DredgeFest
New York City

The Festival of Dredge in New York is a symposium about the human acceleration of sediments, and the technologies and techniques we’ve invented which manage it.

Why Dredge?
The techniques of dredging—and the galaxy of technologies that surround it—constitute perhaps the greatest unrecognized landscape architecture project in the world. Dredge shapes our beaches and waterways, it is driven by what we do to distant upstream forests and fields, it plays a key role in global shipping networks, and in coastal real estate.

Moreover, dredging—the mechanized transport of underwater sediments—is a key moment in a wider cycle of linked activities through which humans act as intentional and unintentional geologic agents, accelerating and decelerating the movement of silts, sands, and clays. If we are living, as many scientists contend, in the Anthropocene, a new geologic era characterized by human action, then understanding dredge is essential to understanding the world we are making for ourselves.