Enacting repair on the half shell: The political ecology of oyster shell recycling in coastal Georgia

Generating possibility with shellfish discard

In late February 2023, I arrived at a festival in downtown Atlanta to volunteer for a Georgia-based non-profit called Shell to Shore. The non-profit organization facilitates oyster shell recycling for restaurants across the state that serve oysters on the half shell. The goal of this work is to utilize shell discard to rebuild oyster reefs and living shorelines in coastal Georgia. Rebuilt oyster reefs act as a form of nature-based infrastructure in coastal conservation projects to protect and stabilize shorelines (Bilkovic et al., 2016). As volunteers, we collected oyster shell discard in barrels placed at tables where people were shucking and enjoying oysters. They used sharp shucking knives to open the shells, laboring through buckets of oysters to get the bit of meat inside. Some visitors were puzzled as to why I was reaching into trash cans full of cocktail sauce and lemons to grab the shells, inquiring about why we needed their trash. I emphasized that these shells would be returned to protect the Georgia coastline, encouraging them to place their leftover shells in the bins rather than their trashcans. After I explained, most made sure to excitedly set their shells aside - the flow of the day was now shucking, eating, laughing, drinking, and recycling shells.

This festival reflected the long-standing seasonal patterns of oyster consumption in the Southeastern United States. There is an ongoing tradition that oysters are a seasonal food. Within Black and Indigenous ecological knowledge, it is common practice in the South to eat oysters only in months that “include the letter R” – September through April. ¹ This tradition is an example of Indigenous ways of knowing shaping environmental practices in the present and carried on by Black/Gullah Geechee communities of the Georgia low country. ² To be Black and historically connected to Georgia's coastline and the Sea Islands means to be of Gullah Geechee heritage. The name “Gullah Geechee” identifies descendants of the enslaved Africans who worked coastal plantations of rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton. ³ As defined by historian Melissa L. Cooper, it is an identity that has been a combination of imagination projected by outsiders to the region, through literature and folklore, and community self-definition (Cooper, 2017). The United States Sea Islands, a Gullah Geechee stronghold, are a chain of islands spanning 300 miles off the Southeastern coastlines of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Crab, shrimp, oysters and other seafood remain an essential part of Gullah Geechee foodways (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000; Hoskins-Brown, 2020) In Georgia, wild-harvested and farmed oysters remain an essential part of low country gatherings in the fall, winter and early spring (Gallant, 2018). In their consumption, they produce waste in the form of oyster shells.

To consider the oyster as a tool for coastal repair is a complex endeavor, yet those involved, including myself, remain committed to the organism's possibility. While I do not explicitly share Gullah Geechee heritage, I am a Black woman with ancestry in the US South and the Caribbean, and was a child raised amongst the Southeastern Florida coastlines. I have been immersed in the Southeastern United States oyster industry since 2023 in various capacities – as a consumer, an oyster shell recycling volunteer, an oyster aquaculture industry conference participant, a curious visitor to oyster farms, and currently as a board member at Shell to Shore, the organization I discuss within this paper. I highlight all this to articulate my stakes within this work and its depiction, and my particular investment in the organization's success and perception. As a critical ethnographer and political ecologist, I must also attend to the questions of imperfection and contradiction that inherently exist in coastal conservation projects. As a perpetual student of Black feminism, I maintain an imperative to pay particular attention to the ways in which Black feminist praxis and logics can guide analyses within the field of political ecology (Mollett and Faria, 2013). Black women's intellectual labor and theorizing act as a guide, and I attempt to explicitly name how long-standing Black feminist ecological logics have planted seeds for how projects such as Shell to Shore can and should be done.

The framework around Black women's ecology that guides this paper emerged alongside the framework around Black ecologies (Ferrari, 2020). As an alternative worldview to the Eurocentric orientation towards placemaking and the natural world, Black ecologies are deeply rooted within Black Studies (Hosbey, Lloréns and Roane, 2022). Building on the seminal text of scholar Nathan Hare, published within The Black Scholar in 1970, Black ecology responds to the incompatibilities between the environmental movement and Black communities, specifically focusing on the rise of urban migration and the field of urban studies (Hare, 1970). This paper builds upon the assertions made by Hare in foregrounding the inconsistencies within environmentalism and Black life - that Black life and the ecological movement remain at odds (Hare, 1970). My own assertions expand upon a rich body of work regarding Black ecologies in aquatic, coastal, and island spaces (Moore, 2019; Guerin, 2019; Lloréns, 2021; Hardy et al., 2022; Roane, 2022; Vickers, 2023; Barra, 2024; Perry, 2023).

Black Ecologies, in particular, Black feminist ecologies, should be placed in parallel with hegemonic notions of environmentalism and environmental thought, existing as alternative visions for Black environmental futurity (Frazier, 2020). Black feminist ecologies attend to both racialization and gender in conceptions of the environment and ecological crisis. These ecologies speak to the importance of memory and legacy in considering oceans, coasts, and the creatures therein, considering our collective futures while attending to Black feminist voices within ecological theory (Gumbs, 2020; Frazier, 2020). Within the Black feminist tradition, there remains an imperative to attend to the theories and praxes that emerge from thinking gender and racialization together (Christian, 1987; Collins, 2000). Black feminist projects attend to quixotic notions of freedom, the spiritual realm, embodiment, Black women's critiques of coloniality, modernity, and imperialism, rival geographies made through containment, and notions of transnational solidarity, among other imperatives (Wynter, 2003; Camp, 2006; McKittrick, 2006; Lara, 2020; Quashie, 2021; Nascimento, 2023). Within my own work, I follow the assertions of one of Black feminist thought's foremothers, Patricia Hill-Collins - that to only follow the work of those who self-identify as Black feminists misses the complexity of Black feminist practice (Collins, 2000: 40). Black feminist theorizing is found in the everyday actions of Black women as they navigate life. While ecological burdens remain placed on Black women within the climate crisis, Black feminist visions of the future also place their well-being at the forefront (Frazier, 2020; Combahee River Collective, 1977).

