More specifically, I examine tidal flats. Interrogating tidal flats’ materialities and how they challenge modern knowledge, I propose a more “slippery” version of wet ontology that takes in-betweenness seriously as an analytical lens.

Tidal flats are dynamic zones that change forms from water to land every day. They are truly wet spaces that are not entirely fluid and free-flowing, but still soaked in water, viscous, and muddy (Mathur and Da Cunha, 2009). Governed by tidal forces that bring regular flooding, tidal flats are distinct from other supratidal, subtidal, or predominantly vegetated land–water spaces, e.g. sand dunes, salt marshes, and seagrass beds. There are particular material properties that characterize tidal flats such as “sticky”, “stuck”, or “sinking”. Among them, I deliberately elevate the term “slippery” to argue for a slippery ontology of tidal flats.

By slippery ontologies, I suggest two related dimensions of tidal flats. First, tidal flats are slippery in a literal sense; their muddy surfaces preclude walking on them identically to other surfaces. To experience them requires different efforts than for open sea or dry land. Second, I use “slippery” in a metaphorical sense. Slipperiness symbolizes how tidal flats’ particular materialities constantly escape our efforts to know them. Slippery ontologies refer to the ways in which the dynamic and ambiguous nature of tidal flats resist placement into stable knowledge systems. They are not merely difficult to understand—they constantly undermine knowledge secured in a fixed form.

Historically, the slippery nature of tidal flats has worked adversely to their own survival. The fact that tidal flats are hard to comprehend—their unknowability—led to subjecting them to modern attempts to stabilize the land–sea boundaries. Reclamation—a contentious term implying that humans have the natural right to “claim” the sea to create dry land, fish farms, artificial lakes, etc.—has destroyed tidal flats in major deltaic regions of the world (Sengupta et al., 2018, 2019). In South Korea, for example, more than half the tidal flats have been reclaimed over the past century (Choi, 2014; Murray et al., 2014; Yim et al., 2018). In countries such as China, the United Arab Emirates, and Nigeria, profit incentives are turning tidal flats into waterfront condos, malls, parks, and various tourist destinations at an unprecedented pace (AlShehabi and Suroor, 2016; Burt, 2014; Burt and Bartholomew, 2019; Choi, 2019a). Not surprisingly, tidal flats are under threat globally (Murray et al., 2019).

To defend tidal flats from further endangerment, this paper contends that we have to fully embrace their slippery ontologies, rather than dismissing or being disinterested in them. By sketching the conceptual and empirical foundations for the slippery ontologies of tidal flats, I follow in the footsteps of Lahiri-Dutt, who advocated “a flexible or ‘wet’ theory that does not pretend to be universal, that can accommodate flux, and that is contextualized in locational terms and comfortable with empirical facts” (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014a: 505). From this wet theory perspective, I consider tidal flats a geographically and politico-economically situated object of study. While recognizing that tidal flats in different places and contexts have their own stories—and ontologies—to tell, this paper focuses on getbol,¹ South Korea’s tidal flats (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Hwado tidal flat, South Korea (credit: author).

This paper is structured around two areas of exploration. First, I interrogate the in-betweenness of tidal flats, a major source of their material and conceptual slipperiness. I show that tidal flats are essentially defined by in-betweenness. This in-betweenness is bound up with the movements of both water and time, giving rise to tidal flats’ “mobile physicality” (Ryan, 2016: 41). By comparing getbol with chars, I discuss getbol’s distinct characteristics. Second, I illustrate how tidal flats’ unique compositions interfere with modernity’s efforts to measure their boundaries, matter, and verticality. In the stories I offer, tidal flats continually escape from the familiar logics of land or open seas. Importantly, they illustrate that living beings, both humans and non-human, also constitute tidal flats’ slipperiness. I conclude by discussing how the slippery ontologies of tidal flats may be able to encourage “diverse representations [that] may support the adoptions of more targeted and adaptable regulatory measures” (Acton et al., 2019: 98).

Methodologically, this research engages with those who produce modern scientific knowledge of getbol. From 2016 to 2019, I had formal and informal conversations with marine scientists, government officials, and environmental activists in getbol science and governance. I have also attended a number of scientific and policy workshops and conferences including the Yellow Sea Ecosystem Symposium and the marine ecosystem service-based spatial analysis & management workshop. In those meetings, I observed how the participants’ knowledge of tidal flats was produced, established, challenged, or discarded. I also paid attention to how the materialities of tidal flats challenged scientists’ fieldwork and experiments. My prior experience as a conservation coordinator of an international Yellow Sea conservation project and my continuous engagement with Yellow Sea conservation practitioners have also contributed to this paper’s conception and development.

