Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
what he called aquiculture, with the institutional support of the regime. In southern
Alsace, near the Swiss border, and with the
nancial aid of Napoleon III, Coste
settled a
sh were
send throughout France and to many countries (as far as Brazil and USA). The
objective of many local
sh breeding farm, from which thousands of eggs and young
shing societies founded during the late nineteenth century
was to repopulate the streams.
10
From the second half of the eighteenth century, an important transformation
simultaneously affected cities and countryside: the increasingly negative view
concerning wet zones. The link between occasional fevers and swamps is very
ancient. However, the drainage effort strengthened and was renewed at the end of
the eighteenth century, for economic reasons as well as medical ones: the hostile
speech against the commons and the agricultural revolution urged elites to look for
new medical justi
cations in the transformations of the territory. Urban transfor-
mations also contributed to this medical debate. The wet zones were less and less
perceived as defensive or productive areas
—
which they often were in Northwestern
Europe since the late Middle Ages
11
t
out in the interest of the city-dwellers. In another geographical context, since the
late nineteenth century, European colonization of Asia and Africa led to medical
research about malaria, which was endemic in many areas. But the wetlands were
also places with great biodiversity; human efforts to adapt wetlands to their new
needs and visions led to the disappearance of many species. The last century or so
has experienced a huge movement of land reclamation in coastal wetlands, leading
to profound physical transformations of thousands square kilometers. Because of
these changes, even if public authorities did not always support this environmental
movement as enthusiastically as the goal of reclaiming wetlands, various species
belonging to these ecosystems (birds,
—
to become places to be cleaned up and to
owers, and so forth) became central in
biodiversity conservation programs elaborated by ecologists.
In many large-scale hydraulic projects, integrated water management was not
secured. One famous example lies in the region of the Aral Sea. Located in the
former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has almost disappeared because of intensive
irrigation from rivers Syr Daria and Amu Daria for cotton growing in Uzbekistan
and Kazakhstan, a non traditional usage planned by Soviet engineers in the 1950s.
Such a large amount of water was diverted that the Sea level started to fall in the
following decade, provoking many environmental changes in the region (including
climatic ones). The major ecological problem touched the social framework of
the former seashore. Fisheries disappeared in less than 30 years. Everything, from
the groundwater to the air and the soil, was salinized. The coastal area is now far
removed from the Aral waters, the seashore receded by many kilometers and
professional
shermen have been forced to abandon their livelihood. Projects are
currently in progress to return the sea water as close as possible to its former
shoreline.
10
Malange (
2009
).
11
Soens (
2011
) and Morera (
2011
).
