Wet, Thick Cosmos &
Reclaiming wet History
Traveling research fellowship, Awarded 2021; Completed Summer 2023.
Locations: Flow Country, Caithness & Sutherland, St. Andrews University, Edinburgh, Scotland
Supported by the Brown's Traveling Fellowship, School of Architecture, Rensselaer.
Presentations
"Reclaiming Wet History: Uncovering the Historical Roots of the Collective Abandonment of Bogs, Swamps, and Peatland in the Scottish Highlands" ASEH 2024 4 April 2024 [1]
(forthcoming, Fall 2024) Brown's Fellow Presentation Rensselaer Polytechnicic Institute [2]
[1] Reclaiming Wet History: Examining Scottish Peatlands to Uncover Suppressed Environmental Perspectives
Abstract
In the Scottish Highlands lies a vast, yet little-known patchwork of wetland. Named the Flow Country, this 1,500-square mile region of peatland and blanket bog is unlike others in Europe in that it far exceeds their area but, like them, exists beyond popular environmental consciousness. This is unsurprising, for obscure landscapes such as the Flow Country are seldom aesthetically or economically valued in Europe and North America due to their exclusion from industry and economic activities.
In this paper I argue that historic attitudes that emerged over the course of the English colonization of the Highlands are at the root of the current apathy toward and obscurity of wetlands and peat bogs. In the 18th and 19th C Highlander environmental beliefs were challenged and then eradicated as social and economic forces eliminated generations of traditional land practices (Toogood, 1995, MacDonald, 1998). The bogs of the Highlands were understood as an interconnected web of human and ecological relationships by lesser-known Highlanders and traditional inhabitants. But, Highlander environmental thinking was in opposition to predominant views in a time that promoted extensive natural resource exploitation (Albritton Jonsson, 2013, Ritvo, 2018). This conflict fed a suite of socio-cultural shifts that occurred in and influenced Scottish land practices which radically transformed the landscape, namely from the aftermath of Christian missions, Highland clearances and resulting processes of deforestation and extensive grazing.
I argue that through understanding this history and examining suppressed Highland environmental perspectives will shed light onto how this environment was understood before its recharacterization through the eyes of religious and political colonizers—a view which has shaped this marginalized landscape and its place in the popular imagination. I examine the writing and contrasting positionality of the Highlanders and British through queer ecological, ecocritical, and STS perspectives. These frameworks acknowledge the loss of Highlander environmentalism and emphasize forming more radical models of empathy and positive coexistence with environments to overcome the limitations imposed by colonial paradigms. The purpose of this study is to investigate how different cultural attitudes in Scotland influenced human perception and feelings towards now-ostracized landscapes, while advocating a paradigm shift toward deeper ties to nonhuman environments and deeper levels of care.
[2] Wet, Thick Cosmos
Research Proposal
This project examines techniques and technologies of landscape making in wetland ecosystems. The research is inclusive of a review of historic methods, contemporary, experimental, and indigenous practices. The outcome of the research will be the creation of a catalog of 2D drawings and 3D models demonstrating techniques, technologies, and practices that accomplish collaborative forms of landscape-technologies. The study focuses on hybridized examples of organic, biological matter coupled with artificial systems in wetland environments. This research will contribute to a publication project, currently underway, which imagines speculative ‘landscape futures’ in aqueous environments. The publication focuses on representing landscapes in visual and narrative form, and on stories that investigate the hybridization of biological and artificial systems. The landscapes included in the text examine regenerative ‘living’ technologies and wetlands that are connected to the production of medicine - material-based or cultural imaginations of medicine - and therapeutic applications.
“Technology is the practice of making tools that enable further making -- material, intellectual, active, and social, technology is the purposeful organization of human effort to alter and shape environments.
Among the most intensively realized of these environments are gardens (viz. landscapes) – which, of course, are the products of a range of technologies.”
– Lee and Helphand, Technology and the Garden, 2014
What are the technologies of landscape-making? Especially in aqueous environments? How are these technologies connected to specific cultural practices, ecologies, or human values and belief systems? What meanings, intended and unintentional, arise from the conceptual underpinnings in the meeting of landscapes and technologies in wetlands, marshes, swamps, and bogs? Where and how are aqueous environments cultivated into cultural landscapes? This project unpacks existing, indigenous, and historical wetland landscape technologies in a series of case studies to speculate upon and propose possible futures of technological and medicinal wetland landscapes of the future.
Many scholars have interrogated the interactions of technology and ‘nature,’ yet this investigation rarely examines how technologies continually shape (and reshape) landscape systems, especially in water-based landscapes. More generally, interconnections between landscapes and technology are overlooked, perhaps due to the large scales associated with land and ecological systems in comparison to the relatively smaller, discrete scales of technological instruments, and presumptions that landscapes are ‘inherently natural.’ This research investigates and imagines landscapes that transcend traditional dichotomies between "nature/culture" and "natural/artificial,” especially examples of landscape technologies deployed in marshes, bogs, swamps, and other aqueous terrain. Emphasis is placed on visual and narrative storytelling techniques that convey how landscapes and their associated technologies are represented, engaged-with, and valued in specific cultural contexts. The research makes no attempt at arguing for the universal applications of technologies nor transferable models of technologies’ from one context to another. Rather, the methodology is interested in a deep reading that exposes context-dependent phenomena of ecological and cultural specific to a particular site, culture, and context. Examples of technologies which will be analyzed include those attributed to agricultural cultivation, industrial fabrication, medicinal applications, and silvicultural practices in five settings.
The five sites of research are selected for their association with the UNESCO World Heritage nomination process, Ramsar recognition, or recognition by UNEP. The first site, the Flow Country peatlands, which cover an area across Caithness and Sutherland Scotland, are currently participating in a bid for UNESCO recognition and are not recognized on the list at this time. The second site, the Céide Fields, Ireland was constructed by Neolithic farmers around 5,700 years ago as a contained wetland landscape and has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2010. The third site, the Great Dismal Swamp is located along the Coastal Plain Region of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina. The swamp, and associated Lake Drummond, are recognized as crucial marooning sites for refugee slaves during the plantation and Civil War eras. Conservation groups have continually advocated for stronger protections for the swamp and lake due to their historical and ecological significance. The last piece of legislation for their protection was written in 1973 by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Parks Service, amidst reoccurring counter-arguments advocating for draining the swamp and the introduction of extensive logging practices and lumber extraction. In light of the recognition of historical and ecological importance, there is a possibility of UNESCO nomination for the Great Dismal Swamp for these reasons. The fourth site is the Everglades National Park, a tropical freshwater wetland located in southern Florida. While the Everglades receives protections via the US National Parks Service, this landscape does not have official UNESCO status, but has been deemed an area of Global Importance by UNESCO since the 1970s and is a possible addition to the World Heritage Cultural Landscapes list. The fifth and final landscape is the Ramsar Cultural Region located in Iran, the origin landscapes of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance held in 1971.
Crossing the Swamp
Mary Oliver
1978
Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything—the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure—
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much as
painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth— a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water— a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud—
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves.