TY - JOUR

T1 - Landscape Imaginaries and the Protection of Dynamic Nature at the Wadden Sea

AU - Walsh, Cormac

N1 - Funding Information: The research for this paper was generously supported by the German Research Foundation under project grant: Metageographies and Spatial Frames: Coastal Management as Situated Practice in the International Wadden Sea Region. The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and Dr. Martin Döring for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Michaela Loch and Sarah Topfstädt for their assistance during the research process. Funding Information: Although the nature conservation efforts at the Wadden Sea date from the early years of the twentieth century it was with the beginnings of mass tourism in the 1960s that the awareness of the need for large-scale protection emerged. In this context, a dedicated conservation organisation was established in 1962, the Schutzstation Wattenmeer. This organisation, influenced by the nascent environmental movement sought to increase awareness of the need for protection of the Wadden Sea, among local communities and summer visitors. Significantly, the founders of this organisation sought to ‘bring the mudflats to the people’. In place of ‘no entry’ signs, it was argued that the landscape should be open for visitors under the guidance of experts (Oetken 1971, in Ziemek 2014: 152– 3). In 1969, the hunting association of Schleswig-Holstein subsequently proposed the establishment of a national park for the northern Frisian Wadden Sea. Their proposal envisaged a cessation of bird hunting but that seal-hunting should continue, the latter justified through the absence of ‘natural predators’. This proposal was decisive in leading the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry for Agriculture to formally examine the possibility of establishing a national park. In the early 1970s, the proposed national park concept was supported at the political level within the district of Northern Friesland and also received support from the federal level of government. The national park would protect the nature of the Wadden Sea ‘in its entirety’ with relatively strict restrictions on hunting and other forms of human intervention. Fishing nevertheless was permitted and the park boundaries were drawn, so as to exclude the inhabited islands, Halligs and coastal marshlands (Der Spiegel 1974). Opposition, however came from the organised Frisian community on the islands and Halligs, who viewed the project as an imposition from outside and a threat to their regional identity and their traditional practices of hunting, fishing and egg collecting. The framing of the Wadden Sea as a natural landscape and national park was challenged and opposed by local communities and organisations on the coast and islands of Northern Friesland. For many, the imposition of a national park represented a denial of the rights of the Frisian community to their own lands which had been lost to the sea in former centuries. In 1974, Frederik Paulsen a pharmaceuticals entrepreneur and long-time supporter of Frisian culture argued as follows: ‘the Wadden Sea is not an original natural landscape but a cultural landscape lost to the sea. So, in one form or another, the Frisian inhabitants have paid for the Wadden Sea. That is why they primarily are entitled to decide about the Wadden Sea’ (Husumer Nachrichten 4th January 1974, in Steensen 2018: 102–3). Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s).

PY - 2020/1/27

Y1 - 2020/1/27

N2 - Whereas the transgression of nature-culture dichotomies is commonplace in academic discourse, contemporary practices of nature conservation continue, in many cases, to be characterised by the active construction of fixed boundaries between spaces of nature and spaces of culture. In such contexts, nature constitutes a powerful discursive category, albeit one that is manifested differently across space and time. This paper advances a situated understanding of the spatialities and temporalities underlying contemporary practices of nature conservation through an empirical study of the concepts of nature and landscape informing management practices in the case of the Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Park in northern Germany. Theoretically, the paper draws on and further develops the concept of landscape imaginaries as a means to analytically make sense of diverse situated understandings of landscape and nature-culture relations. The paper thus addresses the implications of essentialist concepts of nature and landscape for protected area management within the context of a rapidly changing world. It is found that in this case, a conservation philosophy focused on the protection of natural processes is constrained by the maintenance of a categorical distinction between natural and cultural landscapes. The paper concludes with a plea for an understanding of nature conservation in terms of place-based situated practices.

AB - Whereas the transgression of nature-culture dichotomies is commonplace in academic discourse, contemporary practices of nature conservation continue, in many cases, to be characterised by the active construction of fixed boundaries between spaces of nature and spaces of culture. In such contexts, nature constitutes a powerful discursive category, albeit one that is manifested differently across space and time. This paper advances a situated understanding of the spatialities and temporalities underlying contemporary practices of nature conservation through an empirical study of the concepts of nature and landscape informing management practices in the case of the Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Park in northern Germany. Theoretically, the paper draws on and further develops the concept of landscape imaginaries as a means to analytically make sense of diverse situated understandings of landscape and nature-culture relations. The paper thus addresses the implications of essentialist concepts of nature and landscape for protected area management within the context of a rapidly changing world. It is found that in this case, a conservation philosophy focused on the protection of natural processes is constrained by the maintenance of a categorical distinction between natural and cultural landscapes. The paper concludes with a plea for an understanding of nature conservation in terms of place-based situated practices.

KW - Geography

KW - nature-culture dichotomies

KW - National Park

KW - landscape imaginaries

KW - spatialities

KW - temporalities

KW - conservation

KW - wadden sea

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079897332&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.16993/rl.55

DO - 10.16993/rl.55

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 7

JO - Rural Landscapes: Society, Environment, History

JF - Rural Landscapes: Society, Environment, History

SN - 2002-0104

IS - 1

M1 - 1

ER -