Wetlands are not always, and for some not ever, the most pleasant of places. In fact they have often been seen as horrific places. In the patriarchal western cultural tradition wetlands have been associated with death and disease, the monstrous and the melancholic, if not, the downright mad. Wetlands are 'black waters'. They have even been seen as a threat to health and sanity, to the clean and proper body, and mind. The typical response to the horrors and threats posed by wetlands has been simple and decisive: dredge, drain or fill and so 'reclaim' them. Yet the idea of reclaiming wetlands begs the questions of reclaimed from what? For what? For whom? A critical history of wetlands' drainage could quite easily be entitled 'Discipline and Drain'.
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