A Thinning Shoreline In Korba

What is missing is a coastal landscape : the gradual loss of ecological density along the shoreline of Korba in northeastern Tunisia, shaped by my childhood summers at my grandparents’ seaside house. As a child, the coast felt alive in ordinary ways : clear water revealing fish near the shore, seagrass beneath the surface, crabs under rocks, shells appearing and disappearing with the tide. Seaweed on the sand and salt on the skin marked the landscape’s everyday rhythms. Korba’s coastline was never a unified system. Structured by patchiness, it was composed of overlapping uses and histories : family homes built close to the water, nearby agricultural fields irrigated from inland wells and informal fishing practices. This unevenness allowed multiple forms of life to coexist, making the shore a space of encounter between human and more-than-human life. Within this patchy landscape, disappearance unfolded unevenly through modular simplifications. Human interventions reshaped the coastline in fragments: protection structures, hotels, private developments, and concrete barriers were built to stabilize and control the shore for tourism and property protection. At the same time, intensified agriculture relied on fertilizers and pesticides, while untreated wastewater was discharged into the sea, aiming to simplify and standardize coastal space. Feral proliferations followed these simplifications: disrupted sediment flows intensified coastal erosion, seagrass beds thinned or disappeared, and the water became increasingly turbid and warmer. Algae blooms, organic accumulations, polluted runoff, plastic debris, and drifting waste spread beyond the sites where control was imposed, amplifying coastal instability. From a patchy Anthropocene perspective, this structural loss matters, resulting from an accumulation of fragmented interventions that have reconfigured how land and sea interact. The coast still “looks” like a beach, but it no longer functions as a shared multispecies space. What remains is a landscape with thinner relations, offering fewer possibilities for both human and more-than-human life.