Presentation short abstract

Because of the large scale and increasingly accurate map-making of the area, the delta gradually emerged as a terra economica, a passive repository of free resources (Goldstein, 2012), somewhere in between the "officially valued" and the "reserve army" (Collard and Dempsey, 2016) in the hierarchy of

Presentation long abstract

Reedbeds became visible not only as a "green sea" but also as a potentially reachable treasure chest to be soon opened in a land starting to be modernized. It was no longer the sign of "inhospitable" and "uncivilized lands", as it became a potentially civilizing resource, ready to upgrade the Danube Delta region to the higher agro-industrial socialist status, but becoming unexpectedly internally differentiated, both biologically and technologically.

The economic development of large wetlands through biological and technological research and interventions was and still is deeply entangled with plants' lives and histories, and their multiple ontologies, all of them coping with overlapping legislative layers. How reeds entwined with technology profoundly reshaped the local human communities, redistributing them alongside new extractivist projects and strategies to resist them through material and discursive plant-human alliances.

In the Danube Delta, agriculture is spreading on the large socialist ruins of the fisheries, and former cattle and pig raising socialist cooperatives. The landscape is a mix of nature[s], socialist ruins, tourism installations (sometimes using parts of the socialist remnants), and ecological restoration projects. The switch from productive socialist development and nature, to a post-socialist touristic-environment nature, involved processes of destruction but also creation of landscapes and natures.