“These are no roots, but dead plant material,” said Peter as he pointed at a cushion of sphagnum moss that, indeed, resembled a fine web of roots.[1] He carefully plucked a part of it. “Squeeze it,” he said, “it will release its water.”[2] Sphagnum moss is the main building block of an intact peatland; it holds water and forms the cushions that create the raised bog landscape.[3] Peter has been fighting for the restoration of the Peel, a largely drained peatland in the Southeastern Netherlands, since the late 1970s. High livestock density, animal farms, and grasslands largely buried the peatland underneath them, except for a few patches with protected status.[4] The Peel therefore exhibits harsh contrasts; intensive animal farms exist next to peatlands sensitive to nutrients, thousands of livestock animals are crammed into stables while migratory birds pass above them, the thousands of years that the Earth took to form a layer of peat were scraped off within several decades to produce turf.
I encountered the Peel as part of my PhD research.[5] I wanted to understand how animal farming practices relying on imported feed material such as soybeans have changed the landscapes surroundings these farms and what alternative visions of the landscape existed. I could have researched the history of imported feed material in the Peel through textual sources as a history of scientific innovations, globalized markets and human ingenuity. However, this would have obscured the situated multiple temporal scales at which change occurred in the Peel due to human ways of using the land.[6]
[Image description: A hand is holding bright green sphagnum moss.]
The proposition of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch has sparked reflection on time among humanities scholars.[7] Laurent Olivier and Marek Tamm argued that overcoming a “modern” notion of time, which implies linearity and a rigid separation between past and present, was crucial to developing more nuanced theories of change over time, thereby conceptualizing time as a human construct.[8] Anna Tsing advocated following the temporal expressions of nonhuman agents in landscapes to understand the trajectories of the Anthropocene alongside humans.[9] Reflecting on these critiques, I realized that my research practices, such as archival research and life story interviews, implicitly reinforced the linear notion of time that these authors criticized. To question this tendency, I decided to perceive my research as a “time making activity,” and follow Tsing’s proposition of tracing nonhuman temporalities to understand more-than-human interactions in the Anthropocene. I combine archival enquiry and walking oral history to become attuned to the multiple temporalities and nonhuman agents of the Peel and to investigate what new perspectives this approach would yield.
I asked my interviewees to pick a place to walk in the Peel while having a conversation with them, drawing on methods from sensory ethnography, oral environmental history and heritage studies.[10] This led to walking interviews in different conserved peatlands of the Peel, places in which previous land use practices such as turf cutting left their mark, but also included walks on pig farms to talk about the histories embedded in farming practices.
Throughout the past 150 years, the Peel underwent drastic changes due to drainage projects, turf-cutting, and animal farming. The new materialities these uses produced can make one almost forget that this used to be a peatland. However, Jeroen, an ornithologist, remarked upon the black waters surrounding grassland areas in the Peel. He argued that in these nutrient poor pools, the peatland was “peeking through” the fabric of the present-day landscape.[11] The multiple pasts of the Peel were still present in the landscape’s materialities. To him, the black water indicated the region’s past as a peatland. In the Peel’s conserved peatland area, a local ranger highlighted the shapes of small turf pits in which subsistence turf cutters had cut the turf in a non-industrial manner. As the pits hold still water, they provide the preconditions for the regeneration of peat moss.[12] These excerpts show how the narrators projected cultural memories onto the landscape and weaved together knowledge of past and present fuelled by their situated experiences of them. This shed light on the invisible histories we were entering while walking the material worlds of the present. Walking oral histories foregrounded that the peatland continued to haunt the Peel even though it largely disappeared materially.
[Image description: A wide, flat field covered in rows of green grass. The sky above is a bit cloudy with patches of sunlight breaking through. In the background, tall, leafless trees line the horizon, and some farm buildings and houses partially obscured by the trees.]
Walking in the Peel created multiple encounters with the nonhuman environment that the interviewees incorporated into their stories. Recurrent bird sounds, for example, permeated Jeroen’s accounts. During a discussion of what trees were planted in a specific place after drainage, he remarked upon the sound of a dunnock, which redirected his attention to our immediate surroundings and changed the storyline.[13] In another instant, Jeroen described geese flying over us as “flying cows” because they were searching for the “greenest grass to feed on”.[14] Various converging temporalities, such as the migratory rhythms of birds, the seasonal rhythms and the pace of walking therefore informed the walking interviews producing non-linear accounts in which the entanglement of multiple temporalities became visible. To access them, I, as the interviewer, had to let go of being the main time-making agent, deciding where and how long we could spend. Instead, I learned from the interviewee as an interlocutor between me and the nonhuman environment.[15] This shifted my interpretation of the Peel towards a place that multiple agents made sense of such as the geese who adapted to the grasslands of animal farming.
As the effects of agricultural intensification on the peatlands of the Peel became more apparent, foresters and environmental activists advocated for the regeneration of the peatland and the consequent limitation of animal farming. These pleas have been met by fervid resistance from many animal farmers who often perceive the peatland as a relic from the past when the Peel’s population was poor and marked by scarcities. In these debates, various human groups have mobilized temporal aspects of the Peel. A farmer emphasized the slow pace at which sphagnum moss grows. He argued that by conserving it, environmentalists made the peatland fall outside “the test of time,” implying a linear perception from peatland to animal farming.[16] By contrast, in defence of the regeneration of peatlands, Peter referred to the soil of the Peel as “four thousand year old plant material” since the layers on top of it had been scraped off. He mobilized the rapid change humans inflicted on the peatland as opposed to its longstanding previous existence to argue for its restoration. Including or excluding certain temporalities in their oral histories was therefore a means for the interviewees to envision different pasts and futures of the Peel.
