Map of channeled waterways in Oostvaardersplassen. Elaborate management plans and maintenance strategies for the area were soon developed. Vera began publicizing his proposal to facilitate what he called “spontaneously arisen nature,” to use this new piece of land to create an ecosystem that resembled the Netherlands before “human” history. Unlike many paleo-ecologists, who had to reconstruct this scenario on the basis of historical data, Vera saw the Oostvaardersplassen as an opportunity to actually test it, as if it was a laboratory. 3 Rather than the common theory that Europe was originally covered in forest and canopy, Frans Vera, a paleo-ecologist who worked for Staatsbosbeheer (the Dutch National Forestry Agency), believed that it looked more like a steppe-landscape with open patches and grassland. It was essential for nature conservation, paleo-ecologists claimed, to have the “correct” baseline. Rare water and migratory birds began to appear and nested between the pools.Īmong paleo-ecologists at the time, there was an ongoing debate about the ecological composition of pre-human landscapes in Europe. This produced a kind of wetland that was rare in the Netherlands and western Europe. As a result, the government decided to keep it as a shallow water reservoir. Furthermore, a substantial part of the area lied particularly low, making it vulnerable to flooding. Global political and economic conflict in the 1970s, however, called these original plans into question. The particular patch of land where the Oostvaardersplassen are located was initially planned to be filled with heavy industry, like blast ovens for steel and an oil refinery. Kilometers of reedbeds helped evaporate water, further solidifying the soil with their roots, while flaxseed brought oxygen and nutrients to the already fertile soil. ![]() The preparation of Flevoland’s polder fields for cultivation sped up in the 1940s and 1950s by distributing seed by airplanes. It relies on the erasure of peripheral knowledge and custom.Ģ013 map of the Oostvaardersplassen. 2 The idea of uninhabited space as a discovery or a clean slate, a Terra Incognita (“unknown land”) for the exercise of new order, adheres to the deeply colonial imaginary of land as passive, waiting to be used for the production of capital. Like space itself, emptiness is relational, which means that what is considered empty is dependent on the beholder. Emptiness, however, is a slippery concept. 1 In a spatial sense, this might be an apt description: since the large muddy planes left behind by the water used to be flat seabed, they had no visible cultural historical markers. The Zuiderzee works were taken up primarily by socialist planners, who together with other politicians and experts perceived the lands to be a “clean slate” on which they could experiment with new and innovative policies and intervention. Instead of going overseas or beyond the country’s geographical boundaries to take it by force, as the Netherlands had done for centuries prior, new land was “peacefully acquired” through the use of science, technology, and the “visionary resourcefulness” of Dutch engineering. But the construction of the Zuiderzee works was narrated according to a frame of colonial conquest. Such a gigantic infrastructure was built to create a reliable food supply following shortages resulting from the first world war and the growth of major urban areas, as well as job creation and flood protection. Three more large polders followed, the last of which was drained in 1972. Its construction started in 1928 with the draining of the Wieringermeer, and continued with the construction of the 33.4-kilometer-long Afsluitdijk, or enclosure dam, halting the tidal movements of the North Sea from entering the shallow inlet the Zuiderzee. Flevoland is part of the Zuiderzeewerken (the Zuiderzee works), a large-scale hydraulic engineering system consisting of dams, dikes, and pumps that altogether make up about 180,000 hectares of reclaimed land. The piece of land it is situated on, Flevoland, only recently come into existence as a product of land reclamation, the engineering practice of constructing land from sea bed. ![]() Located roughly thirty kilometers east from Amsterdam, the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve stretches out over about 5,600 hectares, about 3,000 of which are wetland and water.
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