Changing waters: from waterscape to landscape and back again

Across Sweden, around 2,400 lake-lowering and drainage projects since the early nineteenth century converted wetlands and lakes into fields, fixing a particular vision of progress into ditches, land deeds, and sediment. This article reviews 82 archival, scientific, and policy sources to ask what was done, why, and when, and to trace how these interventions continue to shape contemporary restoration politics. Lake drainage modifications started gaining interest in the 1830s and peaked around 1870–1930, enabled by ideals of patriotic ‘improvement’, expanding credit, and the 1879 Drainage Act. The resulting hydro-social legacies, long-lasting impacts on water systems and related social arrangements, such as subsiding peat, altered runoff pathways, and internal stores of various metals and compounds, complicate future plans to refill old lake basins and rewet peatlands for climate and biodiversity goals. Evidence from Swedish rewetting experiments indicates that restored peatlands can experience transient increases in total phosphorus and total mercury in outflow waters, while recently rewetted sites may remain net carbon sources during the first years after intervention. Restoration is conceptualised as a negotiated, case-specific intervention in which targeted projects, long-term monitoring, and shared governance confront historical debts rather than rely on expectations of a return to pristine nature.