After Wetlands
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21309665 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eklund Eklund (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 457 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Criticism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-1589 • E-ISSN: 1536-0342 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.13110/criticism.62.3.0457 |
| OpenAlex | W4233533851 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Since 1900, 64 percent of the world's wetlands have disappeared. But in western literature, wetlands have been dead and dying for much longer. In our lived present, "after wetlands" is at once a material fact (since we can measure wetlands loss and count its costs) and an as-yet-unrealized fantasy spun through centuries of writing about wetlands. Attentive to this double vision, this essay performs its own temporal juxtapositions of early modern and more recent writing. Plying an "unfast" approach informed by the temporal and material indeterminacy of wetlands themselves, I offer readings of Aldo Leopold's "Marshland Elegy" (1949) and two landmark texts in the history of drainage in England: Walter Blith's The English Improver, Improved (1652) and the anonymous History or Narrative of the Great Levell of the Fenns (1685). I argue that both the promotion of early drainage schemes and latter-day lamentations of wetlands loss are tightly bound up with notions of historical time. Yet for all their focus on a future "after wetlands," the conceptual margins and drifts of these texts reveal how the ever-transforming past and present seep into the imagined future. Such temporal juxtapositions defy attempts to bring wetlands' amphibious untimeliness into the calendrical regimes of settled agriculture and the historical purview of the law. I conclude by discussing some contemporary examples of wetlands resurgence—examples that not only expose the failures of enterprising human agents to secure control over the nonhuman but also offer models for embracing those failures
Art · Environmental ethics · Geography · Literature · Marsh · Narrative · Wetland · Ecology · History · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure
| Citations per year | 1.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |