Paper short abstract:

I address signs, websites and leaflets of nature conservationists and landscape managers in the Netherlands. I will argue that recent policies gave rise to a past/future temporality – primeval nature equated with a potential future – that should create a public in anticipation of a nature experience.

Paper long abstract:

Spatial planners in the Netherlands continuously face new demands and priorities for the designations of the land. Besides the usual controversies over infrastructure, agriculture and urbanisation, the role of nature areas have began to play a particular part. In their quest for an ecologically sound country, nature conservation and governmental organisations are constructing a Main Ecological Structure, a sort of nationwide interconnected 'nature web' in which 50.000 hectares of 'new nature' should interconnect and expand existing nature reserves. This new nature is often a recreation of 'primordial nature' inspired by the 'original' situation in the Netherlands before human habitation. Agricultural lands reengineered, the topsoil is removed, 'natural gradient' is created and afterwards, special large herbivores (konik horses or highland cattle) are introduced to maintain the vegetation. Besides this reinvented primordial nature, areas that are seen as 'agricultural nature' (peat meadows, chalk meadows etc) have come to be seen as a romantic artefact of history with additional natural value. Different stakeholder groups (ecologists, farmers, animal right movements) are continuously at loggerhead with each other over what kind of nature should be implemented where.

In my presentation I will focus on a particular outcome of these contestations, notably through which media the ideas on nature and the landscape are conveyed. As I will show, nature areas are to an increasing extent signposted with boards and banners that aim to inform people what they ought to see and experience. In stead of the usual 'nature reserve, no free access', signs now contain comprehensive statements that convey to the visitor that the area they are watching is in a certain way related to a larger whole and how all sorts of elusive ecological processes are occurring or are about to occur. Hereby the areas themselves are presented as the unfinished or partial instance of more encompassing and abstract futurities.