Progress report

Political ecology III:

Theorizing landscape
Roderick P. Neumann
Florida International University, USA
Abstract
In this last of three reports exploring the incorporation of human geography theory within political ecology,
I focus on landscape. I begin by surveying recent work on landscape in human geography, which has
increasingly stressed non-representational approaches, and then explore how landscape has been treated
in political ecology. I found that political ecology shares with human geography more generally many of the
same critical responses to the representational landscape approaches of the 1980s new cultural geography.
Although shifts in approaches to landscape in political ecology and human geography more broadly have often
paralleled one another, this has not been an outcome of sustained interaction between the fields. I refer to
work in anthropology to illustrate the theoretical and empirical potentialities of a more direct and explicit
conversation between political ecology and landscape studies in human geography.
Keywords
colonial narrative, contested nature, non-representational landscape, representational landscape, socio-
ecological transformation
I Introduction
In this series of reports I have been assessing the
progress of theory construction in political ecol-
ogy through an examination of its productive
tension with human geography (Zimmerer and
Bassett, 2003: 2). My focus has been on recent
retheorizations of key human geography con-
cepts that are critical to many political ecology
studies, such as scale, region, place, and land-
scape. I am asking: to what degree does new
work in political ecology reflect, challenge, or
incorporate theoretical innovations in human
geography? The first and second reports
addressed this question by examining the theori-
zation of scale and region, respectively, in polit-
ical ecology. In this third and final contribution
I focus on the concept of landscape.
Unlike scale or region, Blaikie and Brook-
field did not explicitly invoke the concept of
landscape in establishing a basis for theory
construction in political ecology (Blaikie and
Brookfield, 1987: xxi). Nevertheless, one can
recognize significant overlap in theory and
inquiry between the concerns of political ecol-
ogy and landscape studies, especially as the lat-
ter was reinterpreted and retheorized in some
strains of the new cultural geography (NCG)
of the 1980s (Cosgrove, 1983). Contested prop-
erty rights, struggles over meaning, land use
change, and the cultural production of nature
under capitalism are some of the analytical foci
shared by critical landscape studies and political
ecology. In addition, attention to history and
Corresponding author:
Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida
International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Email: neumannr@fiu.edu
Progress in Human Geography
35(6) 843850
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narrative are very nearly inherent in the analyses
of both landscape studies and political ecology
(Matless, 2003; Neumann, 2005). Consequently,
and in retrospect, it was inevitable that landscape
would emerge as a key concept in political ecol-
ogy, especially, but not solely, among geogra-
phers. As political ecology research expanded
throughthe 1990s, landscape received increasing
attention, though its theoretical treatment was
uneven (Batterbury and Bebbington, 1999;
Carney, 1996; Fairhead and Leach, 1996;
Neumann, 1998; Sluyter, 1999; Zimmerer,
1999). Before elaborating on this last observa-
tion, I want to briefly examine the present state
of landscape theory in human geography.
Much theoretical work on landscape has been
conducted since Mitchell observed in the pages
of this journal that geographers seemed to be
taking a break from theory (Mitchell, 2002:
386). Special issues on landscape theory have
appeared in the journals Society and Space
(2006) and Social and Cultural Geography
(2008). The edited volume Handbook of Cul-
tural Geography (Anderson et al., 2003) offered
three separate essays on the particular perspec-
tives [on landscape] within geography (Matless,
2003: 228). These perspectives emphasize,
respectively, labor as productive of and hidden
by landscapes, landscapes connections with
seeing and the sense of sight, and landscape
as lived, embodied, and practiced (Cosgrove,
2003: 249; Cresswell, 2003; Mitchell, 2003).
Matlesss introduction to these three stresses
interconnections among them, noting recurrent
themes, particular problematics (Matless, 2003:
229). Other authors, however, suggest that the
emergence of new approaches has produced a
rupture within landscape studies. The principal
fault line divides discursive, representational
approaches from more recent work often labeled
non-representational, building as it does on
non-representational theory (NRT) (see Thrift,
2008). Some suggest that NRT has changed the
terms of debate . . . over the production, mean-
ing and significance of landscapes (Gareth and
Metzo, 2008: 225) or that representationalism
should be abandoned because it results in
landscapes being rendered inert (Lorimer,
2005: 84). Rose and Wylie wondered if the
advent of varied non-representational, post-
human, and vitalist geographies has not made
the very term, landscape, obsolete (Rose and
Wylie, 2006: 475). Rose appears to reject not
only the historical materialist underpinnings of
much NCG, but theoretical structure altogether,
arguing for a more empirical approach to land-
scape (Rose, 2006: 542) and eschewing theore-
tical props (Rose, 2002: 457). At other moments
some of the same authors are more conciliatory
toward the no-longer-new cultural geography,
suggesting that thinking in terms of historical
ruptures and conceptual binaries (e.g. stasis-
movement, representation-practice) will not help
advance landscape theory (Merriman et al.,
2008). My sympathies lie with this last position.
While one might conclude that there is no unified
theory of landscape within geography, it is more
difficult to cogently argue that the various
approaches are wholly incommensurate. In a
later section I will put political ecology into pro-
ductive dialog with these approaches. First, I
want to critically evaluate the treatment of land-
scape in political ecology.
II The political ecology of
landscape
There are many ways one might classify politi-
cal ecologists engagement with landscape.
It seems, however, that one can readily identify
braided pathways of political-ecological inquiry
that intersect with the subfield of landscape stud-
ies repeatedly and at different theoretical points.