Black feminist ecological thought orients us towards relation as key in building livable worlds - relation as dependency and relation as acts of solidarity. In attending to relation, I refer to the notion of spiritual embodied relationships that often shape Indigenous ecological worldviews (Tynan, 2021). For example, a “restoration otherwise” reimagines restoration as a grounded set of relational practices centered in cultural continuity and community care (Barra, 2024). Black Studies scholar Ashon Crawly names the necessity of “otherwise possibilities, otherwise inhabitations, otherwise worlds” and asserts “Black flesh knows this truth, the truth about the necessity of otherwise possibilities” (Crawley, 2020: 28). Articulating Afro-Puerto Rican women's lives after Hurricane Maria, cultural anthropologist Hilda Lloréns also identifies the otherwise in the act of living in relation and in tune with the more-than-human world is part of a neo-Taino cosmological vision (Lloréns, 2021). This sense of relationality is key to an understanding of Black and Indigenous ecological worldviews as alternative to Eurocentric hierarchical and supremacist logics.

Further, Black feminist scholar Jennifer Nash names that “Black feminist theorists show that an intimacy with loss recalibrates our understanding of the regularity and massiveness of loss, and its quiet, ordinary iterations and reverberation” (2024: 5). In considering the continuous losses within the ecological crisis, theorizations that sit at the scene of loss become imperative. To this end, this paper also builds on the work of discard studies, emphasizing the assertion of power within acts of waste and wasting that contribute to ecological loss (Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022; Soloman, 2025). Along with Black feminist informed political ecologies of waste and discard, the coastal management realm remains an understudied area of critical inquiry (Hilton and Moore, 2023; Bennett, 2019). In this context, I understand that the political ecology of shellfish waste exists within a gendered and racialized coastal geography that cannot be ignored.

I argue within this paper that a Black feminist ecological orientation to coastal planning reveals the oystershell's possibility - it could be utilized as a form of Black ecological repair in the coastal realm to build the material solidarity needed to respond to the “double dispossession” of coastal and cultural erosion. ⁴ By material solidarity, I refer to the labor, time, and physical material needed in order to truly enact certain forms of Black ecological connection that require hubris and intention (Bruno et al., 2024). While centering notions of loss, solidarity, and repair on the coastline articulated by Black women coastal activists, I reveal a complex set of relations and entanglements centered around oyster discard. An investment in oyster recycling and living shorelines in the Southeast as a return to Black and Indigenous ecologies and multispecies relationships that have existed for many generations. In this view, oyster recycling carried out in Georgia's post-plantation waters, fraught with gentrification and land dispossession, requires responsible thinking beyond the physical ecology of the coastline.

To that end, this paper utilizes terminology often stemming from the practices of building living shorelines – restoration and repair. I also suggest a third term, reparation, alongside coastal management practices. Reparation ecology (rather than the more mainstream “restoration ecology”) denotes what is at stake when considering ecology and reparations together as a response to ecological harm and human wellbeing (Barra and Jessee, 2024). Along with reparation ecologies, another concept that guides this work is the notion of abolition ecologies. Stemming from the idea of abolition democracy developed by WEB Du Bois and Ruth Gilmore's abolition geographies, abolition ecology is a concept that leans towards collective organizing against white supremacist logics that surround ecological and thus political relations (Du Bois, 1935; Gilmore, 2007; Heynen, 2018). Within this work, I would like to consider the opportunities and the continued limitations of reparation and abolition ecology on Sapelo Island, a small island community on the Georgia coast, surrounded by conservation land and predominantly owned by the state (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000). In this place, oystershell recycling would require articulating community connections and forms of repair that could be forged between those who live inland and those on the coastline from what would otherwise be restaurant discard.

Finally, within this account of the overlooked possibilities buried within oystershell recycling in coastal Georgia, I focus on the notions of loss, solidarity and repair generated by Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey, a Black woman and Gullah Geechee coastal activist who articulated these concepts on Sapelo Island through oral history and memoir. ⁵ It is within her words that ecological repair is entwined with notions of Black liberation and self-determination. Her everyday Black feminist environmental theorizing has acted as a seed planted within present day coastal practitioners to inform their work for the future.

Methods and materials

Through ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories conducted in coastal and inland Georgia, this work articulates the political ecology of oyster shell recycling foregrounded by Black feminist ecological thought. This work is part of a larger project to develop an account of what it means to make life on the barrier islands of coastal Georgia, the refusal/envisioning that staying in place requires, and what Black feminist environmental praxis can illuminate for coastal policy. The work represented in this paper is a culmination of participant observation and oral history interviews conducted in coastal Georgia, as well as the inland cities of Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, from 2023–2025.

Oral history interviews were conducted and recorded with five leadership team members of the Shell to Shore nonprofit organization and one director of a Georgia-based shellfish laboratory. Utilizing narrative analysis, I gained understanding of the personal goals and intentions of coastal restoration practitioners and the projected impacts of Georgia oyster projects in aquaculture and coastal restoration (Scott, 2019). I conducted participant observation at multiple shell recycling events held in inland Georgia and during initial ecological fieldwork done by Shell to Shore and its community partners in the saltmarshes of Sapelo Island. Participant observation has allowed me to experience the physical labor required to collect and recycle oyster shells directly with other volunteers and to experience living shorelines research in action with coastal practitioners (Latour, 1987).

