The water eaters: A political ecology of drainage in the Romagna coastal plain

Coastal areas are critical zones where multiple dynamic ecological and human processes meet, both concentrating and confounding human efforts to control nature. Rising sea levels have become emblematic of the effects of climate change. But in delta landscapes with extensive land reclamation, the risk of flooding derives from multiple factors whose evolution poses additional challenges. Focusing on the fallout of major floods in Romagna, on Italy's northern Adriatic coast, we aim to understand institutional responses to the disaster, which focus on maintaining and reinforcing existing hydrological infrastructure, notably the idrovori, literally ‘water eaters’ or pumps. Scientists’ models warn of the risks of further deepening reliance on a system constructed by actors lacking understanding of its long-term consequences, such as saline incursion into freshwater aquifers. Yet policymakers avoid reflecting on the inevitable necessity of rethinking a system that relies on a rigidly controlled separation of land and water and which, we argue, is a structural legacy of a colonial hygiene of moral progress. We consider the Romagna case in light of recent theoretical challenges to ontologies of radical separation between wet and dry. This leads us to reflect on the difficulty of embracing ‘wetness’ where local identities are rooted in an anthropogenic landscape, comprising not only farmland but also historic pine forests, which are the legacy of centuries of relations of labour and care.