Kristína Jamrichová, And clouds of dust and sand used to rise over the plain...

And clouds of dust and sand used to rise over the plain...

 

 

  Both seas disappear at the end of Tertiary and water and wind erosion becomes characteristic for the lowlands’ further development. The beginnings of the early Quaternary were characterized by a cold and humid climate which towards the end of the period became hotter and drier. The abundant forests which grew in the lowlands disappeared and made way for grassland steppe. The steppe grasses were not able to resist the wind, and wind erosion started gaining momentum. The heaviest parts of the soil, the gravels which originated at the bottom of the Morava river, remained in their original place. The lightest dust particles were carried by the wind towards the east across the Lesser Carpathians, the Trnava basin and the Danubian Lowland. But the wind could not carry the medium-weight materials like sand over the Lesser Carpathians and deposited them on their slopes. It however left some of them on the lowlands’ eastern half. These formed the current sand dunes. Currently, it is human activity definitely has the greatest impact on the lowland’s surface transformation.

Since the rise of agriculture and the first large deforestations, humans have indeed fundamentally changed what we call “the surface.” We can speak about nature or the environment ad infinitum, but the zone which significantly impacts us is that particular “surface” layer between the atmosphere and the parent rock (substratum), just a few kilometers wide.   But what exactly is this thin surface, which some scientists call the  critical zone,  where humanity has established itself, which it cultivates and on which it builds; this sponge from which it draws water and where it deposits its waste?   

 

Flows and reservoirs

It can be described as a zone poised between two energy sources. The first is the internal energy of the planet which allows the development of new material through volcanic and tectonic activity. The second source is the Sun’s energy, which activates the water cycle through its evaporation from the land and oceans and creates clouds and rain which help dissolve carbon dioxide in the soil.   We can imagine both kinds of energy as a cycle of self-organizing flows coursing through this porous threshold. There are also other cycles of surface flows which meticulously sort and assemble the earth materials into larger wholes, coherent structures, and vast strata.   

But the stratification is neither final nor irreversible. The most diverse materials are constantly carried and organized by air, rivers, or people.   Such temporary structures also include (or used to include) dunes of eolian sands in the Záhorská Lowland, that border area of western Slovakia which constitutes our section of interest within the  critical zone . The mineralogical composition of the wind-deposited sands shows their similarity to river sediments of the Morava river.   

Gravel-sand deposits which the Morava river has placed in the Záhorská Lowland are, like a “hydraulic computer,”   arranged in strata which rise from the current river valley, thus showing the progress of the river’s gradual deepening.  When the dynamic water erosion ceased, the climate changed, the forests disappeared and the era of wind erosion dawned. The dry, loose sand was easily picked up by wind which, due to its low density and viscosity,   is an even better (atmospheric) “computer” than the river. The grains of blown sand are rounder and finer than the river sands.   

The comparison with computers is not wholly metaphorical as may at first seem, and importantly does not allude to automation in the sense of mere repetition.   It is rather about the creation of a spontaneous order from random events. The various turbulences and regimes of flows give the river the ability to sort materials according to the size of its grains, shape, and even composition. The random balance between the wind’s strength and the durability of the surface ultimately determines whether there wind erosion and the repositioning of surface materials will occur.   The formation of the dunes themselves is based on the self-organization of the carried sand grains of various weight. As if the material (sand or water) were posed with a problem (expressed for example by the balance of forces) and spontaneously drew a solution from a “reservoir” of abstract machine schemata.   

In the geological sense of the word, these are processes of weathering, erosion and sedimentation but, according to some authors, such a reservoir is available for all possible energy flows;   not only for the river or wind, but for example also genetic lines or technical systems. Much like the geological strata, organic layers are also composed of temporary “clots” of matter (i.e. bodies of plants, animals or people).   

Grasping any sphere of reality from the perspective of material flows and the energies and reservoirs which drive them   is easier when we realize that our era has lost ‘frames’ through which it would be possible to clearly delimit human action from its fictitious outside, as we had been used to doing in the past.   Although humanity currently mines at least 50 gigatons of “material” – i.e. sands, gravels, clays, ferrous minerals, coal, etc.  – the human footprint is not distributed equally across the  critical zone.  That is because the flow of technological development is not universal.  Although the increase of erosion is associated with callous human activity (especially with deforestation and intensive agriculture), the Záhorská Lowlands tell a bit of a different story…

 

Sand vs. water

As the climate warmed, the eolian activity decreased and the dunes stabilized. But eolian activity did not cease altogether.

  Wind erosion did not cease even in the early Quaternary which again brought colder and more humid weather. It partly continues to this day. During dry, autumn days, the loose sands continue to blow. And they fill ditches, grooves and nooks. A reservoir of such loose sands can be found in river and brook sediments, and exposed sandbars. The river Morava, whose surface in the summer months greatly decreases and exposes the sandy bottom, provides the most sand.  

For example, Rudolf Witsch   wrote in 1809 that the greatest problem with blown sands is their motility, and he proposed a “practical law for their recultivation in the Uhry region.” Wenzel C.W. Blumenbach,  geographer and topographer of Lower Austria, states in 1843 that “blown sands east of Morava between Prešpurk and Holič are the worst disaster for a farmer, but luckily the river flood plains protect the soils of the Marchfeld from frequent overblowing by this detrimental sand.” In 1935, geologist and geographer Jan Hromádka also writes about the continuing eolian activity in the Záhorie region:

  When the winter is drier and without snow, it does not limit the work performed by the wind. So for example in February 1932, clouds of dust and sand rose over the lowland almost every day, as the wind was in full activity and the fresh layer of sand, blown in from the early winter, was often 10, even 20 cm thick.  

As late as in the 1950s, botanist and Záhorie resident Eduard Krippel wrote about the wind burying buildings under blown sand.   According to the testimony of one of the residents, a house built around 1880 on the edge of a pine forest in Lakšárská Nová Ves had to be reconstructed due to the ten-meter-high and nearly kilometer-long dune. The motif of the wind as a supernatural and ominous force is also present in the local folklore; a story from the village of Závod for example states that when a witch dies, the wind blows so hard that the casket must be hoisted down from the pall-bearers’ shoulders in front of the gate, so that hell can bid its goodbye.   

Záhorie was at first a very hostile environment for humans, with poor, sandy soils, vast virgin forests and mires (soon to be mentioned further). The local population thus switched from nomadic pastoralism to agriculture later than in other lowland regions of contemporary Slovakia.  From the chronicle of the village of Borský Svätý Jur we learn that the local cadaster compiled since 1874 preserved long-established local names.   From these it was obvious that most of the territory was used not as agricultural farmland but as pastures. In at least some of the lowland parts up until the 18th century, it was not agriculture, but pastoralism and animal husbandry which remained the main sources of food for the villagers.

Whether referencing fields or pastures, many of them indexed a source of standing or flowing water, for example  Díly u jezírka  (By the Pond),  u Ištókových jezera  (By Ištóks’ Lake),  pod Rybníkem  (Under the Lake),  nad Studenou vodou  (Above Cold Waters), etc. These names indicate that this was then still a landscape with various types of wetlands, reed lands and small limestone lakes, accompanied by open dune vegetation and pine forests. According to the former residents, the landscape still had abundant water as late as the mid-20th century.

The formation of wetlands then temporally corresponds with the end of the high dune activity in the region.  Subterranean waters rich in minerals streamed to the surface through deep geological breaks, and although their flow was blocked by the local shifting dunes in the later ice age,   this initiated the formation of many wetlands in the inter-dune depressions along the western edge of the Lesser Carpathians. Jan Hromádka explains it very well:

  Between the changing planes of blown sand, there are enclosed depressions with wetlands, soggy alders and wetland vegetation lacking any drainage. The normal drainage through brooks flowing in the regularly down-sloping valleys is cut off, and many similar vales have been filled in by sand. This absence of normal valleys and the existence of drainless plateaus is characteristic for all the dune regions in our local lowlands. We see how the rules of drainage become void, because another morphological actor has taken over initiative, and its driving force is no longer water.  

The presence of water in the landscape allowed for the construction of a system of water mills on the Lakšár brook. The waterlogged soils also provided a fitting substrate for growing hemp. In the local folklore, the wetlands were even connected with the presence of supernatural, frightening beings, like the  vodník  (vodyanoy) or  světlonoš  (torchbearer), and were said to be a haven for the souls of unchristened children.   What is certain is that these are specific environments in permanently or occasionally waterlogged spaces where biotic primary production exceeds decay and where decaying organic matter – or fen peat –   accumulates in the substrate. It thus makes for an environment which oscillates between the aquatic and the terrestrial, as in its “ideal” state it retains a volume of vegetation and peat production which retains its aquatic nature.

 

Healing nature

In its full force of untamed winds, stirred sands and mysterious mires, nature used to be a great unknown, and was perceived as a source of randomness and chaos. Daniel Wilcke, a student of Carl Linnaeus, for example wrote about the desperation of humanity finding haven in cruel nature. Nature was a “war of all against all,” but nonetheless, “After a rather long stay in this world [man] would gradually distinguish an elementary order and finally the supreme confusion would appear to him as such a remarkable order that, in his astonishment, he would recognize it difficult  and even futile to seek in the divine work a beginning and an end, indeed all things are in a circular movement.”   

The struggle to find order is thus partly a reaction to the perception of nature as a cruel mistress. It was necessary to imbue nature with a higher purpose so that it could be logically explained.    This logic was provided by contemporary economics which has, since the 17th century, considered nature as the background to human activity.  It then took just a little step to frame a separate science of natural economics – ecology. The shared prefix deriving from the classical  oikos  (household) created a sense that every natural resource has an unquestionable place and a  useful  function, that everything in nature remains in a hidden, transcendental harmony.   Just like in an optimal human household.

But the ‘co-habitation’ of water and sand did not unfold in harmony; they rather ‘negotiated’ for their positions, with the arbiter being simply  chance  through which they constantly alternated.

  When sand blows across the wetland, water goes underground and a forest or non-woodland, sand-loving vegetation grows on the drier sands. Or when the climate or hydrogeological conditions change, the groundwater seeps up into the sand and a wetland forms. A random event can precipitate the switch from one environment to another. It happened for example in Siberia, and certainly in Záhorie, before the humans came and stabilized everything – by draining water, planting forests, regulating the streams.  

This random shifting of water, wind and sand was something which did not fit into the new matrix through which the human framed nature. It was too spontaneous and even “unhealthy”, as expressed in a collection published by the Slovak Institute for Conservation and Nature Protection (Slovenský ústav pamiatkovej starostlivosti a ochrany prírody) in 1967: “By getting rid of the constantly water-logged and unhealthy wetland areas in this part of Záhorie, new farmland was opened up, and the health and aesthetic value of this natural environment improved.”   We are thus seeing a reasoning arc here; nature becoming subject to human intent may occur only through the laws of nature itself.   Nature itself ought to have profited from taming wind erosion and making fertile the local soils, which had until then been either too dry or too wet.

While nature conservation emphasizes the  exceptionality  of the sand dunes (or what is left of them) mostly within the context of precious, sand-loving biodiversity, the foresters emphasize mostly the  uselessness  of the sands, which “through their blowing have gradually lost both nutrients and clay particles, and have thus transformed into barren silica substrate with a sandy structure.”   They argue that the artificial renewal of pine forests has a long tradition in the sandy soils of Záhorie.

And they are right. As early as 1650, Palatine Pálffy saw the need to stabilize the moving sands of Záhorie, dedicating over 1000 gold coins for their forestation. In the 19th century, the methods of Jan Bechtel, the forest inspector of the Bzenec estate in Moravia,   were employed throughout Záhorie because of the similarity of their open, sandy plains. Bechtel forested most of Záhorie by planting seeds, and in 1842 started foresting by means of one-year-old saplings of pine, pre-grown in forest nurseries. He was the first forester who managed to grow a forest in this open, sandy landscape. And this method is used in Záhorie to this day.   

Although pine is a native species to Záhorie and, during the warmer periods, it grew along the steppes and sand dunes, the vegetation here did not consist exclusively of pine, but constituted of a mixed forest with oak, birch, and occasionally also mountain-ash and populus. Today’s forest composition however prefers the pine, as it is more attractive for industry.   Due to the “specific character of the subsoils,” the foresters consider any other option apart from the current monocultural revitalization as “very time-demanding, laborious and thus uneconomical.” And the pine groves which naturally occur apparently “grow spaced, uneven, there are overgrowths, and they fan out along the edges.”   

The forest’s artificial revitalization is preceded by “invasive technologies of wide-scale soil processing” consisting of very deep ploughing (up to 50 or 60 cm deep), which overturns the soil’s horizon and thus liquidates “unwanted vegetation and cockchafer larvae”.   The bioactive layer becomes totally stripped, which creates the best possible conditions for the pine. Apart from the intense planting of trees which are known to shed very little pine needles (organic substance), this also creates devastating pressure which can be withstood in the long-term only by soils rich in nutrients.   The soil horizons, whose replenishment takes thousands of years, are destroyed and this irreversibly impacts not only the biodiversity of the blown sands   but also the forest’s overall functionality.

Along with the tilled top layer of soil, the entire moss and herb layers are also stripped, including the seed bank. Nothing remains of the old plant communities and new communities must start developing from scratch. The light conditions are furthermore very bad due to the thick pine canopy, and only a fraction of species can survive. The vegetation is soon cut down, creating barren areas, deep tilling is used again, and the entire process repeats itself.   

Most of the former sand dunes have today turned into forest (or have been harvested), and only fragments remain of the original 2600 hectares of western wetland.  Many inter-dunes wetlands of the Bor region formed in the late ice age and would later turn to peat-forming fens. Until the 20th century, most of them produced a large volume of organic matter, due to the various mud-loving and aquatic plants which transform into peat when they lack oxygen. For centuries, the peat fens have thus served as so-called ‘geochemical archives’ which store information about themselves and their surroundings. 

For example, a large volume of blown sands was found in a fen dating from the late period of the last ice age, confirming that this was most likely the period when eolian sands formed in our region. We also know about the later beginning of agricultural activity in the Záhorská lowland from the occurrence of cereal pollen grains in the local peat, which indicate the presence of a settled human - a farmer.  This data however come from the 1960s, when not yet all peat fens in Záhorie were extracted and the data they stored was irretrievably lost. With today’s technology, their variously composed layers could, for example, tell us not only about the period’s climatic conditions, but also about the composition of the atmosphere.   

Peat started being mined in Záhorie in the 18th century. The local mining operations for manufacturing fuel were at first local but, with the ensuing parallel modernization of agriculture and gardening, they soon became much more intensive.   It remains a paradox that the peat mined from the wetlands was often transported to cover the sands which had originally led to its formation.   If the fens were not extracted, they gradually dried as part of the draining of the vast lowlands.   

The interest in transforming the water regime came only later, during the late 19th century, and at first consisted of the occasional irrigation of meadows and pastures. Their rapid expansion, especially in the lowlands, ensued during the second half of the 1950s as part of the collectivization of agriculture and soil regulation. The vast drainage projects called “meliorations” were in themselves a reaction to the need “to ensure better harvests for a steadily increasing population.”   According to some locals, “collectivization saved people from toiling on the lousy sands.”

The construction of a network of drainage ditches and the regulation of watercourses however continued into the 1990s. The entire original hydrological network, which was largely the result of erosion performed by the Morava river, was essentially liquidated. The vast drainage increased the soil’s mineral content (the decay of organic matter binds water), which in turn decreased its porosity and absorbency. The water drains in the form of soil water into the watercourses, and finally ends up in the sea.   

