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Reassessing Landscape Drivers and the Globalist Environmental Agenda

Seminar

The Nordic Landscape Research Network (NLRN) and the Landscape Research Group (LRG) are inviting interested researchers to take part in a seminar on the European Landscape Convention to be held on October 7, 2009 in southern Sweden. The theme of seminar will be Reassessing Landscape Drivers and the Globalist Environmental Agenda. It will be held in conjunction with the official Council of Europe (CoE) International Workshop on the European Landscape Convention (ELC) to be held in southern Sweden, October 8-9, 2009, on the related theme of "Landscape and Driving Forces" (for information on the upcoming CoE workshop, see: Landscape and Driving Forces).

The NLRN/LRG research seminar will be for senior researchers and doctoral students. The results of the seminar will subsequently be presented at the CoE workshop proper in a planned round table, just as it is hoped that the seminar will generate papers suitable for publication.

Though the seminar will be affiliated with the main CoE "workshop," it will operate as an independent prelude to the main event in order to allow researchers the opportunity to present and discuss their work prior to the main CoE workshop, which is oriented toward implementation. CoE workshops of this kind (which are effectively a form of conference, though it is called a "workshop" in CoE parlance) have been held previously in a number of countries, including Ireland and Romania, and they provide a good opportunity to meet with, and learn from, practitioners and representatives of local and regional authorities and NGO's, as well as other landscape researchers (for information on previous ELC workshops/conferences: Council of Europe - Meetings).

Background

The UN's Climate Conference will be held in Copenhagen from the 7th to the 18th of December 2009, and it can thus be expected that the world attention of politicians, public authorities and research bodies will be drawn to the issue of global climate change at the time of the October CoE Workshop, just across the Öresund from Copenhagen. This will thus be a time when it will be particularly relevant to address the question of the relationship between the globalist environmental agenda and the landscape agenda in the context of Europe. Is the relationship between the two agendas simply that between the global and the local, where landscape plays the role of the local? Or does the landscape agenda provide an alternative to the global/local binary? - and how does Europe fit within this binary? Is there a possible conflict between the two agendas? For example, will those who seek to ameliorate climate change through the construction of giant wind turbines and the planting of energy crops tend to see the landscape agenda as a barrier to their goals? Or is it possible to see, in landscape, a terrain in which a resilient synergy can be found?

The dawning of the new millennium marked a growing millennialist globalism, symbolized perhaps most aptly by the rising rounded shape of London's Millennial Dome. Great expectations were held for the growth of a new global economy. Great fears were also held for the effects of global warming and other global environmental issues, including the loss, or insufficiency of, global resources. The local, furthermore, tended to be subsumed to the global. One might act "locally," but one should think "globally," the local belonging to the realm of bodily activity, whereas the global belonged to the realm of the mind and thought. One consequence of global thinking was that many nations abandoned agricultural policies designed to assure local foodstuff self-sufficiency in favor of a reliance on the global market. Another consequence was that many local companies, both private and public, were sold to global concerns and hedge funds in the interest of maintaining global competitiveness in a global market. At the same time, global environmental concerns led to large-scale international programs to, for example, create fuel from foodstuffs or to build gigantic wind turbines, dams, etc. Global millennialism, in this way, became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating global economies, global markets, global dependencies and global environmental interventions, where they had not existed before.

The juggernaut of the new global millennium came to something of a halt with the recent collapse of the global financial market and with a related period of wild fluctuations in the global food commodities market that drove some populations to the brink of famine, and which raised serious questions about the advisability of turning food into fuel. We are thus in a situation when it is time to reconsider the relationship of globalism to the drivers of landscape change. It seems to be clear that European nations, and regional authorities, in the future will need to give greater consideration to national and regional food security and, likewise, there is an obvious need for national and regional economic firewalls to prevent future global economic meltdowns. Finally, awareness that the cure might be worse than the disease, with regard to the threat to the landscape environment constituted by large-scale global scale environmental measures, seems to be growing. Landscape, in this situation, can perhaps provide an economically and environmentally resilient alternative to the simplicities of the local-global binary.

Landscape, as defined for example in The European Landscape Convention, might provide a door to an actor centered understanding the complex social/environmental drivers of landscape change, be it sustainable and resilient, or destructive. At the same time, it is still necessary to consider the role of the global economic drivers society has constructed in transforming the landscape, just as it is necessary to evaluate the potential landscape role of world encompassing environmental factors such as climate change and resource scarcity.

Call for Papers

It is against the above background that a research seminar will be held for ca. 20 senior researchers and doctoral students that will focus upon the topic of reassessing European landscape drivers as a necessary alternative to simplistic global-local models. Possible topics could range from concrete analysis of the landscape effects of wind-turbines, excessive forestation and bio-fuel production; to the landscape impact of globalist economic restructuring; to case studies of the role sustainable and resilient non-global/local landscape drivers in the context of climate change. It might be argued, for example, that landscape historical heritage can act as a driver for sustainable development, and that knowledge of landscape history can help provide an understanding of the perceived threats presented by climate change. An important dimension of the European Landscape Convention is the strengthening of the role of education in stimulating governmental and citizen knowledge of and engagement with landscape issues, and this will also be an important topic for the seminar.

The research seminar is sponsored by the NordForsk financed Nordic Landscape Research Network (NLRN) together with the international, UK based, Landscape Research Group (LRG), with the support of The Swedish Heritage Board, which will also be organizing the CoE workshop. A number of keynote speakers, to be announced later, will be invited. The research seminar will be on 7 October (beginning at 10:00 AM) and it will take place at Lund University. The following CoE workshop on the ELC will be held on the 8th and 9th at neighboring SLU-Alnarp, which is the southern campus of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Lund and Alnarp are both located in the south of Sweden, with convenient public transportation to the city of Malmö, to which there is ready access, by train, from Copenhagen Airport, and by bus from the Malmö city airport at Sturup. The organizers will cover the cost of participation in the seminar, but not the cost of transportation and lodgings. There will, however, be a limited number of grants to cover the expenses of doctoral students and senior researchers who are in need of economic support. For travel and lodging information of relevance both to the seminar in Lund and to the CoE workshop at Alnarp, see: Travel Information.

Updated information on the seminar will be available at the NLRN website: Nordic Landscape Research Network.

Those interested in participating in the seminar should send an abstract for a paper, and a request for supplementary funding if needed, to Kenneth Olwig no later than 1. June 2009. Final manuscripts will be due September 15. All seminar participants are, of course, eligible to take part in the following CoE workshop. Note that registration for the CoE workshop must be done separately, see: Landscape and Driving Forces.

Kenneth Olwig, NLRN/LRG, Dept. of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Heritage, SLU Alnarp

Tomas Germundsson, NLRN, Dept. of Human Geography, LU

Peter Howard, NLRN/LRG, Bournemouth University