My research methods are deeply informed by Black feminist theorizations of the environment and coastal realm, as described above, which insist on an attention to the voices of Black women as they relay their lived experiences between their minds, bodies, and the natural world (Frazier, 2020). This has required retuning to a major voice in the coastal Georgia environmental movement through a close ethnographic reading of Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey's 2000 memoir God, Dr Buzzard and the Bolito Man (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000). I consistently return to her memoir as a key text informing my research. Close reading implies a method of reading and re-reading of text while interrogating specific details within said text through a particular lens, in this case Black feminist ecologies (Kier-Byfield, 2024). Her memoir is a piece of Black feminist environmental theorizing in its critiques of ecological science and environmental conservation and its reflections on land, water, embodiment and spirituality. Returning to her text has functioned as key to understanding my place within this work and my continued presence despite my own discomfort and uncertainty about a conservation project enacted on former plantation land. Her memoir speaks to a legacy of Gullah Geechee activism, memory work, and coastal stewardship on the island, and has deeply influenced contemporary reparative conservation projects (Heynen, 2021). The legacy of struggle she describes within her memoir is part of a particular standpoint articulated through Black women's lived experience, although I have not found documentation of her ever naming herself a Black feminist explicitly. She acknowledged the impact of land dispossession on the Gullah Geechee people and always spoke towards a persistent landed-ness that guides life on Sapelo Island. Today, there is an acknowledgement of climate change and sea level rise disrupting island life, but this fact of landed-ness is persistent in islanders’ memories. These disruptions are not a deterrent to making life on the island.

In addition to my use of ethnographic qualitative methods and the vernacular Black feminist environmental theorizations of Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey, my research also operates within the conceptual and methodological framing of “the shoal.” The shoal is a method for Black Studies that speaks to Black and Indigenous relations and intimacies (King, 2019). As Tiffany Lethabo King describes in her interdisciplinary theorizing of encounters between Black and Native Studies, the shoal is a dynamic and moving set of “processes and ecological relations. It is a mobile, always changing and shifting state of flux. The shoal is liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map” (2019: 3). Shoaling as a method points the scholar to attend to liminal space, its organisms, and their relations. The shoal provides a framework to consider projects that inherently are fraught with contradiction, imperfection, and uncertainty in places grounded in histories of dispossession, yet also working towards repair. The shoal requires attention towards the space between – in my own work I understand this to mean sitting directly with a site of loss (Nash, 2024). Within my work, the Georgia saltmarsh becomes a kind of shoal, an area where the ocean and land meet, creating a muddied landscape, both physically and through the layered social relations that occur in this landscape. This framing helps me reveal the project of oyster shell recycling on Sapelo Island to be entangled with evolving muddied relations held in the act of collectively envisioning coastal futures amongst ecologies of dispossession, racialized land use, and exploitation.

My shoaling research practices required me to look for newspaper articles, letter correspondences, and interviews regarding the community of Hog Hommock, the University of Georgia Marine Institute (UGAMI), the Department of Natural Resources, and the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Reserve as conservation entities on Sapelo Island. It has also required speaking with individuals responsible for leading contemporary conservation projects on Sapelo Island and to examine inland oyster shell recycling events and early living shorelines fieldwork in the Sapelo saltmarsh to examine shifting Gullah Geechee lifeways and ongoing colonial relationships to the land and sea. My attention to the muddy shoals of life in the Georgia coast is further enhanced by the work of Black feminist geographer, Katherine McKittrick, and their attention to Black storytelling. McKittrick offers the potential of storytelling as Black Method and points towards the deeply held narratives that remain within land and place as evidence of ongoing Black livingness (McKittrick, 2021). The saltmarsh, as shoal, is demonic ground, a place to attend to Black women's alternative articulations of geography, ecology, and placemaking (McKittrick, 2006). I attend to Gullah Geechee women's narratives of land relations and dispossession on the island and how they diverge and converge with the narratives of ecological science and coastal conservation.

This work has therefore also required environmental policy analysis regarding Georgia's redeveloping aquaculture industry accessed through the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Coastal Resources Division website, and online resources. Additional archival research has focused on historical coastal management documentation regarding UGAMI's formation, the Georgia oyster industry, and the overall coastal conservation history of Georgia accessed at the University of Georgia Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Georgia's plantation and conservation history

Attending to the oyster between the space of its consumption and its return to the sea, while attuned to deeply embedded Black coastal ecologies, requires a consideration of the precarious and liminal space (the shoal) that is the Sapelo saltmarsh. On Sapelo Island in coastal Georgia, state and federal conservation agencies, ecological scientists at UGAMI, and a remaining Black community of Gullah Geechee descendants exist in the same and overlapping space. Sapelo Island shares a particular history of Black land loss through coercion and land grabbing that characterizes much of the United States coastal South (Kahrl, 2012). Within the Gullah Geechee corridor, issues of Black land loss to coastal gentrification have been documented across South Carolina and Georgia (Brabec and Goetcheus, 2014; Hardy and Heynen 2022). Within this context, heir's property, common land owned by multiple heirs as a relic from the Jim Crow era, presents a particular condition for property loss (Bailey and Thomson, 2022). As with much of the Gullah Geechee corridor, Sapelo Island maintains the same problems. I argue here that this condition is rooted in the island as a plantation and eventual conservation space.