Neither land nor sea, or both? The in-betweenness of tidal flats

What is a tidal flat? A slippery ontology acknowledges that tidal flats are ambiguous beings, difficult to grasp in simple terms. It begins with understanding where they are. In our geographic imaginary, the boundaries between land and sea are often thought of as a line. Consider “coastlines”, represented on maps as solid lines that clearly delineate the two spaces. This “longstanding binary between the ‘land’ and ‘sea’” (Anderson and Peters, 2014: 5), however, fails to recognize the porousness, dynamics, and multiplicity of the spaces between land and sea. In this imaginary, the in-between zones “characterized by an ever-changing interplay of land and water” (Krause, 2017: 403) are rendered invisible.

Tearing open the coastlines, we find two-dimensional “land–water spaces”. This term departs from the familiar term “wetlands” that immediately arouses a terrestrial sensibility. Land–water spaces are liminal water worlds that constantly change shape. As such, they present materialities that are different from open oceans, which are “indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual reformation” (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 248). Land–water spaces are shaped and reshaped by multiple beings: rivers, waves, winds, tides, rain, plants, bedrocks, etc. Yet, these spaces are not only governed by non-human processes; human-induced processes such as “flooding, draining, drying and irrigating, sinking, silting, sedimentation, channeling, erosion, and reclamation” (Krause, 2017: 403) also affect their forms and compositions.

The study of land–water spaces was pioneered by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, who was particularly fascinated by “chars”, temporary islands that seasonally rise and disappear in the Bengal Delta. Taking chars as a case, Lahiri-Dutt laid out a conceptual foundation to see land–water spaces as, first, hybrid environments that are malleable, diffuse, and elusive and, second, historical processes that reflect the changes in a society’s political economy and governance system (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014b; Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta, 2013). Lahiri-Dutt’s wet theory offers an inspiration to those who want to think with land–water spaces. Yet, with a focus on materialities, I must dig deeper because land–water spaces are simultaneously composed of multiple water worlds. This is how I arrived at a particular land–water space: tidal flats.

Modern science defines tidal flats as an in-between coastal zone:

A coastal zone under tidal influence between [emphasis added] open sea and land, which is flooded by sea water regularly twice a day in a ca. 12 hours cycle; Area between [emphasis added] the average lowest and highest sea water level at low tide and high tide. (EU’s Copernicus: Europe’s eyes on Earth, n.d.)

In-betweenness is a definitive characteristic of tidal flats. As such, the presence of tidal flats is always tied up with the movement of water. In other words, their spatial ranges are determined by tides constantly in motion. Given that the tides fully expose and fully submerge their ground twice every day, tidal flats are bound up with time too: we might just as easily ask when tidal flats are. In both spatial and temporal terms, tidal flats do not stay still.

As inherently relational beings, many of tidal flats’ dynamic materialities derive from this in-betweenness. The topologies of tidal flats are distinguished from the topologies of fluid and fire, which Law and Mol have suggested as spatial forms of technoscience objects (Law and Mol, 2001). Neither “fluid constancy, movement rather than stasis” nor “discontinuous transformation as a flickering relation between presence and absence” (Law and Mol, 2001: 615–616), tidal flats transform gradually with rhythms and patterns. Given that the tides are governed by the gravity of the sun and the moon, tidal flats are also a rare place where the extra-planetary forces at work can be observed with our bare eyes (Jones, 2011; Steinberg and Peters, 2015). As they are the very border zone that is neither land nor sea, or a simultaneous both, we may call tidal flats a “third space” (Oslender, 2019; Soja, 1996).

Tidal flats are among the less well-known land–water spaces. By contrast, river deltas have raised considerable scholarly attention (e.g. Anthony et al., 2010; Gagné and Rasmussen, 2016; McLean, 2011; Morita and Jensen, 2017; Raffles, 2002; Raffles and Prins, 2003; Richardson, 2016; Taylor, 2014). River deltas and tidal flats are different: one cannot be reduced to the other in terms of scale or composition. Yet, they partially overlap geographically and share similar characteristics. Proposing an “amphibious anthropology”, Krause (2017) explained the “multiple, simultaneously social and hydrological dynamics” of river deltas (Krause, 2017: 405), where the interplay and intermix of humans and non-humans is amplified. Also, Oslender (2016, 2019) termed a river delta on Colombia’s Pacific coast an “aquatic space”, defining it as “an assemblage of relations resulting from human entanglements with an aquatic environment characterized by intricate river networks, significant tidal ranges, and labyrinthine mangrove swamps” (Oslender, 2019: 1691). In particular, Oslender showed that this aquatic space is deeply political, which in the particular context of Colombia “has informed the political organization of Afro-Colombian communities in the region in a conflict with capitalist modernity, which, crucially, is not merely about land rights and resource extraction but an ontological conflict over ways of being in the world” (Oslender, 2019: 1691). These characteristics apply to tidal flats as well.