The soil’s porosity determines not only the plants it can support but is also essential for an entire system of atmospheric cycles, moving from the ground to the sky and back.   Less water evaporation for condensation (evapotranspiration) is the result of draining a vast land area   and brings with it a lack of precipitation; or, as the locals say, “the storms never loiter here.” An immense amount of sensible heat is released into the atmosphere. Under these conditions, a fragile monocultural forest transforms into a dry sponge which is no longer able to absorb and retain enough humidity. Apart from the change of drainage ratios in the surface waters, it also brings a decrease of the water level in underground waters in the entire lowlands area, changing the entire balance of local relationships.

 

A false dilemma

Whether it is the standardization of pine vegetation or radical drainage, these activities lack the ambition to see beyond the horizon of their own century and the limits of the use of soil for agriculture.   And this shortsightedness creates a dilemma of choosing between humans and nature.   The first is represented by the foresters or by the then drainage engineers who work on the  mechanical  movement of transforming resources into goods, while the conservationists fighting for each cubic centimeter of the precious fens, for each root of sand-loving plant or the continuing survival of glacial relicts in the remains of peat, represent the second option, choosing  nature  as their center of reference.

But what if this dilemma is false because our era has seen the dislocation of both these imaginary centers? On the one hand nature, on the other hand humanity.   Nature as a cognitive category has achieved a wholly different meaning, as the perspective from which we observe it, its  representation , has been shifted by technology.   

Until the arrival of digital technologies (amongst other things), the capacity of non-living matter to (under the right conditions) create complexity similar to that of the organic world remained largely “invisible.” These “discoveries” are based on the fact that non-linear models of self-organizing processes can be  visually represented.     The mechanism of the sand dunes’ formation was for example elucidated by means of chronophotography, showing the surging sand grains within a wind tunnel.   The strength of the wind determines the intensity of the sand grains’ bounce. The oblique impacts of these grains then impart energy to the heavier grains, so that they slide on the bottom. Put very simply, non-linearity was observed in the change of flow of the sliding, secondary grains which are not much impacted by wind.   

Along with these advances in representative technologies, scientific disciplines have nonetheless shown us the collapse of the boundary between  knowing  and  creating.  Ways of knowing (and representation) do not describe a pre-existing world. “They are rather part of a practice of handling, intervening in, the world and thereby of enacting one of its versions—up to bringing it into being.”   Experimental mathematics have shown that the behavior of entirely different systems can exhibit “universal characteristics”,   but the point of non-linearity is unpredictability. At global scales, geomorphic systems indeed develop similar forms, but at more local scales, landscapes become sensitive to initial conditions and perturbations and common starting points can lead to diverse states.   

The same happens to us. We also know the form and composition of what is human only after the evolutionary process makes technologies organic, as they come to take on more functions and responsibilities for human subjects.   Just like the wind organizes coherent sand structures, so do technical objects currently organize us. But just as the sand structures are elusive, so are we. We change the moment we recognize what we have been; or rather, at the moment we become dependent on something other.

Every pine tree, wetland frog or grain of sand store their own list of things they are dependent on, and regularly update that list.   For example, the unique fen vegetation of dune slacks was determined not only by the sandy subsoil and the water-table fluctuations, but also by the further overflowing with sand which most likely continued. Because the dunes have become largely stabilized by pine plantations with an unnaturally dense canopy, the dune slacks have lost their initial character.   Their interests have come to overlap with human interests which, due to the use of technology, advance at an immense tempo.   

On the contrary, dissolving a grain of quartz in the presence of water made acidic by carbon dioxide is physically possible, but the reaction is so slow that we can say it effectively doesn’t happen.   The longtime of eolian sand slows down the location’s (the particular critical zone’s)  metabolism .   We are told that the sustainability of human existence rests on the mutual engagement of the metabolism of a given location with technology, which shows the general tendency to contract distance.   Under the regime of technological totality – for example the mere planting of pine trees into thick rows, the decimation of any life on the forest floor or radical drainage – biodiversity becomes a mere exception   in flows of matter and energy.