Thomas Spaulding was Sapelo Island's first plantation owner, enslaving the ancestors of contemporary Sapelo Island descendants. Buildings constructed on Spaulding's plantation were made from tabby, a building material partially built from oyster shell and lime. This historical connection between the material realities of enslavement and the oystershell lends additional resonance to the oystershell's use today as a tool for repair in the present (Kinsey, 1982). In 1934, tobacco heir RJ Reynolds purchased Sapelo from industrialist Howard Coffin who used the island as a resort for hunting game and birding. Coffin had built his home on Spaulding's former plantation land (Cooper, 2017). Upon purchase Reynolds began to condense the Gullah Geechee residents of the island into smaller communities, acquiring their land and their waterfront access (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000). Modern ecological science became linked with this land dispossession when the so-called “father of ecosystem ecology,” Eugene Odum, met RJ Reynolds in 1948 during a chance encounter while Odum was on a birding trip for University of Georgia scientists on Sapelo (Pomeroy and Scott, 2001). Between 1949 and 1951, Reynolds attempted to create the “Sapeloe Inn” to attract tourists to the island (Pomeroy and Scott, 2001). But when the Sapeloe Inn failed, Reynolds turned back to the scientists, with Odum expressing the most interest in using the island for scientific research and education (Odum, 1975). Significant changes to the island spatial geography and Black land distribution began in 1949, a manifestation of the island's usage for tourism and eventually laboratory science (Hardy and Heynen 2022). Sapelo Islanders sold or traded land from the multiple communities located on the island and relocated to the north end community of Hog Hammock, which remains a predominantly Black community today.

In her memoir, Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey remarks on these changes to the island in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in a chapter titled “The Cusp.” She likens Sapelo Islanders, when they realized scientists were coming to the island, invited by Reynolds, to deer, frozen motionlessness in danger. She states,

“This was altogether different. Something that made you stay still for a second, the way a deer freezes when it first scents danger. It made the old people say, “It ain’t gonna lead to no good.” Richard Reynolds had invited the scientists over to live on Sapelo and study the marsh.” (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000: 209)

Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey articulates that the move to Hog Hammock was not a choice. Families were coerced to move, fearing repercussions from Reynolds who controlled the island ferry. The threat of being cut off from the island's primary access point led Sapelo Islanders to sell their land to Reynolds (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000). The University of Georgia Marine Research Station was established on this “vacated” land in 1953, with Reynolds turning over Sapelo's whole south end to ecological scientists, giving them access to the complex of buildings he built on former plantation land. This area eventually became UGAMI in 1959 (Barrett and Barrett, 2001). Bailey describes how Reynold's treatment of the island and its people was linked to the scientific and coastal conservation entities on Sapelo Island. One of the many ghosts of saltmarsh ecology is its direct ties to Black land dispossession in pursuit of a particular white spatial imaginary; one that envisions coastal futures in the absence of Black life (Subramaniam, 2014; Hardy and Heynen, 2022). On Sapelo, a conservation ethic influenced by an ecological science developed through dispossession has shaped the socio-ecological landscape. This is a pattern seen across much of the Sea Islands of the Gullah Geechee Corridor, where Black communities have been removed from coastal lands, with former homelands becoming sites for tourism, ecological research, and conservation (Cooper, 2017; Hardy and Heynen 2022; Walter, 2024).

Today, the common narrative about Sapelo Island is that it is a “pristine” site in which to study saltmarsh ecology, that it is where modern ecology emerged, and that it contains the last remaining Gullah Geechee community of Hog Hammock (Chalmers, 1997; Pomeroy and Scott, 2001; Dewan, 2008). Yet, what is missing from this narrative and fails to account for Black livingness, are the direct links between the capitalist plantation industry, ecological science, environmental conservation, and the land loss of Sapelo Islanders (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000; McKittrick, 2021). Hog Hammock was one of many communities where Sapelo Islanders lived - it only became the last because of direct and intentional actions to move Sapelo Islanders off the majority of the space and into one community, which has continued to shrink due to coastal gentrification (Hardy, Bailey and Heynen, 2022). Under the compounding forces of enslavement and settler colonialism, these lands and waterways have shifted from plantation to private ownership for agriculture, hunting, and leisure by Northern industrialists, into state-owned land for conservation and scientific research (Sullivan, 2025). The plantation has become the blueprint for the field station and the conservation lands that surround it (McKittrick, 2006). Included in this plantation to conservation process was the colonial land dispossession of the Muskogee peoples, General Sherman's Special Field Order 15 (colloquially known as “40 acres and a mule”), and the denied dreams of Freedmen meant to work and own land after the Civil War (Dorsey, 2010). This process ignores the deeply embedded Black ecologies of the marshland – instead creating conservation spaces that place plantation realities and years of Black ecological stewardship temporally out of time.

As Black feminist scholar Katherine McKittrick notes, science and storytelling occur simultaneously (2021). Science, especially ecology and environmental research, is often oriented towards a collective “we” that is supposedly responsible for the climate crisis. Within Odum's work, this “we” is portrayed through his notion of healing the environmental crisis through successful integration of “man and nature” through the principles of ecology (Odum, 1975: 205). Odum states,

“A change in public attitude toward the environmental began first in the affluent countries but is now slowly spreading to the less developed countries as political leaders begin to realize it is in the best interest of each country large and small to be concerned with the big picture as well as internal problems” (Odum, 1975: 204–205).

