Landscape, politics, labour and identity: Stewardship and the contribution of green political theory

Abstract

The conceptualisation of 'land' and 'landscape' is not only intellectually, but also politically and ethically, contested and subject to many of the debates one finds about related concepts of 'nature' and the 'natural'. How 'we' define and understand the 'land' and 'landscape' is not politically neutral and has implications for who 'we' are and the values and practices we have in relation to the land. This paper will offer an overview of the ways in which the land and landscape have been conceptualised within (green) political theory and environmental ethics, ranging from Wendell Berry's revenant agrarian stewardship to the ethics and politics of 'ecological restoration', to bioregional distinctions between 'ecosphere' and 'biosphere' human-nature relations, to more urban-based forms of 'collective ecological management' in relation to sustainable land use, landscape management and preservation and wider issues of sustainable development. A key theme to be explored is the ways in which particular conceptualisations of landscape (and land-use) are often related to constructions of collective identities in terms of the way in which such identity-constitutive aspects of landscape are as much about who 'we' are (particularly if the landscape is/or has been one worked on by humans) in expressing how we transform 'space' into 'place' with all the complex cultural, ethical, political and socio-economic issues that the latter term entails.