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Wetlands - the reason for their existence
Wetlands - their reason for existence can already be seen onhand of this one image of the coastline in Rhodes. Water behind the shoreline can be attributed to an overspill of the sea when high waves swap over. But they can be easily the areas where not salt but fresh water collects itself and waits for the time when it is possible to join the sea.
Plimiri on Rhodes Photo by Nikos Kasseris
Poetically speaking, such standing water close to the shoreline alters the usual description of a river. The latter seeks the sea. Wetlands, so it appears, avoid the direct contact. It is still fed by tributes but ones not strong enough to push through to the sea and into the open.
As the pilot project shall get under way on Rhodes June 29th and take the participants to such sites, it will be interesting to trace with eyes and feet the path taken by the water down to the sea.
A shoreline delineates the one sphere of forces influencing the atmosphere and the space from another. As described already water can mean something else when a river, a wet land or the open sea. The quality changes with the form. In correspondence to that, it becomes a question how mankind came to recognize over time the differences between these similar and yet still very different elements.
Questions shall be raised whether or not in terms of development this water behind the shoreline can be ignored altogether. In times of climate change, there is anticipated a rising of the sea level. Some of this land will stand in future completely under water and the distinction between the two different spheres will vanish. What consequences will this natural cushion between land and sea have for future development on the island?
Question of development is also one of letting things develop naturally or to attempt to influence it in a way that out of the development emerges a new cultural landscape. Always this depends upon the kind of interaction between mankind and natural environment.
A quite different impression in terms of coastline provide the following two images.
Fragma Gadouras
Clearly in the first of these two images can be seen man's interference. There is an embankment to be seen as well a dirt road leading up to the coastline. What falls into the picture is immediately a kind of functional intervention with but a single purpose. There seems no thought was given to some other human activities which could play a role, if life was to develop there some other answer to man's existence on this planet earth.
As to the second image, here a pattern of stones creates a distinction between a natural and a man built embankment. It can give an idea to various degrees of delineations. The shrubs go only up to a certain point like the trees grow up a mountain only until the tree line is reached. In keeping this contrast in mind, the shoreline has as well this distinction and reveals a sharp difference in how things can exist or not. While everything depends on a kind of osmosis with the immediate surrounding, the overall context should not be forgotten. For there is the earth rotating around the sun within an infinite universe. The latter's real borders, or where it ends and marks at the same time a beginning, that mankind does not know. In philosophy it has given merely ground to believe experience sets in with 'Umkehren' (Hegel - turn around to back the way one came).
Nothing is abstract in nature but its finite time line of existence changes all the time. This does not apply merely to the river with Heraclit's famous saying one would not step twice into the same river. A time line of existence is comparable to the streak of a comet in the night sky. Long before and well after extinction its traces can still be seen from the surface of the earth. Light years ago was the beginning and the end of that star. Light travels on to tell of its existence. Light has made itself independent and travels on as if there is no end. How then to pick up the story of mankind?
Hatto Fischer
7.5.2011
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