Here, the so-called positive change to public attitude towards the environment began in the affluent west and were taught to the Global South. The collective public (“we”) is responsible for the climate crisis, and ecologists of the Global North have revealed a necessary push towards collectivity and healing. Scholars within Black and Indigenous studies have long provided critiques of this assertion (Yusoff, 2018; Whyte, 2017; Ramirez-D’Oleo, 2023). Within this scientific story, ecology is knowledge bestowed by the educated white elite, rather than knowledge reflecting the philosophies of shared commons and moral relations that emerge from Black and Indigenous orientations towards nature (Whyte, 2018; Roane, 2018). Yet, the history of Black and Indigenous dispossession in the Georgia Sea Islands, and the stories that accompany these histories, are integral to the science of ecology as it emerged from this region. If we center a Black feminist ecological perspective, island conservation land cannot be viewed as a liberal public good competing against coastal development – it becomes part of a wider white spatial imaginary built on racialized dispossession (McKittrick, 2006; Loperena, 2016; Beer, 2025). We must link the legacies of the plantation – and its logic of placing Black people within confined spaces - to the current work of scientific inquiry and conservation that guides the management of the saltmarshes of coastal Georgia.

A further point can be made that western discourse has rendered the tropical island “in terms of vulnerability” (Deloughery, 2019: 166). Like many islands, the landscape of the Georgia Sea Islands is similarly shrouded in discursive narratives of containment, remoteness, and exoticism (DeLoughery, 2019; Davis, 2007). The narratives around Gullah Geechee people themselves mirror these same tropes (Cooper, 2017). The history of scientific inquiry on Sapelo enhanced the mysticism and “wildness” the island supposedly brings to mind as a part of a highly productive estuary – providing nursing grounds for sea life (Pomeroy and Scott, 2001). Fueled by both the tourist and scientific imaginary, conservation practices and policies emerged to keep this area “pristine,” despite the fact that on Sapelo, as in much of the region, isolation has in part been fabricated by many decades of forced displacement and coastal gentrification. For the ecological sciences, this forced placelessness generates excitement and possibility. This is the context that shapes UGAMI, now located at the southern portion of Sapelo Island. I now understand the UGAMI field site as part of the long legacy of Sapelo Island as an ecological island laboratory space (Moore, 2019). If the plantation has always played a central role in the “negotiation and management of race and ecology in Southern Geographies” (Rusert, 2010: 152), then it is through the development of ecological research and conservation science in this place that the legacy of the plantation as scientific laboratory has continued into the present.

The Shell to Shore oystershell recycling and living shoreline project is a set of partnerships between Maurice Bailey's nonprofit organization, Save Our Legacy Ourselves (SOLO), and several state and federal agencies including UGAMI. It cannot be denied that the University of Georgia has been complicit in the dispossession of Gullah Geechee people on Sapelo, yet some individuals embedded within both of these groups are now tending to coastal repair (Heynen, 2021). This is the evolving muddy set of relations that must be attended to, and this is the context in which I now understand the particular organism that is embedded within the saltmarsh shoal of coastal Georgia, the Eastern oyster. The oyster is an essential organism with which to consider notions of connection, relationality, and futurity that guide coastal restoration practices. The act of coastal restoration through the repair of oyster reefs becomes even more complex and fraught when considering the evolving plantation geographies of the Georgia Sea Islands (McKittrick, 2013; Hardy et al., 2017; Bruno, 2023).

On southeastern oyster ecologies as Black ecologies

Within the Georgia saltmarsh, there is a deep connection between the Gullah Geechee people, coastal lifeways, and oceanic resources as an articulation of Black ecology. As stated in my introduction, the term “Black ecologies” signifies an alternative worldview to the white hegemonic orientation towards placemaking, space, and the natural world (Hosbey, Lloréns and Roane, 2022). Oyster harvesting, crabbing, and shrimping have defined coastal foodways for Gullah Geechee communities throughout time (Hoskins-Brown, 2020; Campbell, 2010). The ecological heritage of Gullah Geechee communities is intertwined with the saltmarsh. The oyster represents a complicated legacy of coastal heritage – one that includes historical violence and exclusion from the oyster industry and that of a deeply held relation with an organism as a foodway tied to economic autonomy and food sovereignty (Blout, 2000; Clark, 2022). These histories must be foregrounded in the political ecology of oystershell recycling and restoration. Shell recycling cannot be understood without considering the racialization of both the oyster industry and the disproportionate environmental injustice issues that shell recycling projects seek to address.

Black feminist ecologies, as articulated by figures such as Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey, further enhance the political ecology of oyster shell recycling in Georgia by inserting questions of care and relationality into coastal planning to build relationships in pursuit of a “restoration otherwise” (Barra, 2024). One of the key analytics of this paper is to consider relation in its many forms - between rural and urban communities, between communities experiencing environmental injustice and researchers with vast monetary resources, and between humans and mollusks. My use of Black feminist ecological thought builds on the Black ecologies worldview to orient us specifically towards relation as key in building livable worlds – as a form of mutual dependency and solidarity (Frazier, 2020; Lloréns, 2021).

To this end, Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks,

“How does oceanic knowledge, combined with our increasingly impossible-to-ignore knowledge of our dependence on the ocean and its literally rising role in our lived experiences, shift our definitions of the world we are constructing and our place within it?” (Gumbs, 2019: 339).

For Back feminist scholars like Gumbs, oysters are a narrative life form – built upon one another in community, filtering out gallons of water while revealing the confluences of racial capitalism, Black freedom-making, and coastal resilience (Gumbs, 2019). We can now reconsider the oyster as an articulation of Black (and Indigenous) ecological legacies of multispecies kinship through its deeply embedded relationship with Black liberation and freedom-making (Guerin, 2019; Roane, 2022) and its relation to Black dispossession.