Given that land–water spaces are place-specific entities, where geographic materialities and local contexts are deeply intertwined, the categories of river deltas and tidal flats are too general to make comparisons. Acknowledging that “the ontology of mud is place-specific” (Blavascunas, 2017: 260), I instead juxtapose chars and getbol to highlight the particular characteristics of getbol.

Chars are a predominant estuarine delta form of the Bengal Delta, which became an inspiration for Lahiri-Dutt’s wet theory. Getbol are South Korea’s predominant tidal flat form concentrated along the Yellow Sea coasts. At a glance, chars and getbol show strikingly similar properties. Both chars and getbol are dynamic “hybrid environments” constituted by natural and social processes. Also, both are “historically shaped and culturally constituted” (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014a: 509); they are products of colonial and postcolonial modernity, which has played important roles in forming the Indian and the South Korean nation-states (Choi, 2014; Lahiri-Dutt, 2014a; Mukherjee and Ghosh, 2020). The people who live on chars present certain temporal rhythms that correspond with the chars’ seasonality (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta, 2013), just as the people who make use of getbol learn tidal clocks to know when to enter and when to leave tidal flats (Kim, 2010).

Despite these similarities, chars and getbol are remarkably different. In terms of geomorphological formation, chars rise above the high tides and become vegetated, after which landless people come to live on them. Getbol lose their character when permanently exposed above water and predominantly vegetated. While they are densely used for fishing and mariculture, getbol have not been inhabited due to their muddy, sinking grounds. Also, chars are predominantly governed by the ferocity of rivers and monsoons (Ghosh, 2005, 2018), giving them a strong “thing-power” (Bennett, 2010: 2): “those pieces of temporary lands that rise above the water only to submerge unpredictably” (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014b: 22). Chars’ instability has led to ambiguous citizenship and land tenure regimes (Mukherjee and Ghosh, 2020). In comparison, getbol behave more moderately, primarily governed by tides, winds, and waves. Getbol has been treated as a communal property shared by members of local fishing village cooperatives. Historically speaking, chars have grown in number and size due to the postcolonial Indian state’s large-dam projects that significantly slowed down fluvial power in estuaries. In contrast, getbol’s gentler thing-power has allowed the postcolonial Korean state to launch large-scale reclamation initiatives, resulting in the steep decline of their presence.

To summarize, tidal flats’ particular materialities arise from their in-betweenness in space as well as their specific situated histories. In the following sections, I engage with getbol’s slipperiness more closely, by observing how scientists struggle to know them.

Boundaries: Moving relentlessly

Tidal flats’ slipperiness does not arise only by how we conceptualize them: they are slippery in material senses as well. Tidal flats’ multiple, messy, and complex materialities make them tremendously difficult to explore. They resist in those moments when humans or machines attempt to produce singular and rigid knowledge about them. We still do not know much about tidal flats. Moreover, our knowledge on tidal flats is always provisional—subject to subversion by new research, unexpected discoveries, or other surprises.

Tidal flats’ boundaries represent an ongoing venue for scientific research. In this section, I specifically engage with how the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Agency (KHOA) is struggling to understand those boundaries as they deal with the constant movements of water. KHOA is a government agency dedicated to the production of ocean data in South Korea. In 1949, it was born as a hydrographic division of the South Korean Navy. While the agency’s top concern is still navigation safety, its core mission today is mapping, monitoring, and forecasting. KHOA now serves various users including oceanographers, fishers, seafarers, and tourists. Along with producing nautical charts, it conducts ocean observations including hydrographic surveys. It also records basic data such as temperature, salinity, tides, currents, coastlines, and seafloor topography, including the locations of man-made facilities. KHOA does not directly manage tidal flats. However, it is responsible for regularly reporting tidal flat areas, which requires measuring their boundaries.

In KHOA’s view, tidal flats should not remain vague, in-between spaces but need to be measured precisely. Mr Park, who is in charge of the coastline surveys at KHOA, uses the survey data to estimate the total tidal flat areas. In his conception, tidal flats are a ranged zone between the “zero-depth line” and the “coastline” (Figure 2):

Figure 2.

Spatial ranges of getbol (adapted from the manual drawing by Mr Park).

Tidal flats are a space between the lowest and the highest tide lines… The lowest tide line is equivalent to the zero-depth line (depth=0). This line is of utmost importance to us because it guides where ships can and cannot go. You know, it is a big problem that a ship gets wrecked. The highest tide line, on the other hand, is what is commonly known as the coastline. The coastline, although not so much important to us, is still useful to those who own properties on coasts. Because, again, you do not want to build a house on the water. (2018 interview)

According to Park, tidal flats do not draw much interest from land- or sea-based perspectives. From a land-based perspective, what matters is the absence of water: dryness beyond the coastline guarantees the safety of buildings. From a sea-based perspective, the opposite logic applies: water guarantees the safety of ships. The space that goes above the zero-depth line is both dangerous and of no use to seafarers. This seemingly practical application, however, has a deeper implication. In between those “safe and useful” spaces, tidal flats are rendered as relatively insignificant.²

