With the winter semester 2025/26 already in full swing, the ‘Thinking with Wetlands’ working group can look back on a successful summer semester. It was the first semester in which the group received SEED funding from the University of Augsburg, which enabled it to significantly expand its work.

Using gases from wetlands to power a gun? In the 18th century, that was planned and realized by the Italian naturalist Alessandro Volta. Volta’s pistol uses methane (he called it “aria infiammabile nativa delle paludi”), an inflammable gas, which he discovered in the air in wetlands, at this time more generally referred to under the name of “swamps”.

From 9 to 10 October 2025, the ‘Thinking With Wetlands’ working group held its first international workshop titled ‘Testing the Ground | Auf instabilem Grund’. Participants included members of the working group at UniA, their project partners from universities in Germany, France, Italy and Australia, and representatives from the Bavarian State Office for the Environment.

The area of the Fens extends around the bay of The Wash, in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. These are extensive wetlands, some of which were flooded from the sea (salt marshes), but some were also created by the backwater of rivers (Witham, Welland, Nene or Great Ouse). The land is in some places below sea level, so that there is no gradient for natural drainage...

Throughout her life, K?the Seidel (1907-1990) has worked on the bulrush and constructed wetlands. A controversial character, she is remembered both as a prophet for living otherwise and an epitome of alternative science. For the age of the Anthropocene, she represents an intellectual who firmly believed that planting a wetland would do nothing short of saving the planet….

“An everlasting good deed” this is how Stephan von Stengel described the project to drain the Doanaumoos, which he was instrumental in promoting in 1791. Lately, for reasons of climate protection, there has been a tendency to renaturalize wetlands as far as possible.
“Why to drain an inland wetland?” examines, how it came about that numerous wetlands were drained from the 18th century onwards...

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