The oyster fisheries of coastal Georgia were a means of subsistence for the enslaved, both during the antebellum period and post-emancipation (Hoskins-Brown, 2020). As an industry separate from the confines of enslavement, small-scale fishing and oyster harvesting functioned as an informal economy and a form of freedom. These oyster beds, when utilized by the enslaved and newly freed, were sites of Black commons, working against the enclosure of the plantation (Roane, 2018; Roane, 2022). Before the nineteenth century, the Black population was the majority in the oystering industry on the Georgia coast. In the twentieth century, the fishery demographics shifted as the oyster industry became more commercialized with the rise of coastal packing houses and canneries (Blout, 2000). Black women, in particular, shifted towards working in packing houses as a major form of employment in coastal communities such as Pin Point and Harris Neck in coastal Georgia (Hoskins-Brown, 2020).

With this shift towards commercialization came a purposeful re-racialization of the industry. ⁶ Interdisciplinary artist and scholar Ayasha Guerin discusses a similar process on the New York coastline - the mobilization of Jim Crow attacks directed at African American oystermen were attempts to demonize and push customary Black oyster tongers out of the industry (Guerin, 2019). Utilized predominantly by Black oystermen, oyster tonging required sticking a long pole into an oyster bed to harvest the oysters from above. This technique later received blame for environmental degradation and overfishing (Guerin, 2019; Jacques, 2017). This same sentiment is exhibited in Georgia in an 1894 management document entitled The Past, Present, and Future of the Oyster Industry of Georgia. In a description of the industry and its future potential, Armenius Oemler, Owner of the Oemler Oyster Company, directly named “colored oystermen” as responsible for environmental degradation within the region, with “a few white men” also participating in depletion (Ingram, 2022). Oemler's company had multiple documented disputes with Black oystermen. He remarked that Black oystermen, “fill their boats indiscriminately with oysters” and fail to replenish the beds.

“All the young oysters, of the most recent set, and all the empty shells, so indispensable, as collectors to replenish the beds, are thrown overboard to be engulfed in the soft mud of the river bottom, or when the culling process has not been completed in transit, they are as effectually destroyed by being cast upon the shell heap at home.” (Oelmer, 1894: 265).

The degradation of the oyster industry in Georgia is framed as the responsibility of these Black men, rather than a result of increased industrialization and demand from majority white owned cannery systems within the state. In these ways, racial capitalism and environmental degradation can be understood as linked through the oyster. Black ecological knowledge was turned into economic prosperity for the elite few through Black labor, yet the blame for environmental degradation is then placed on the oystermen themselves. The link between racial capitalism as an economic system that functions through racialization in pursuit of capital, and the resulting environmental damage that follows, is demonstrated through the oyster's decline. Today, the Georgia oyster industry is often considered to have declined in the 1930s due to over harvesting. This era of over harvesting, however, should be directly connected with the racialization of the industry as it evolved through the Jim Crow Era (Guerin, 2019).

As I have been arguing, shell recycling projects and the reemergence of the oyster in coastal Georgia are tied to regional history. Land and waterways are now being taken from Saltwater Geechee communities in the Sea Islands - not only as a result of sea level rise and storm surge, but also by ongoing efforts to redevelop this area into resorts for tourism, conservation, and laboratory science, ⁷ the particular geography that marks the contemporary US southern coast. This pattern is particularly poignant at the coastline, where compounding issues of sea level rise and coastal gentrification generate a distinct problem – the white spatial imagination generates futurity, but only for white lives (Hardy et al., 2017). This problem is showcased on Sapelo by the lack of infrastructure for the island's Gullah Geechee elders. There is no grocery store located on the island and there is no medical center – what was once intended to be a community center and clinic for Sapelo elders has now become a tourist-centered restaurant. While speaking with island tourists one evening in 2025, I learned that a former senior community center is where many visitors now dine, but tourists and visiting researchers don't need infrastructures for permanent community. This reality shapes the worlds of oyster farming and shell recycling and forces me to ask, who will these restoration projects eventually protect if Gullah Geechee decedents are removed from coastal lands entirely when they can no longer thrive or even survive within these coastal spaces?

On possibility through shellfish discard

Although there is immense opportunity for the Georgia oyster industry to thrive, the question must be raised about the meaning of renewed oyster aquaculture in a racialized coastal landscape. This brings us to the contemporary context around the oystering industry, the attempts to expand oyster aquaculture as a form of economic prosperity in coastal Georgia, and the question of shellfish discard. In 2019, Georgia House Bill 501 introduced a framework for commercial oyster farming in the state. The bill allowed for the development of an oyster farming industry, known as oyster aquaculture or mariculture. Before 2019, the main form of leasing was for intertidal wild harvesting. Currently, there are a total of 14 leaseholders in the state of Georgia who own a mix of subtidal and intertidal farms. ⁸ This will inevitably lead to an increase in available oyster cultch within the state.

Understanding the reemergence of the Georgia oyster must include attention to “cultch” – discarded shell, where oyster spat, young oyster larvae, attach themselves to grow and build new oyster reefs. Within the permitting process, historically, harvesters were required to return or transplant cultch to reseed wild oyster beds (Revell and Hill, 2021). Shell to Shore began amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Through an oral history interview with the organization's founders, I learned that while seeking to reconnect with people amongst the precarity of pandemic isolation, they began to examine the issue of shell waste at a restaurant where they both worked. One of the co-founders, an oyster shucker, noticed the amount of waste generated from shucking oysters on the half shell for customers. The other co-founder, who was not new to oyster possibilities, having worked in New York for the Billion Oyster Project and New York Harbor School, realized there was no similar large-scale program in Georgia. ⁹ Shell to Shore began as a circle of friends and neighbors who wanted to do something about this issue. They sought the guidance of geographer Nik Heynen to determine where oystershells should eventually be placed in Georgia. Heynen's work on Sapelo Island and his long-term relationship with Gullah Geechee activist Maurice Bailey, son of Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey, brought the organization to Sapelo Island. Within this work, Sapelo becomes a future site for this material solidarity, where shell discard is utilized to address future issues of saltwater intrusion and coastal erosion.