Given this, tidal flats have merited only a very modest research budget in the KHOA, which in turn has further contributed to their unknowability. Indeed, it has been less than two decades since the KHOA began to conduct research on tidal flats, as pressure from domestic and international conservation groups led the central government to shift its agenda for tidal flats from development to protection (Mirae Ocean Corporation, 2008). Park said that both the sheer difficulty in measuring the coastlines and his team’s limited budget and manpower prolonged the first survey. From 2002 to 2007, his team and subcontractors relied on actual site visits, surveying half the western coastlines. It was only after 2008 that they were able to deploy small airplanes and drones to conduct aerial photography. Still, the process was slow due to their limited capacity allocated to tidal flat research. The first nationwide coastline survey was completed in 2013.

Scientific technologies, one might argue, help to overcome such obstacles. Satellite image analysis, for example, has been widely applied as a proxy for measuring tidal flat areas (Bishop-Taylor et al., 2019; Murray et al., 2012, 2019; Yim et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2020). As the official data provider, however, KHOA researchers make precision their utmost priority. They engage tidal flats closely to make their data as accurate as possible. The process to determine a coastline is complex. First, they conceptualize the highest and lowest tide lines using tide gauges. Considering the average tidal level as 0, known as the mean sea-level (MSL), they add or subtract the “Four Main Constituents of Tides (FMCTs)”. The FMCTs refer to the greatest tides of a year, both highest and lowest, among the roughly 64 constituents of tides that occur as a material effect of the complex relationships between the moon and the Earth (Kang et al., 2008; Noye, 1999). Second, they conduct field observations. Their on-site measurement uses not coastlines but points. These points do not represent the highest tide points of the year, as they vary by the time of visit.³ Third, they combine on-site observations and tidal data to create vertical coastlines. This is still not the final step, as there are regional sea-level differences. Contrary to popular imagination, the sea level is never flat: it has heaps and puddles. In South Korea, the MSL differs by several tens of centimeters across the coasts. The FMCTs differ even more dramatically, from 0.3 meters in the Eastern coasts, 3 meters in the Southern coasts, and up to 10 meters in the Western coasts. Combining these differences with topographic data and the KHOA’s zero-depth line data, which they acquire in similar ways to create nautical charts, such verticality results in several kilometers of tidal flat width in the Western coasts vs. only a hundred meters in the Eastern coasts.

Even after going through all these tedious steps, however, Park admitted that the measurements are “still a concept”. The KHOA’s 2013 survey reported that the total area of getbol in South Korea is 2487.2 km², of which more than 80% is distributed along the Western coasts of South Korea.⁴ While most people would consider this knowledge a fact, Park, the one actually conducting the calculations, treated it with caution. He viewed it as a best estimate at a given point in time, not as a firm, fixed truth. To him, the relentless movements of seawater—the changing tides by seasons and years—make the number always an estimate. As Lahiri-Dutt (2014a) noted, a “hard edge” is “the clean division in the sciences between land and water created in order for accurate measurement, planning, and control” (p. 507). Yet the hard edge can lead to unintended outcomes. Examining the institutional efforts to draw boundaries of the Sargasso Sea, Acton et al. (2019) illustrated how the idea of “fixing space” led to rigidity in science and policy options. Boucquey et al. (2016) also argued that imposing lines “on a system that is inherently dynamic and noisy in terms of shifting around” (p. 8) is problematic, because it fails to acknowledge the fluidity of its spatialities (see also Bear and Eden, 2008; Martin and Hall-Arber, 2008; Peters, 2020; St Martin, 2001). Park’s reflection echoes this critical water world literature.

The complex processes involved in drawing the contours of tidal flats, which at best yield estimates, “reflect our inability to fully comprehend … in [their] essential mobility” (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 253). The dynamic nature of tidal flats also has philosophical implications. Refusing to be fully captured by mapping or other calculative measures, they humble human desires for knowledge because we never know precisely. In addition to the difficulties associated with calculations, Park pointed out that the data do not sufficiently take into account the effects of human activities on these spaces. As continuous reclamation efforts dramatically change the coastlines, our knowledge’s expiration date becomes shorter. For these reasons, the KHOA updates its coastline survey data every five years.

Matter: Sensuous yet unwieldy

Mud is the predominant matter comprising many tidal flats around the world. Mud generates very different materialities than those of the open oceans, the inaccessibility of which comes from sheer liquidity or deepness. Mud, in contrast, makes one fall or get stuck. One has to maintain vigilance to notice rising water, or risk drowning in the mud. Because of these particular materialities of mud that restrain our bodily movements and mobility, ways to navigate tidal flats are limited and even look ancient in this age of high technology. For example, scientists at the Seoul National University Benthos Lab—top scholars in the field—use jumpsuits, rubber boots, and wooden boards to slide on tidal flats, because it is the most advanced gear available for relatively free movement (see Keny, 2019).

