Beavers in the Senne
A liberated river, a resurgence of life (with audio)
I don’t know about you but the world feels way too much at the moment. I’ve been writing about some pretty heavy subjects - on the scapegoating of marginalised groups in times of crisis, on the environmental and social impacts of prisons, on queer precarity, classism and land enclosure. I will share all of that here, and one day in whatever this book is becoming, but for now, today, I really needed a story about beavers and maybe you do too.
The Senne
In 2022, I was invited to give a presentation called Queer Ecologies of Resistance in Ghent, Belgium. There was a stage, bright lights, the whole thing was being live-streamed. I wore what I think of as ‘a popstar microphone’ that I couldn’t stop fiddling with and getting tangled up in. I was terrified. I don’t know if public speaking will ever get less intense for me.
To ground myself, I started by reading part of a short story I had written for Our Entangled Future, an anthology on social change and the climate crisis. I lived several years in Brussels and the story is an ode to that city, and in particular to a river called the Senne or Zenne and a park in the north, around 50km from where we were gathered that evening.
The river runs right through the centre of Brussels but few people even know that it exists.
In fact, Brussels was founded on an island. Today the flag for the region has a yellow iris, a water plant, on it - it was all marshland. The name ‘Brussels’ itself comes from an Old Dutch word for marsh and another word for home. It’s hard to imagine today but it was literally a ‘home on the marsh’.
The Senne was an important part of the Brussels landscape but for hundreds of years, it was used as an open sewer. The neighbourhoods along the river were poor. Thousands were killed by cholera outbreaks and the air was putrid. Poisoned by industrial and domestic waste, eventually the water became so polluted that nothing and no-one could live in it.
Brussels, like so many cities, is today undergoing intense and unrestrained gentrification and some of it dates back to that time. Although the Zenne had become associated with poverty and disease, the ruling elite wanted to turn the area along the river into Parisian-style boulevards. The river was already dead after all and there was money to be made. The Senne was covered over and prestigious buildings - like the Beurs and Palais du Midi which still stand today - were built over it.
For 150 years, the river was hidden beneath concrete, running forgotten under our feet. Not until the turn of the millennium did anyone seriously try to clean up the water being dumped into it.
The short story I mentioned is about the Senne reemerging from its concrete tomb, flooding a privatised park full of colonial history, coming back to life after centuries underground.
In real life, two years later and a few kilometres north of where I set the story, a small part of the river was actually released as part of an engineering project in 2021. I’m certain that the companies and state institutions have their own motives that I’d prefer not to know about and I rarely find myself on the side of the bulldozers and diggers. And yet still, the Zenne flows. Watching timelapse videos of the concrete being removed and the river being freed, I get chills.
A couple of days after the presentation, a dear one came to visit me where I was staying in Brussels. Battling the cold and wet weather that Belgium is famous for, our bellies full of gluten-free waffles, we made our way to the north of the city on a hunt for the Senne. We walked for hours in the drizzle until finally, between an industrial site and an apocalyptic shopping mall, we reached a bridge. We crossed to the middle and below us ran the small, slow stretch of liberated water.
It is, like so many green spaces in Brussels, quite unassuming. I’m sure few people know about it and even fewer care. But we carried so many stories with us that day and, surrounded by water above and below, it was a celebration.
Beavers!
Fast forward two more years, it’s the end of 2024 and for the first time since they were eradicated two centuries ago, beavers are back in Brussels. One particular beaver has been filmed gnawing on trees in the middle of the night, close to where we were that drizzly day.
Beavers seem to be having a moment right now. Guerrilla beaver reintroduction or ‘beaver bombing’ has become a thing and they seem to be in the news a lot as a symbol of rewilding. They also keep popping up in my workshops and writing. There are some living down the road from me felling massive trees and feasting on bark. Beavers are amazing.
Sometimes life is overwhelming. Despair and panic and grief are so familiar to me. But the fact that a buried river still flows, that queers carry its stories, that a beaver returned and made a home there —
—that tentative feeling in my chest… is it hope?
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