Eco-Prospecting in Early Modern Wetlands

What kinds of natural knowledge and natural value existed in early modern wetlands? This essay uses a naturalist’s survey of a now-vanished swamp outside the northern Italian city of Bologna to reconstruct both the ecological knowledge of the swamp’s peasant inhabitants and the processes of “eco-prospecting” by which their knowledge was gathered, recorded, and used. The naturalist, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, systematically interrogated the wetlanders for their site-specific knowledge of the seasonally dynamic relations between fish, water, plants, and weather. He also recorded in detail the wetlanders’ building of hydraulic infrastructure, practices of cane cultivation, and artisanal craftwork with the swamps’ natural materials. Marsili’s survey revealed the swamp as a place that was neither hostile nor barren (as most outsiders saw it) but populated and productive, filled with natural materials that could be used to sustain human communities and also to support divergent visions of resource management and extraction.