Mud also makes tidal flats particularly sensuous places for corporeal experiences (Lambert et al., 2006; Ryan, 2012). To deal with mud that is stubborn and unwieldy, humans must learn various embodied ways to navigate and use tidal flats. Korean fishers, for example, have intimate relationships with mud. They understand that the mud’s sticky properties create getgol (tidal channels), which stay relatively stable but also change forms over time. While they refer to the daily tidal schedule and the getgol map released by the KHOA, they use all their senses to notice any unexpected changes (see also Oslender’s (2019) discussion on “aquatic epistemologies”). Eosal nets, also called eojeon, are another creative example of fishers making use of their combined knowledge of tidal flats’ muddy topography and tidal clocks. A type of traditional fishing net, appearing in the renowned artworks by Kim Hong Do from the Joseon Dynasty, eosal nets trap fish as tides draw back (Figure 3). Fishers simply pick up the fish ensnared in the nets during low tides. Modern scientists are no exception when it comes to tuning their bodies to communicate with mud. As a scientist from the SNU Benthos Lab has remarked, the best way to move around a tidal flat is “simply to accept its slipperiness and to get immersed in it” (2017 interview).

Figure 3.

Eosal, a traditional fishing net installed on tidal flats, in “Gogijabi (fishing)” from the Album of Genre Paintings by Kim Hong Do (1745–after 1806). Source: National Museum of Korea.

Understanding mud thus requires our bodily senses. Yet, paying attention to mud alone is to miss the more profound complexities of tidal flats. Tidal flats consist of diverse, hybrid matter. “Mudflats”, in fact, are only one type of tidal flats; depending on the composition of the various sizes of geologic particles, tidal flats may be muddy, sandy, rocky, or a combination of all of these. Recognizing this spectrum of non-human, non-living matter that composes tidal flats, we are reminded that “matter is always in transition” (Krause, 2017: 406). Tidal flats slip through the modern knowledge system that separates mud, sand, pebbles, and rocks into discrete categories. Studying tidal flats requires viewing them as a continuum as to the degree of weathering, i.e. as “poles of a spectrum” (Krause, 2017: 406). In this way, tidal flats inspire fluid thinking. If land-based logic is based on a “sedentarist metaphysics” that sees fluidity “as morally and ideologically suspect, a by-product of a world arranged through place and spatial order”, tidal flats are all about a “nomadic metaphysics” that “puts mobility first… and revels in notions of flow, flux, and dynamism” (Cresswell, 2006: 26).

Lastly, matters slip through ultra-human senses. KHOA’s substrate mapping program is constantly challenged by suspended matter in seawater, i.e. small particles from clay and silt to sand. The program uses hyperspectral sensors to identify different types of substrates. These sensors, attached to an airplane or a drone, deploy different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Between 2010 and 2018, KHOA completed about 90% of the mapping in the Eastern coasts and 50% in the Southern coasts; in contrast, little has been done within the Western coasts (Figure 4). The reason why KHOA has deferred mapping of the Western coasts is due to the predominance of getbol. Getbol’s matter prevents the hyperspectral sensors from seeing through the water as the rays hit the suspended sediments instead of sea bottoms, rendering data accuracy questionable. In theory, the tidal flat zone itself could be scanned during low tides, but the nearby subtidal waters remain murky all the time. Tidal flats’ influence thus extends beyond themselves. The multitude of matter makes certain knowledge difficult to attain, or unreliable at best.

Figure 4.

Coastal substrate map of Jumunjin, Gangwon Province in the Eastern coasts. Source: KHOA.

Verticality: Unsettled by life

The verticality of tidal flats is a relatively new area of knowledge production. Getbol is commonly imagined as a 2D space: get/gaet meaning seashore and bol/beol meaning a flat field indicating the presence of low-slope bedrocks. Tidal flats’ slippery ontologies, however, do not stop at the surface. Recent scientific efforts to understand the vertical dynamics of tidal flats add another dimension of complexity, where tidal flats refuse to conform to modernist sciences. Moreover, they highlight that tidal flats are an assemblage of both non-living and living beings.

The first occasion where tidal flats’ verticality matters is the new “blue carbon” research. Blue carbon is an idea that extends the terrestrial logic of organic carbon sequestration to land–water spaces. On land, photosynthetic organisms—trees—breathe in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix carbon in their bodies. Over time, their dead bodies get deposited underground, removing carbon from the atmosphere and thereby mitigating climate change. Similarly, blue carbon researchers are investigating carbon sequestration capacities by coastal plants and marine primary producers, e.g. phytoplankton (Barbesgaard, 2016; Nellemann et al., 2010; World Rainforest Movement, 2014).

