By the mid-eighteenth century, river flooding seemed to be increasingly numerous and severe. To later observers, the 1740–41 river floods, which affected numerous parts of the Rhine–Meuse River System, were an important inflection point. This chapter evaluates the origins, interpretations, and consequences of the 1740–41 river floods. Victims interpreted these floods in the context of recent years of dearth and disaster. The historically bitter winter of 1739–40 had catalyzed a disaster cascade in the hardest-hit areas of the riverlands that amplified the impacts of inundation and expanded its consequences. At the same time, Dutch surveyors and hydraulic engineers, ministers, and state authorities promoted a discourse of increasing moral and geographic risk of inundation. In contrast to the Christmas Flood, where technocrats grounded dike innovations in the cultural memory of prior inundations, river floods forced observers to consider problematic futures. Surveyors and cartographers mapped flood risk in the Dutch riverlands and warned of potential consequences should the state ignore their new river management strategies. The floods of 1740–41 and narratives of increasing risk added to distress and anxiety about decline, but they also prompted the first proto-national flood relief efforts and increased emphasis on the systemic, interprovincial nature of Dutch river challenges.

Salt marshes have been lost or degraded as the intensity of human impacts to coastal landscapes has increased due to agriculture, transportation, urban and industrial development, and climate change. Because salt marshes have limited distribution and embody a variety of ecological functions that are important to humans (see ecosystem services, Chapter 15), many societies have recognized the need to preserve remaining marshes, restore those that have been degraded, and create new marshes in areas where they have been lost. An emerging and critical threat to tidal marshes across the globe is increasing rates of sea level rise and other aspects of climate change, which complicates but also heightens the urgency for restoration. By restoration we mean re-establishing natural conditions and the processes needed to support their functions, especially self-maintenance (see Box 17.1). Typically, salt marshes are self-maintaining, with salt tolerant plants, mineral sediments, and tidal flooding interacting to maintain elevation and ecological functions under dynamic conditions (Chapters 4, 7, 8).