In October 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation celebrated the completion of a new wetland ecosystem in Buffalo's Outer Harbor — a former industrial shipping slip filled with dredged sediment and enclosed by a concrete breakwater. The slip wetland is simultaneously a dredge disposal solution, a regulatory compliance mechanism, and an ecological restoration credit lubricating speculative real estate development on one of Lake Erie's most vulnerable coastlines. Championed as a contribution to coastal resilience, the project exemplifies a paradox at the heart of Great Lakes coastal governance today: the ecosystem that would be most resilient in the face of the new climate-driven hydrological regime is the very dune-wetland complex that settlers once destroyed. The wetlands now being engineered are not resilient. Ecologically, they are not even wetlands. At best they are tokenistic or symbolic—a simulacrum of what was destroyed but serving no gross ecological function. So what work are they doing? Drawing on the history of Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, this paper examines the political economy of ecological restoration and the way in which projects like the slip wetland are ecologically insignificant but serve as an anchor for real estate capital on the Outer Harbor. What is proving to be resilient is the way the growth machine utilizes ecological discourse for the work of economic development.
