Do-It-Yourself Islands (Slight Return)

Last year, Julian had written a post about a dispute between China and Japan over whether certain rocks in the ocean should be considered islands. If they are islands, then Japan would have a significantly larger Exclusive Economic Zone than had been previously recognized. To bolster the view that these are islands, not mere rocks, Japan has tried to increase their size by cultivating coral growth.

BLDGBLOG has updated the story with a very interesting post (with some great pictures) looking at this from the perspective of architecture/geography/land-use planning, etc. Here’s a snippet comparing the current situation to that of Prussia in previous centuries:

The generation of new territory for the purpose of extending – or consolidating – political power is nothing new. As but one example, I happen to be reading The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, a book that “tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the last 250 years by reclaiming marsh and fen, draining moors, straightening rivers, and building dams in the high valleys.”

The relevance of this here, in the context of artificial Japanese reefs in the south Pacific, is that Frederick the Great used hydrological reclamation projects – i.e. marsh draining and river redirection – literally to create new territory; this expanded the political reach of Prussia by generating more Earth upon which German-speaking settlers could then build farms and villages. All in all, this was a process of both “agricultural improvement and internal colonization,” and it “increasingly assumed the character of a military operation.”

As David Blackbourn, the book’s author, further notes: “External conquests created additional territory on which to make internal conquests, spaces on the map out of which new land could be made.” Indeed: “For Prussia, a state that was expanding through military conquest across the swampy North European plain, borders and reclamation went together.”

The post also points out a short piece from the New Scientist on the last place on earth to be unclaimed by any nation.