In a blue carbon session at the 4th Yellow Sea Ecosystem Symposium, 2018, benthic ecologist Noh gave a presentation on getbol’s blue carbon capacity. As he was showing a graph from his experiment, an audience member asked why the levels of total organic carbon (TOC) do not indicate a decreasing tendency by depth in bare tidal flats (Figure 5). Trained in terrestrial wetland ecology, the PhD student was questioning what he thought was an abnormality. On vegetated land, the surface has higher TOC levels as plants are the main source of carbon; the TOC levels then decrease by depth due to decomposition over time by microbes. This terrestrial logic expresses a linear trajectory of time. It is a stable ontology, in which material strata, i.e. sedimentary layers, reflect the passing of time.

Figure 5.

Total organic carbon (TOC) concentration by depth. Gray: bare tidal flat/green, red, and blue: vegetated coastal wetlands (Phragmites australis, Spartina alterniflora, and Suaeda japonica) (Lee et al., n.d. reprinted with permission).

This logic, however, does not apply to unvegetated tidal flats. Instead, what governs tidal flats is “a different, nonlinear, nonmeasurable notion of time” (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 255). Unlike dry soil, Noh responded, tidal flats experience cycles of erosion and sedimentation. In the getbol on Western coasts, sedimentation prevails in the spring and summer. Then, after August, the process reverses due to strong winds and currents; at this point erosion prevails over sedimentation. The result is a vertically mixed surface layer, measuring between 5 and 10 centimeters by depth per year. Time does not pile up neatly in tidal flats.

“That is not all, however”, Noh added. The Yellow Sea tidal flats’ high biomass plays an active role in this process too. Along with the constant disturbance driven by the forces of physics, burrowing animals—crabs, clams, and worms—cause “bioturbation” (Koo et al., 2005, 2007; Kristensen and Kostka, 2005). These organisms create innumerable burrows, cutting through the vertical layers, so air and other materials reach and mix with the deeper sediments. These living beings further disrupt the expected accumulation of time in linear layers. Consequently, the top layers do not correspond with age in tidal flats.

In a follow-up interview (2018), Noh explained that tidal flats need to be approached not for accuracy but for tendency. His remark underlines the fact that the conventions of science, seeking as much precision as possible, fail to grasp tidal flats. The dynamic verticality of tidal flats is a combined effect of seasonal changes in erosion and sedimentation, vertical mixing, and bioturbation. As I noted earlier, tidal flats and time are enmeshed. As Ryan said, “a sense of time, or more precisely, the blurring of time, is a perceivable quality of the coast” (2012: 13). In addition, tidal flats have another dimension: time is not only bound up with physical properties but also with life. Life is a critical variable for the blue carbon scientists to consider. Getbol, in particular, are known to exhibit a much higher density and number of burrowing and digging marine vertebrates than other tidal flats in cooler climates, e.g. the Wadden Sea in Europe (Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, 2020; Marine Ecology Division, 2020). This makes it even more problematic to assume a linear temporal change by depth in getbol.

The second example is about the recent attempts to measure getbol’s depths, which vividly illustrate that humans are another critical variable for scientists to take into account. Thus far, several public research institutions and universities have applied sonic waves, a geophysical data collection method commonly used to identify subtidal and deep sea floor topography (Lee, 2005). This method uses a research vessel that drags a side scan sonar. Unlike hyperspectral sensors, elastic waves can penetrate through mud and other buoyant matters. Thus, the hard part is not technical. According to Lee, a geophysicist from the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology, the first challenge arises from getbol’s shallowness. Even at high tide, the water column above tidal flats can be very low. A research vessel big enough to attach a side scan sonar may hit the floor. The second challenge, which is much more problematic and has been mentioned in numerous research papers, is man-made facilities spread across getbol. Fishing nets, bamboo, or plastic sticks used to grow oysters or seaweed, Styrofoam buoys, and other types of aquaculture facilities can easily interfere with the movement of a side scan sonar. They are frequently invisible from the surface, increasing the risk of damaging or losing the equipment. “There are too many of them that get lines tangled easily”, noted Lee (2018, interview).

Because of this “human-turbation”, the journey to understand getbol’s vertical properties has been a relentless battle for scientists. A couple of studies were limited to passive measurements with partial results, such as the Audio Magetotellurics method that detects naturally-occurring ionospheric currents (for example, see Kwon et al., 2007). Getbol scientists’ fieldwork stories are full of complications and surprises. While some of these stories are documented, most of them are consumed for laughs over drinks. On the surface, it is scientific equipment that is broken, tangled, and lost. Going deeper, what is trapped in these muddy and crowded turbulences is modern knowledge itself.

Where do the slippery ontologies of tidal flats lead us?

