Note: This post is part of our series of blog entries based on our RMA students’ engagements with the Lutkemeerpolder. For a more general introduction to the series, click here.
Author: Emrys Karlas
Since I grew up near the city’s western border, my familiarity with the Lutkemeerpolder began long before I consciously encountered the space. Traveling through the polder to a teammate’s house, or crossing it on the way to visit Gemaal Lynden, I had very little awareness of the polder or its context. My reintroduction with the Lutkemeerpolder came on long runs that took me to all the outskirts of the city during COVID-19-related national lockdowns. Something about the polder kept pulling me back. This pulling became more visceral when I ended up experiencing a second reintroduction at the start of April 2024 in the context of the Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities module. This reintroduction was more forceful. It was not leisurely or practical, it was a confrontation with the competing interests of many parties where the battlefield itself was the topic of contention.
Being the child of two disciplines, literary studies and geology, spatial encounters frequently send me into the ground through different archives. To understand the soil that is now being fought over, you must understand how that soil came to be. The human narrative must be supplemented by the story the land itself tells. The encounter must be opened up to deep time. The Netherlands being the delta that it is, the millions-to-billions year old deep time history is not found on the surface. The top 14 meters of the Lutkemeerpolder send us back a maximum of 238,000 years, though the exact timing of the sedimentation in the area is not known. Below the contested farmland and potential prospective business park lie the remnants of the second-to-last ice age during which the ice in this area came up to Haarlem. Until the early Holocene (which started ~11,700 years ago), this area hosted braiding and meandering (ice) rivers flowing below and from the glacial cover, followed by rivers typical for dry areas, and then swamps. During the Holocene the coastline of what became the Netherlands moved. The shallow seas left behind clay, silt, and sand. The Lutkemeerpolder was sea once and will be sea again. The fertile sea clay lies at a depth of approximately -5m below sea level and over time the sediments will be taken back by the water.
I was trying to understand not only the politics of the land and the human history of it, but the deep time history of the Lutkemeerpolder forced me to become reacquainted with the space in a new way. At the Lutkemeerpolder, the landscape as a palimpsest – a view of the landscape that is widely contested within geography, but I argue functions as a useful metaphor here – gains meaning. The sedimentary layers are overlain by biotic, social, historical, and political layers creating not only a tapestry of stories, but a tapestry of landscapes that becomes apparent through the environmental humanities practice of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016).
Leave a Reply