Local Rights to Landscape in the Global Moral Economy of Carbon

Abstract

Energy policy is an increasingly influential driver for landscape change in the Global North and in rapidly industrializing nations. The renewable energy industry and the large utilities installing wind farms are increasingly powerful actors in the global economy, and their activities are giving rise to a growing number of energy-landscape conflicts. Dependent on its characteristics with regards to the local landscape and the energy system it is part of, a renewable energy project can be portrayed as representing either development or conservation, and representing either globalization or localization. By interrogating landscape as a right, and carbon as a commodity, this paper reveals a number of tensions between abstract, aggregate and top-down narratives that are typical of a globalist discourse, and more localized, contextualized and individuated concerns. We draw attention to examples of reconciliation through customized entrepreneurial activities which manage to make sense of landscape, energy and climate issues at the local level, and which can be enacted and presented through both a globalist and a local narrative. These developments illustrate that hybridity of the local and the global is yielding differential rural energy geographies, consistent with Woods's (2007) concept of global countryside.

Key Words:

• renewables
• landscape-energy conflicts
• performativity
• native
• commodity

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding by the UK Research Councils (EP/C1040176/1 on energy systems and equity; NE/H010432/1 on energyscapes and ecosystem services and NE/I003319/1 on the bridging of global/scientific and local/indigenous knowledge system).

Notes

The term ‘carbon crimes’ has over 14 000 hits on Google. However, some of these are related to reported fraud in carbon trading (e.g. The Washington Times, 2009), whilst the EU ETS has also suffered from phishing attacks and a recent case of cyber theft of more than 3 million allowances (BBC, 2010, 2011).

There have been efforts in the UK to develop individual carbon allowances (e.g. Parag & Strickland, 2009; Roberts & Thumim, 2006).

The concept of international carbon trading was introduced in the Kyoto Protocol by the US, and accepted, despite strong initial reservations by developing countries, in the (failed) effort to keep the US on board.

And even this idea is challenged by Ingold (1993, p. 154), who argues for a ‘dwelling perspective’ of the landscape, which can help to bridge the atemporalized nature of scientific studies and the dematerialized history of humanistic studies.

See http://www.maweb.org/en/Index.aspx.

For example, Bergmann et al. (2006) and Hain et al. (2005) provide Scottish case study evidence that rural people may be more tolerant or even actively supportive of renewable energy activities than urban people. For evidence that the attitudes of ‘local’ people were more favourable towards renewable energy facilities than those of ‘newcomers’ who had recently moved to the area, see Landscape Design Associates (2000, in Hain et al., 2005) regarding wind farms in Mid-Wales, and Hanley and Nevin (1999)—regarding biomass/wind/hydro in Assynt, on the west coast of Scotland. Bergmann et al. (2006) argue that local job creation is important for many people in rural Scotland who support the development of renewables, but not for urbanites.

As the ultimate technoscape, we can point at emerging visions of gigantic off-shore wind and wave farms, and solar farms in the deserts of North America and North Africa, connected to urban consumers by super-grids that run the length of continents (e.g. The Guardian, 2008).

Landscape and energy are of course intimately linked in everyday situations such as the persisting Turbary Rights in Scotland and Ireland, the collection of firewood in developing countries, or centuries old Right to Lights legislation for urban settlements where land scarcity creates competition between neighbours for access to daylight (see Bickford-Smith & Francis, 2007).

See www.westmill.coop.