Thus far, this paper has examined the slippery nature of tidal flats. First, I have attended to land–water spaces as a different water world from the open oceans. Within these spaces, I have zoomed in on tidal flats that occupy the very border between land and sea. Always relentless and dynamic, tidal flats’ slippery materialities derive from this in-betweenness. Second, I have shown how modern scientific efforts to understand tidal flats have bogged down, much like scientists wallowing in the mud. Specifically, I have interrogated tidal flats’ slipperiness in terms of boundaries, matter, and verticality, to show how tidal flats keep evading the assumptions and technologies that we made to know and govern them. The examples I have introduced demonstrate that tidal flats remain something that modern thoughts cannot entirely understand. So what does this slippery ontology mean to us, and to tidal flats?

Drawing from the cases where a non-slippery ontology on getbol caused their predicament while also engaging with how their slipperiness shifted the course of public views toward their protection, in this last section I contend that fully embracing tidal flats’ slipperiness might help us see tidal flats in a new light and defend them from future threats. To illustrate this potential, let me briefly review the modern history of getbol.

As I noted earlier, in South Korea, the modernization of getbol arrived in the form of their removal via reclamation. During the first half of the 20th-century, Japanese colonizers reclaimed at least 480 km² of dry land from Korea’s getbol, mostly during the “Increase Rice Production Plan” period (1920–1934) to feed Japan’s growing military and citizens at home (Choi, 2014). During the second half of the century, the newly independent South Korean “developmental state”, concerned with speedy modernization and economic growth (Chu, 2016; Johnson, 1982; Woo-Cumings, 1999), launched two nationwide agricultural reclamation programs—the Large-scale Agricultural Comprehensive Development program and the Southwestern Coastal Reclamation program—along with smaller-scale industrial reclamation projects. While the numbers vary significantly by studies, Murray et al. (2014) estimated that 1726 km² of getbol were removed between the 1950s and 1980s, then another 573 km² between the 1980s and the 2000s.⁵

Getbol’s slippery yet gentle agency did not help prevent the ordeal. The modernist perspective consistently undervalued traditional work on getbol, e.g. catching clams or fish, as laborious and inefficient. This fed the popular non-slippery ontology of getbol, which approached them from a distance. Avoiding an embodied encounter with getbol, this zoom-out, hands-off view rendered getbol as barren and empty wastelands that had to be turned into something useful. Scott described in Seeing Like a State how the state deploys such a distant view to make its subjects legible and governable: “not at street level but rather from above and from outside… from the vantage point of a helicopter hovering far above the ground: in short, a God’s-eye view, or the view of an absolute ruler” (Scott, 1998: 57). Likewise, the South Korean state tactically reproduced a non-slippery ontology to justify reclamation. As one example, the state conducted at least eight reclamation resource surveys from the 1960s through the 1980s (Korea Agricultural and Rural Infrastructure Corporation, 1995). The maps coming out from the surveys identify getbol as a “reclamation resource” (Figure 6). These maps pretend to fully understand getbol while not getting close to them at all. In doing so, they illustrate the pretense in the non-slippery ontology that tidal flats can be known, controlled, and mastered.

Figure 6.

“Korea’s Reclamation Resource Map”. Source: Korea Agricultural and Rural Infrastructure Corporation (1995: 29).

In contrast, we see the potential of slippery ontologies in protecting tidal flats in the nationwide anti-reclamation movement during the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Unlike the early modernist view that refused to deal with tidal flats’ slipperiness, anti-reclamation activists willingly entered into getbol to show that they are not barren but full of life. They showed such scenes as crabs nibbling mud or clams blowing out water from their burrows, which are only visible when one decides to get dirty and zoom in close on getbol. These images portrayed radically different realities from the landscape or aerial images of getbol offer: a habitat full of life, not a hopeless wasteland. Images of live clams, crabs, mudskippers, and baby octopuses, juxtaposed with the scenes of their deaths on reclamation sites, worked powerfully to convince people that reclamation is destructive and irreversible.

This alternative ontology of getbol bloomed in Saemangeum, South Korea’s largest reclamation site. As Ms Jeong, a leader of the Saemangeum anti-reclamation alliance, explained, their concerns expanded from the displacement of fishers to the massacre of marine organisms over time; they learned that the fate of human and non-human inhabitants cannot be separated (2018 interview). They put conscious efforts into drawing scenes of ecological aliveness in order to contrast them against the pre-existing, dull, and still imagery of getbol. One result is the “fishers-created Saemangeum getbol eco map” published in 2006 (Figure 7). As the title suggests, it reflects local fishers’ ontology of getbol, as those fishers intimately encounter marine life every day. Violating the rule of scale, the map offers a magnified view of popular seafood species. During the anti-reclamation movement in Saemangeum, these kinds of images and texts clearly sent out a message that getbol are not dead but alive. Eventually, this emphasis on getbol’s intrinsic biological values shifted the course of how the state and the public perceived them. By the mid-2000s, polls on getbol shifted from promoting them for development to wanting to conserve them, leading to the cancelation of future large-scale agricultural reclamation plans (Ku and Hong, 2011). Accordingly, over time the new state policies have expanded marine protected areas, torn down the embankments of several reclamation sites, and even restored previously reclaimed sites.

