Go slow: An afterword on landscape and justice

Abstract

This afterword serves as a commentary on the essays published in this special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography on ‘Landscape, Law, and Justice.’ By focusing on the normative claims of the authors 2006, it argues that landscape theory needs to be better integrated with theories of social justice as they are being developed elsewhere in geography and political philosophy. In relationship to landscape and landscape change, it argues that we need to look at the complexity of the world and continually make judgments about what is worth preserving, what is worth stewarding, and what is not – and that these judgments have to be rooted in an explicit theory of justice.

Keywords:

• historical change
• landscape
• justice
• normative theory

Acknowledgments

Seeking to protect me from myself, the editor and two anonymous reviews gave me some very helpful comments on an earlier draft, and I have tried to incorporate them. But please do not hold them responsible for any errors of omission or commission or for any of the opinions here. All are my responsibility alone.

Notes

1. I focus in particular on Sevatdal's essay (2006) for a reason: his argument more than any of the others in this collection (though Erling Berge's (2006) comes close) aligns with globally dominant political-economic trends. In its focus on property rights and economic efficiency it clearly outlines the now-hegemonic neo-liberal position on how to achieve a just society. By contrast, the other articles in this issue more closely align with what is now (non-economic) academic commonsense. They provide a range of perspectives, internally differentiated to be certain, that enunciate hegemonic positions within social and environmental theory. I find Sevatdal's article to be of particular interest because it is largely at odds with the others in this issue, but also, and more importantly, because of its argumentative consistency. It is the article that best exemplifies my call for a theory of justice ‘beyond’ landscape, within which landscape is a key social force, even if I disagree with the (implicit) theories of justice that guide his work. That is to say (and to play on the famous dualism that structures debates about justice), I find Sevatdal's article to be the most procedurally correct, while I find most of the others in the collection most substantively correct.

2. For a discussion that places the ‘ownership model’ within its complex ideological and geographical context, see Blomley (2004).

3. Olwig is singled out here because of all geographers writing in English he is the one who has most successfully engaged the landscape discourse in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural geography, taking seriously the discourses of each, and moving both in new directions in his insistence on a ‘substantive nature’ of landscape. Of course there are others who have also linked landscape theory with social justice, including Nicholas Blomley (2004), with his turn towards the analysis of property, Katrina Brown (2006) in her studies of crofting, and George Henderson in both his study of California (1998), and theoretical essays (Henderson 2003). For the Nordic and Baltic areas, see especially the work of Merje Kuus Feldmann (1999) and Gunhild Setten (2004).

4. In addition, the work of both Raymond Williams (1973) and Denis Cosgrove (1998) has developed this theme in direct reference to the way that landscape – as ideology as well as built space – uses the rural idyll precisely to mask the violence that is at its roots.