This week we will hear from Dr. Achirri Ismael, whose PhD is from the UM Anthropology Department and who teaches at Grand Valley State University in African and African American Studies. Achirri's work considers South Africa's largest estuarine system, Lake St Lucia in the northeast coastline. The first settlement of uMfolozi floodplains by English sugarcane farmers in 1910 compromised the hydraulics of the joint uMfolozi River and Lake St Lucia estuary mouths, which constitutes the lifeline of the estuarine system. The floodplain ecology has since been complicated primarily by sugarcane cultivation and commercial Australian gum tree plantations. But the separation in 1952 of the river system from the lake system, and its channeling out to the Indian Ocean to eliminate high salinity levels, back-flooding, and sedimentation, has created a never-ending human engineering and ecological crisis. The space-time effects of both crises, resulting from decades of unproductive technological solutions, have awakened negative colonial affects and responses that have polarized St Lucia estuary along racial, ethnic, class, gender, expert, and bureaucratic lines. Recent efforts by Isimangaliso Wetland Park and World Heritage Site, the South African state, along with their international partners to phase out the sugarcane plantations, industrial gum plantations, and subsistence agriculture on the floodplains, have met with stiff resistance. This short talk will offer a jumpoff point about how exclusive ideologies of nature, decades of engineering interventions, coupled with a catastrophic waste of multi-scalar resources, have entangled St Lucia estuarine system and left it in a state of inertia that can be useful for considering wetlands like those in Louisiana, in the US, or even those over and against which US cities like Boston, Chicago and Detroit were built.