Figure 7.

“Fishermen-created Saemangeum getbol eco-map”. Source: Citizens Environmental Research Institute (2006).

Although stepping into getbol’s muddy terrain contributed to reshaping human governance toward their protection, it is still insufficient as long as it continues to produce unchanging imagery of tidal flats. Most recently, a new way of seeing getbol has emerged in South Korea. Combining the competing ontologies of getbol as an economic resource and as an ecological entity, the new perspective claims to maximize economic profit from getbol’s ecological values while not destroying them. The hybrid idea of getbol was persistently sought throughout the national Low Carbon Green Growth initiative (2008–2013), South Korea’s Green New Deal, to cope with the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. The initiative identified getbol as one of the nation’s “new growth engines” (Lee, 2009: 8). Ironically, however, the subsequent “tidal flat fisheries” program mobilized the knowledge produced by getbol conservationists for an anti-conservation agenda, demonstrating the getbol’s economic potential. For example, the percentage of underused getbol areas and the monetary value of the getbol’s ecosystem services, originally assessed to promote getbol’s high conservation values, were used to justify the expansion of industrial mariculture (Choi, 2019b). This new perspective is driving another round of the getbol’s material transformation into a production platform, where selected species with high profit potential—oysters, sea cucumbers, abalones, etc.—would thrive while others would not (MAFFF, 2010). In sum, biological knowledge about tidal flats does not always lead to their defense; any singular and rigid knowledge can be eroded or co-opted by counter-efforts putting tidal flats at risk.

Getbol’s modern history teaches us that engaging with the tidal flats’ slippery nature helped protect them from reclamation by allowing us to form closer relations with them. It also offers the lesson that it was not stricter regulations per se—modern imperatives to exploit tidal flats always found ways to break through them during the reclamation era—but an ontological shift that not only drove policy changes but fundamentally altered the ways in which tidal flats are treated by the state and the public.

To push these insights further, embracing the notion that tidal flats are dynamic and ambiguous, which we cannot fully understand, let alone master, would make us respect tidal flats’ integrity. In their study of the sound of surf, Anderson and Stoodley (2019) stressed that the most important aptitude required for surfers is to listen to the waves’ “hydro-logics”. The hydro-logics cannot be expressed in a form of modern knowledge:

It is here that the movement of which they were a part is simply what it is – it does not refer outside itself for external meaning or understanding, and cannot be translated, interpreted or represented through another medium. It simply has to be experienced. (Anderson and Stoodley, 2019: 71)

If tidal flats as a third space have their own hydro-logics, and if we cannot fully interpret them with our current knowledge systems, then slippery ontology demands careful consideration about any action, either in the name of development or conservation, that would bring abrupt changes to them. In this regard, the slippery ontologies do not apply to tidal flats alone but to many other beings around us in the world.

As I finished revising this paper, a news article appeared in my social media feed about the Gunsan city government’s project to relocate forty-thousand milky fiddler crabs (Uca arcuate) from a getbol adjacent to the Seonyudo beach, a popular summer holiday destination, to another getbol nearby (Na, 2020). Migrating the endangered species populations is, perhaps, a laudable decision compared to wiping out the getbol without any ecological considerations. But would they thrive in the new place? Moreover, would relocating the crabs to add another parking lot for human tourists be truly worthwhile? From a slippery ontological perspective, the two getbol are not the same; each is a unique assemblage of non-living and living beings that is surprisingly resilient yet equally vulnerable. Nevertheless, modern hubris does not deter treating them as an interchangeable environment. This is why we need slippery ontologies—to learn that one does not “have to be ‘modern’ to be treated with respect” (Blavascunas, 2017: 261).

Highlights

Tidal flats’ dynamic and ambiguous materialities produce slippery ontologies.

Non-humans and humans are constitutive of tidal flats’ conceptual and material slipperiness.

Embracing tidal flats’ slippery ontologies opens up new possibilities of encountering, using, and living with tidal flats.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 9th Meeting of the East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography in 2018 and at the Rivers in the Anthropocene Workshop of Duke University Global Asia Initiative in 2019. I thank the participants of the meetings who provided valuable feedback and the fellows of the Seoul National University Asia Center and the LMU Munich Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) for their collegial support. I appreciate the thoughtful reviews provided by the editor of Environment and Planning E and three anonymous reviewers. Due to IRB recommendations, I used pseudonyms for participants of this project unless they gave permission to use their real names.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research and writing for this paper were funded by SSRC Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship, RCC Writing Fellowship, and Morris and Anita Broad Research Fellowship.

ORCID iD

Young Rae Choi

Notes

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