Shell to Shore is one actor in a larger network of restaurants, state organizations, and federal agencies working to collect oyster shells and return them to Georgia's coastal waters to ground restored oyster reefs. The process is perceivably simple – restaurants lay oyster shells aside in the process of shucking and collect the shell waste after customers eat oysters on the half shell. These shells are then transported towards the coastline to multiple shell recycling facilities, like the farmland of Maurice Bailey, where they cure in the Georgia sun. Palates of oyster shell or artificial reefs from ground oyster shell can be placed back into coastal waters. Although the state of Georgia has multiple ongoing oyster restoration projects, Shell to Shore, specifically intends to return oyster shells to Sapelo to address coastal erosion in the community of Hog Hammock, a Gullah Geechee community that continues to fight efforts of displacement. This is part of a larger project towards abolition ecology – led by a long-term partnership with Bailey and Heynen (Heynen and Ybarra, 2021). More than the return of shells as a general act to save a collective “we,” this shell comes to rest in a specific political ecological context - shell return is a move towards the repair of a long-term, albeit fraught, relationship between the University of Georgia and the community of Hog Hammock.

Considering the long history of dispossession enacted on these lands, this act of restoration could become reparative. ¹⁰ I am not arguing that Shell to Shore has in fact enacted reparations. The University of Georgia, and other state and federal conservation entities, still work on and own the majority of Sapelo Island. A specific reparative future should be decided only by those experiencing the particular form of ecological and cultural violence that Sapelo Islanders have endured for generations. The complex historical relationship between UGAMI and Hog Hammock cannot simply be thrown aside (Heynen, 2018). However, the argument I make here is that within the oyster and its entanglements lies possibility and opportunity. Black feminist ecologies provide a path forward.

In order to understand the oyster as an organism of opportunity, it is integral to note its return to this specific community. This is a material return to the Black ecologies that have anchored forms of freedom making from before the antebellum period, reasserting the connection between oysters and Black life that can be traced to the African continent (Dawson, 2018; Belhabib and Pauly, 2015). Taking shells consumed inland back to the shoreline is an act of deep reconnection, whether consumers are aware or not – their stomachs are connected to the marshland as a nursery of Black struggle over land. A holistic approach to regional coastal planning would refuse to shy away from acknowledging these restoration legacies and would enter into this work by embracing tension and contradiction. To collectively plan a future amongst oyster shells and to seek repair requires turning towards deeply and rightfully held tension within communities historically wronged by Western scientific investigations. ¹¹What was once seafood waste, thrown into bins to rot away in landfills, has the potential to become reparative material solidarity.

Coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer, in 2000, the term Anthropocene with its prefix Anthros- places the influence of humans on the climate record as central to its definition (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Geographer Kathryn Yusoff remarks that although the Anthropocene now seems to offer a new dystopian future, “imperialism and ongoing settler colonialism have been ending worlds as long as they have been in existence” (Yusoff, 2018: xiii). Rupture emerges between apocalypse and salvation, a space of possibility where acts of material solidarity - like the pursuit of oysters as living infrastructure - may be able to emerge. With the notion of material solidarity, I am implying that physical labor, time, and resources in the form of money and materials are needed to enact certain forms of Black ecological repair, and this requires hubris and intention (Bruno et al., 2024). As Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey explains in the final chapter to her book, “I want the state and people everywhere to be proud of us and to realize the distinct historic and cultural value we have as a people who’ve lived here ever since the time of slavery” (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000: 333). Attending to this value would mean investing in the many relations the saltmarsh holds.

Living with/in ecological catastrophe does not mean that relationality must be abandoned in favor of dystopian imagining. Life continues to thrive within ecological turbulence. Possibility is seeded in the knowledge of climate disaster through a commitment to mitigating its effects. Actions of solidarity are not only necessary but essential in generating futures. Speaking to the Gullah Geechee knowledge about land that Bailey emphasized, Heynen states,

“Mrs. Bailey argued that re-purposing this agricultural knowledge could help the Geechee residents still living on Sapelo to save their land, and it would take all kinds of people working in solidarity, including me, to make this possible” (Heynen, 2021: 11).

Work towards solidarity is not without tension, all work in racialized landscapes is precarious. Shell to Shore, a predominantly white-led organization located inland, working with a historically Black coastal community constantly forced to fight land dispossession through gentrification, exploitation from academic research, and land loss from sea level rise, is bound to have missteps. Yet the possibilities for material solidarity must be extended to the foreshore and the waterscapes of coastal Georgia. These possibilities must be articulated through acts of holistic ecological repair. How can coastal management support such efforts?

A Black feminist ecology of the saltmarsh – on loss, solidarity, and repair

As I articulated in the introduction, a sense of a planetary wholeness has been articulated through Black feminist theorizations of the environment, where ecological stewardship requires considering legacies of the past as constitutive of living in the present. Memories of the past become imperative for envisioning sustainable futures, and because ecological burdens are often placed on Black women within the climate crisis, visions of the future should center around their well-being (Frazier, 2020; Combahee River Collective, 1977). Black feminist ecological thought also orients us towards relation as key to building livable worlds through both dependency and solidarity. In the act of living with/in ecological catastrophe, relationality is not abandoned in favor of dystopian imagining and succumbing to extractive futures (Lloréns, 2021). Yet life continues to exist and thrive within ecological turbulence and uncertainty.

