On Friday 4 October 2024 Professor Maarten Zwiers (University of Groningen) will present this year’s RIAS Environmental History Lecture on the meaning of wetlands throughout history in the Netherlands, the US, and beyond.
Title Lecture: The Meaning of Wetlands
Lecturer: Maarten Zwiers
Date: Friday 4 October at 16:00 to 18:00
Location: RIAS, Hofplein 16, 4331CK Middelburg
Please register here before Wednesday 25 September.
What is the meaning of wetlands? Throughout history, humans more often than not considered wetlands like swamps, fens, and bogs as obnoxious and hostile spaces. “Drain the swamp” has even become a political slogan.
In this Environmental History Lecture, historian and Americanist Maarten Zwiers delves into the various manifestations of the marsh and its representation in movies, literature, and politics. From Het Zwin in Zeeuws Vlaanderen to the swamps in the Deep South of the United States and onward to the peat fields in the North of the Netherlands, we discover how wetlands mean different things to different organisms, both human and other-than-human.
While antebellum planters in the U.S. South saw marshlands as obstacles to progress and profit, swamps offered refuge to those escaping the plantation system. The swamp can be many things: a dystopia that needs to be drained, a symbol of chaos and decay, but also an important agent in the fight against global warming and a site of resistance and rebellion against enslavement and extraction.