As a researcher, I inserted myself into this landscape with my practice and presence and was able to glimpse the many temporal arrangements that produced the multiplicity of material forms in the Peel. Walking the landscape allowed me to question the temporal order I imposed in oral histories, the validity of perceiving a human life story as neatly delineated from its material surroundings and, finally, to understand humans as products of multiple environments that we co-create together with those we call non-humans. In the present, one form of land use dominates the Peel, animal farming. However, the practice of walking oral history weaved together materialities with visible and invisible pasts, destabilizing the seeming dominance of animal farming as the main use of the peatland in favour of multiple visions of existing in, on, and with raised bogs in the Peel.
[1] This study is based on fieldwork in the Peel, the Netherlands, on the use and associated landscape changes of the import of feed material for animal farms. I conducted semi structured interviews with farmers, environmentalists, a retired veterinarian, a former employee of the feed industry and former local politicians active in the Peel. The interviews sought to integrate the resource stream of feed material into wider experiences of agricultural and environmental change in the Peel. The interviewees described their experiences of change in the Peel in relation to animal farming, the preservation of the peatland and the use of imported resources. Whenever possible these interviews took place in a walking manner. These interactions were documented by taking notes, photos and voice recordings. The interviews were recorded and transcribed and the interviewees are here referred to by pseudonyms.
[2] Interview, 13:14, “Dit zijn geen wortels maar afgestorven plantmateriaal en die groeien weer door. Neem het maar in de hand en knijp er maar in want dan komt er water uit.”
[3] Hans Joosten and Donal Clarke, Wise Use of Mires and Peatlands—Background and Principles Including a Framework for Decision-Making (Totnes, Devon: International Mire Conservation Group and International Peat Society, 2002), 24.
[4] Emmelien Stavast and Sabine Grootendorst, “Waar Wonen de 11.456.831* Varkens in Nederland?” NRC Handelsblad, 23 September 2022.
[5] Caroline Kreysel, https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/caroline-kreysel.
[6] Kate Brown, “Learning to Read the Great Chernobyl Acceleration: Literacy in the More-than-Human Landscapes,” Current Anthropology 60, no. Supplement 20 (2019): S198–208.
[7] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time,” History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018): 5–32; Courtney Fullilove, “Debate: Seeds as Deep Time Technologies,” Technology and Culture 65, no. 1 (January 2024): 7–38; Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The Anthropocene Monument: On Relating Geological and Human Time,” European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 1 (2016): 111–31.
[8] Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier, “Introduction: Rethinking Historical Time,” in Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism, ed. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 4.
[9] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Multispecies Ontological Turn?” in The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies, ed. Adrian Franklin (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024), 122.
[10] Stephen M. Sloan and Mark Cave, eds., Oral History and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (London: Sage, 2015); Torgeir Rinke Bangstad, “Interstitial Heritage: Industrienatur and Ecologies of Memory,” in Heritage Ecologies, ed. Torgeir Rinke Bangstad and Þóra Pétursdóttir (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 222–45.
[11] Interview with an ecologist, 39:09-39:22, “(…) en dan zie je eigenlijk dat de Peel er nog doorheen schijnt.”
[12] Interview with a ranger, 12:26 – 12:39, “de grens die loopt zo hier doorheen, dit zijn allemaal nog van die oude turfputjes en die zijn eigenlijk aan de grootschalige vervening, daar zijn ze nooit aantoe gekomen.”
[13] Interview with an ecologist, 9:31, Interviewer: “En de dennen waren voor de bosbouw, voor het hou?” Interviewee: “Ja precies. Dat is een heggenmusje wat je daar hoort zingen. Nou hier hebben ze dus op de alleroudste gronden (…).”
[14] Interview with an ecologist, 1:27:09, “En hier heb je meer dan genoeg te eten. Dat is goed gekeurd door de Vereniging van Ganzen. [01:27:33 – 01:27:40] Nee, die moeten het niet altijd. Maar dan zeggen ze, wow, het zijn er veel te veel. Maar weet je, als je kijkt naar de landbouw, dan zie je dat het heel erg goed is. [01:27:45 – 01:27:53] Het zijn eigenlijk vliegende koeien, die vliegen hier overheen en die zoeken dus de plekken met het meest groene gras.”
[15] Michelle Bastian et al., eds., Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 11.
[16] Interview with a farmer, 01:09:59 – 01:10:11,”Maar dan krijg je, ik vraag me af van hoezo? Wie zijn wij om te zeggen, die Peel hoeft de tand der tijd niet te doorstaan. Wij gaan het anders doen?”
*Cover image: Part of the now protected peatland in the Peel, in which the water was dammed to allow for moss growth. Image by the author.
*Cover image description: The photograph centres on a small body of water, surrounded by green moss, within a landscape dominated by yellow-brown grass. There are several leafless trees in the background below a light grey sky.
Edited by Teja Šosterič; reviewed by Josephine Goldman.