Justice, power and the political landscape: From American space to the European Landscape Convention

ion and conceptualization. Alienation is thus the sentiment of the intellectual, wistfully looking down from an elevation upon the landscape of a childhood home characterized by concrete labor and social relations. It is also, however, literally the situation of a farmer who has lost the family’s rights in land to enclosure (Olwig, 2005) or to the restructuring of the production and marketing of agricultural produce, as described in Carrie Breitbach’s article. The ‘dead labor’ that is embodied in the landscape is both a metaphor and, Mitchell shows, a reality for many migrants. Breitbach argues, ‘‘taking seriously the lessons of landscape means recognizing that political power struggles . must always involve the means to control the representations and built forms of landscapes’’. Landscape is both good to think with—and against. Against because different ways of representing landscape can present differing ideas of power and justice. Thus, from a visual perspective, if the landscape under discussion is represented simply in scenic and pictorial terms, the majestic pylons marching in spatially even rows over hill and dale, or the miles long line of the siphon, will present a powerful perspective of power that might be seen to justify the burying of whole communities under the waters of the dam. Such a picture, however, does not do justice to what is not so visible, such as the drowned village, or the energy of the imported ‘‘illegal alien’’ muscling irrigation equipment into place, or harvesting the bounty of irrigated fields. Perceived, however, as a region and place, as Mitchell does, the different invisible expressions of power, justice and injustice, that permeate the political landscape become palpable. To perceive the issues of justice and power energizing this landscape one needs, therefore, to think ‘against’ the overwhelming visual image of sublime power presented by the pylons or siphon, but with the landscape understood as a regional polity. It is therefore the case, as Carrie Breitbach writes in her essay, that ‘‘Landscape is a useful tool to understand, and perhaps challenge, the ‘fit’ between values or ideas and social and material realities. ’’ The European Landscape Convention The problems besetting rural South Dakota and much of rural Europe are similar, but it is difficult to imagine an ‘American Landscape Convention’ being put into place to protect the threatened landscape of the cow country described by Breitbach. At best, one might find a regional museum with examples of the farm and ranch buildings that once characterized the area. The reason lies not only in the American tradition for economic liberalism that tends to mitigate efforts by the government to plan and restrict development (and un-development), but also in the simple fact of the aforementioned densely populated European landscape made intractable by centuries of settlement and concomitant political organization. The very age of European settlement, furthermore, gives much of the European landscape an amenity value as cultural capital (to borrow a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu, 1984), which few areas of western America can rival (though some, like Santa Fe, compete on much of the same terrain). The depopulated marginalized and poor agricultural regions of Europe are therefore often repopulated by wealthier urbanites from elsewhere in Europe (or the world), who restore rustic dwellings and use them as vacation or retirement residences. Though this sort of development can help alleviate 528 K. R. Olwig & D. Mitchell