By David Gottfried and Lothar Schilling

‘An imperishable good deed’ - this is how the Electoral Bavarian Privy Cabinet Secretary Stephan von Stengel described the project he was instrumental in promoting to drain the Danube moss near Neuburg an der Donau in 1791. In recent years, for reasons of species and climate protection, there has been a tendency to renaturalize moors as far as possible, i.e. to restore them to their pre-draining state. Such pilot projects are also being carried out in the Donaumoos.
The project “Why to drain an inland wetland? Revisiting German-language Economic Enlightenment discourses” examines, among other things, how it came about that numerous wetlands were drained from the 18th century onwards.

The Economic Enlightenment movement, which, among other things, aimed to increase agricultural yields, played a decisive role. Arable farming was to be practiced on ‘virgin land’ wrested from nature in order to ‘optimize’ the use of the available areas. However, the initiators of the project were unaware of the lack of nutrients in the soil. What Stephan von Stengel had described as a ‘blessing’ condemned the people who settled on the ‘reclaimed’ land to great poverty for a long time. It was not until the introduction of artificial fertilizers brought improvements here. Many other problems (including those caused by extraction and subsidence of the peat soil) remained. Nevertheless, historiography has long regarded the draining as a success.
The project adds innovative perspectives to the historiography of the ‘melioration’ of moors: it analyzes the contemporary discourse on wetlands in the 18th century, which has been neglected by research to date, based on an extensive corpus of sources. This includes a wide range of archive holdings and is based, among other things, on a database that lists and analyzes over 10,000 publications on the ‘economy’ from the 18th century. Unlike much of the previous research, the project is not based on the unquestioned assumption that the reclamations were cultural achievements of the state-led expansion of the country and thus milestones on the road to ‘modernity’. Instead, the (quite incomplete and contradictory) interpretations, knowledge and future horizons of the actors involved are placed at the center of the investigation.
These horizons are considered in the context of the overall ‘Thinking with Wetlands’ project. The knowledge available to agricultural experts in the 18th century, where it came from and how it was disseminated will be examined, as will the question of how and why it differed from the local, practical knowledge of the residents who had been using the bog extensively for centuries. For the actors of the 18th century, the melioration projects represented the logical next step towards a future characterized by rational mastery of nature, in which infinite progress seemed possible. The question of whether (and if so, how) such horizons of expectation were adapted in the face of contradictory experiences is another focus of the research project - a question that also arises regarding how contemporary societies deal with the ecological consequences of their growth- and progress-orientated policies.
During renaturalization, wetlands are once again being used extensively, for example as pasture, as they were before the draining of the 18th century. ‘Cultural achievements’ of the last 200 years are thus being questioned and revised. The example of dealing with wetlands clearly shows that expert knowledge that is primarily orientated towards technical feasibility is obviously not sufficient as a basis for future decisions. This makes it even more important to bear in mind that all decisions could be based on misjudgments and should therefore be revisable.