Within this uncertainty, the process of shell recycling and restoration in coastal Georgia is ongoing, producing a deeper meaning beyond placing shells on a shoreline (Barra, 2024). Yet this incomplete and uncertain project for building a future of secure shorelines and healthy oyster reefs that employ Gullah Geechee peoples requires further grounding. I suggest that this grounding can be found within Black women's worldviews. By allowing us to rethink racial capitalism and utilizing relation as a form of disruption, revolutionary ways of being come from Black women's understanding of the natural world (James, 2022).

Within her memoir, Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey continually sits at the scene of loss and imagines a future anyway. She takes us through a specific orientation to life and ecological futures in her chapter entitled, “The Eye of the Storm.” In this chapter, she narrates the changes to Sapelo Island in the late 1960s, saying,

“Change after change blew into Sapelo, and some came in on a gentle breeze, and others battered us with winds so fierce we thought we were gonna be blown right off the island. By the time the eighties rolled around, we felt like a special list of endangered peoples had been drawn up and that our names were on it” (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000: 266).

Her words represent an embodied precarity and struggle – one that continues to persist and insist on living amongst notions of disaster. Making life, being Sapelo, is not deterred by the possibilities of loss. There is another rupture that emerges when looking at the space between death and salvation, what Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers referred to as an “interstice” - a word unspoken and unattended to (Spillers, 1984), a verb that exists between worlds beginning and ending, attending to the life we are living now. Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey embodied that verb. In her writing, there is a refusal to be erased from the island. This refusal can be held as a form of ecological praxis.

Returning to the introduction and the importance of loss in Black feminist thought, Jennifer Nash offers a conceptual framework for Black feminist attention to sitting at the scene of loss. Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey's writing and lifework sit at the scene of loss. In an op-ed entitled “I am Sapelo” she explains that, “It's a dying form of life we have here. I relish the new way while at the same time I feel such as heavy loss for the vanishing of the old ways” (Bailey, n.d.). Her words, “I am Sapelo,” imply a deep relation between self and island and an embodied cultural and ecological loss. As she narrates the loss of community, ecology, and culture on Sapelo, she maintains that the island and herself still remain. This is a vision of Sapelo Island as a body-land, where self and the landscape are intertwined (Lara, 2020).

The presence of loss was made manifest to me during an ecological monitoring trip with Shell to Shore in the summer of 2024, while I sat outside the UGAMI faculty dorms counting oyster spat grown on PVC pipes. This was an experimental beginning for the eventual living shoreline – the places where the most spat grew across the multiple locations throughout the community of Hog Hummock were where oyster shells would be placed as living shoreline infrastructure. I learned later from maps of Sapelo that the area where the faculty dorms are located, and where the initial stages of this recycling project were completed, is the marshland of Shell Hammock – a Gullah Geechee community whose members were also coerced to leave by RJ Reynolds (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000). The present-day conservation project is steeped in these legacies of Black exploitation and land loss in profound and quotidian ways. Within the legacy of enslavement, coastal dispossession, and cultural loss lies is “a debt that cannot be repaid” (Gumbs, 2020).

What meaning can we make from this oyster recycling project when we are able to center the material and embodied realities of cultural and ecological loss? This kind of acknowledgement can become an offering towards repair, rather than a tidy step to absolve the university of past and continued harm. As Bruno et al. explains, we have a responsibility to contribute time, resources, and labor to articulate what justice, and repair could look like while keeping in mind the limitations of repair (Bruno et al., 2024). I consider the time, resources, and labor that go into unearthing and understanding the legacies of Sapelo, along with the physical return of oyster shells, as a form of material solidarity. The Shell to Shore project was in part developed through the lessons of Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey. She is the catalyst; we must center her words and her formerly invisible labor to fully enact her lessons.

Conclusion

Black feminist ecological perspectives help reveal the capacity for shell recycling in Georgia to generate potential beyond a one-dimensional, science-based idea of ecological restoration. A holistic coastal planning process requires questioning what conservation science is utilized for and where – its means, its ends and its contexts. Healing the saltmarsh also comes in the form of repairing relationships and investing in physical acts of repair for those who maintain deep relationships with the waterscape. Oyster shell recycling in Georgia can utilize an old and deep Black ecological relationship as a framework for oyster reef restoration writ large. Coastal infrastructure can not only acknowledge Black life, but it can also become a form of material solidarity to bridge the gap between culinary enjoyment and coastal livelihoods. What was once perceived as waste, the oyster shell “cultch”, has the potential to become the binder that holds this material solidarity together.

On one of the multiple trips to Sapelo Island I’ve taken with Shell to Shore, I quickly learned that it is essential not to panic when stuck while trekking through the salt marsh. We visited one of the locations where the 201,390 lbs of recycled shells from the oyster festival I opened with, and from other events and restaurant kitchens since Spring 2021, may come to rest. Getting there on foot required traversing the saltmarsh to get to the coastline. Filled with deep mud, the marsh pulls you in deeper as you struggle to walk, bringing up the sulfuric smell of mud, oyster shell, and spartina grass that cannot be ignored. Mrs. Cornelia Walker Bailey relished that smell of the “most beautiful marsh you’d ever want to see” and spoke of the joy the smell also gave her mother (Bailey and Bledsoe, 2000: 19). Rather than viewing the terrain as dangerous, I learned to think of the mud as a welcome invitation. Conservation through oyster shell allows for collectively thinking beyond a linear past, present, and future, to instead consider muddied time and muddied relations. There is a future for oyster recycling projects in Georgia grounded in Black feminist ecologies and the possibilities and solidarities emerging from relationally rethinking discard.

Highlights