Towards a Mirier Future
Maarja Pärtna
- On drainage ditches
Utopias of the past have left landmarks in the landscape, the presence of which may be so self-evident that it is even strange to ask questions about them.
A couple of years ago my friends and I went to swim in a small fen in Western Estonia. To get there, we had to first walk two hours through a gravelly timber transporting forest road cutting straight through high fir-groves. In some places a smaller road branched from the main one, going deep into the forest; the renovated main road hinted that preparations for clear-cutting were under way.
By one such road we entered the dimness of the forest like trencher friends to a school reunion. The journey through the fir-grove was slow as our road often crossed drainage ditches. At first they seemed low and overgrown, full of plants and branches, but after our first jump-over we found ourselves in water up to the knee. The drainage ditches in the forest were much wider than it had seemed at first sight.
We spent several hours in the forest seeking dryer places and trees fallen across the ditches for crossing, tearing out our feet and footwear stuck in the ditches. That dogged toiling towards the faraway glowing bog pools made us joke somewhat ironically: was it really a romantic bathing tour in a fen without a broadwalk and tourists on the lightest day of the year?
- On land development
Estonia is one of the most drainage affected states in the world. The extent of drainage systems in Estonia is estimated to be about 150,000 kilometers and if we would tie all those drainage segments together into a rope, we could wind it around the planet several times. Several of these ditches point silently to one of the greatest ‘utopian’ megaprojects of the 20th century, the Stalin Plan for Transformation of Nature started behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union. The part of it concerning Estonia designated drying of wetlands on nearly a million hectares. The plan was actuated officially in the occupied Estonia in August of the bloody 1949 with a draft act of draining the mires for usage which started the ‘onslaught on mires’: mechanized melioration and draining work with the aim to extend agricultural and forest land and rise their productivity. Melioration stood on the shoulders of three giants: the planned economy of an authoritarian society, the availability of machines necessary for melioration, and usage of fossil fuel. In this ’anti-mire war’ wetlands were seen as useless hostile obtrusive places, suffering from excessive dampness, spreading dangerous diseases of cattle and people that had to be conquered using melioration methods and applied in the service of the Soviet economy.
Melioration went on as a part of the Soviet agricultural and forestry practice after Stalin’s death. By the end of the occupation period, Estonia had undergone an extensive change of landscape, forfeiting one third of its mires, but not only these: melioration and drainage also meant straightening and dredging rivers and brooks. As a child growing up in a village I also used to play, although after the occupation time, on the banks of such a brook, who had one had a naturally windy bed but who was in the end of the 1970s dug straight using an excavator and connected to the drainage network. Nobody knows exactly what biodiversity got lost in the course of that drainage, as nobody has ever mapped it. But we know that in Estonia as a whole drainage has affected vanishing of the freshwater pearl mussel, the willow grouse, and the black stork.
3. Towards a mirier future
It is impossible to imagine the future better than the present if it doesn’t comprise repairing the traces of transformation of nature. In a mirier future wetlands would have a right to remain where they were formed during the holocene, and a right to restore where they have been damaged in the course of drainage and transformation of nature. We would acknowledge them as a habitat of species who tend to live in their wet embrace and value their ability to swallow carbon from the atmosphere that we have carelessly extracted from the bowels of the earth. Mirier, damper, softer and moss-covered future wetlands could continually clean and absorb fresh water, stay free of pollution, alleviate floods and droughts. They should have a right to be restored.
Translated by Kersti Unt