Amenity Landownership, Land Use Change, and the Re-Creation of “Working Landscapes”

Abstract

In recent years the “working landscape” concept has risen to prominence in popular, academic, and policy discourse surrounding conservation of both natural and cultural values in inhabited landscapes. Despite its implied reconciliation of commodity production and environmental protection, this concept remains contested terrain, masking tensions over land use practices and understandings of human–nature relations. Here we draw on a case study of landownership and land use change in remote, rural Wallowa County, Oregon to explore how working landscapes are envisioned and enacted by various actors. The arrival of landowning amenity migrants, many of whom actively endorsed a working landscape vision, resulted in subtle but significant transformations in land use practices and altered opportunities for local producers. The working landscape ideal, while replete with tensions and contradictions, nevertheless functioned as an important alternative vision to the rural gentrification characteristic of other scenic Western environs.

Keywords:

• amenity migration
• discourse
• land use
• rural gentrification
• working landscape

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Starker Program in Private and Family Forestry at Oregon State University, the Rural Studies Program at Oregon State University, the Saubert Family Fellowship and Dorothy Hoener Fellowship through Oregon State University's College of Forestry, the Oregon Lottery Scholarship, and Wallowa Resources. The authors thank the residents of Wallowa County, Oregon, for generously contributing their time and insights as interviewees for this project. We also thank three anonymous reviewers whose feedback improved the article greatly.

Notes

While concepts of wilderness and the middle landscape are typically framed as quintessentially American landscape ideals, it is more accurate to label them EuroAmerican ideals, near-hegemonic social constructions based in the history of European colonization of North America.