Principal among these are analyses of socio-
ecological transformations, investigations into
the contested meanings of nature, and interroga-
tions of colonial narratives. Many of these
engagements offered critical responses to NCGs
approach to landscape, even as they built upon it.
844 Progress in Human Geography 35(6)
Driven by a central interest in socio-ecological
transformations, most political ecology studies
have highlighted the material aspects of landscape
from multiple angles. Landscape representations
produced through remote mapping technologies,
for example, were shown to influence the estab-
lishment of new kinds of forest landscapes and
ecologies on the ground (Robbins, 2001).
Approaching from a different angle, one closely
associated with the traditions of cultural ecology,
landscapes have been analyzed as the material
result of decades of peasant labor reworking
local ecologies while enmeshed in dynamic
extralocal processes such as land reform,
macro-economic policies, andagribusiness invest-
ment (Zimmerer, 1999). Many studies have found
NCGs binary framework of landscapes of
production and consumption important to expla-
nations of how state resource policies and capi-
tal investment shifts propel such socio-
ecological transformations. Here, landscapes are
conceptualized as falling into two distinct cate-
gories, which are linked to changes in the polit-
ical economy of natural resource exploitation
and conservation. Robbins and Sharp (2003),
however, challenged the clear distinction
between landscapes of production and consump-
tion articulated in NCG. In an inspired effort to
set American lawnscapes within Blaikie and
Brookfields (1987) framework, they argued that
the American suburban household and third
world agrarian land managers are theoretical
equivalents. They cogently demonstrated how
household lawn managers produce the American
lawnscape for public consumption and conclude
production and consumption are enmeshed in
the lawn and made difficult to distinguish
(Robbins and Sharp, 2003: 445, 444). Others
further blurred the distinction, noting that, as
with landscapes of production, landscapes of
consumption often turn a profit for one or more
sectors of competing rural capitalisms (Walker
and Fortmann, 2003: 484; see also Neumann,
1998). Nevertheless, some of the most recent
political ecology works on landscape continue
to find the binary framework analytically useful
(Bunce, 2008; Ekers, 2009).
While the materiality of landscapes has been
a strong theme in political ecology, virtually all
studies that have engaged the landscape concept
have been drawn to NCGs focus on symbolic
meanings. Many of these reveal multiple and
contested meanings of nature and natural land-
scapes among interested social groups. Land-
scapes as contested nature, as struggles over
meaning, are simultaneously struggles over
social identity, belonging and exclusion, and
land rights and use. Whether it is a question of
climbing real estate prices and rural gentrifica-
tion (Bunce, 2008; Walker and Fortmann,
2003) or state resource management and conser-
vation practices (Ekers, 2009; Fairhead and
Leach, 1996; Neumann, 1998), what is at stake
in struggles over landscape meaning are peo-
ples livelihoods in place. Contained within
these explorations of symbolic meaning is a per-
sistent critique of NCGs representational
approach to landscape. Specifically, NCG is
faulted for both narrowly focusing on dominant
discourses and largely ignoring the active role of
non-human forces (Batterbury, 2001; Batterbury
and Bebbington, 1999; Fairhead and Leach,
1996; Zimmerer, 1999). Political ecology stud-
ies are typically grounded in the spatial and
temporal variability of biophysical conditions.
Such studies examine both how those conditions
are interpreted and understood by multiple
social actors and how they alter and are altered
by local knowledge and practice to produce
material landscapes. As Fairhead and Leach
emphasized in their West African research, local
knowledge and meaning of landscape are rooted
in lived history and its experience. Such experi-
ential and historical issues are all too often over-
looked by discourse analyses in their focus on
howthings are represented (FairheadandLeach,
1996: 15). Similarly, Batterbury (2001: 441)
insists that the landscape as representation
view . . . needs to be combined with analysis
of livelihood dynamics and everyday use.
Neumann 845
Some of the most fruitful engagements of
political ecology with landscape studies but-
tressed by advances in postcolonial studies and
enthnohistory are critical evaluations of long-
lived colonial narratives about nature-society
relations. At its most assertive, this approach
treats colonization as a process of conflict
between natives and Europeans over and
through landscape (Sluyter, 2001: 415). Some
of this work probes and dismantles the coloni-
zers model of the world (Blaut, 1993) wherein
productively occupied precolonial landscapes
are symbolically and materially transformed into
pristine wilderness under European colonialism
(Hecht and Cockburn, 1990; Neumann, 1995;
Sluyter, 1999). Fairhead and Leachs (1996)
Misreading the African Landscape remains the
best demonstration of how contemporary ideas
about environmental degradation may derive
more from racialized colonial discourses of
power than from scientific investigations.
In political ecology studies of colonialism, eth-
nohistorical methods have been key in exploring
the roles of local knowledge and practices in
shaping landscapes. Such a methodological
approach was innovatively employed to demon-
strate how dominant representations of US
southern plantation landscapes erased the role
of African technological knowledge and prac-
tices in creating them (Carney, 1996). It was
West African knowledge and expertise in water
engineering and rice cultivation, introduced
through slavery, which created the antebellum
tidal plantations of South Carolina and Georgia,
resulting in visually similar landscapes on either
side of the Atlantic.
III Landscape studies and political
ecology: Dialects or languages?
From the late 1990s through the 2000s, political
ecology writing has both built upon and cri-
tiqued the limitations of landscape theory that
emerged from 1980s NCG. Less generously
stated, political ecology writing has yet to
acknowledge the subsequent post-NCG debates
within cultural geography that have produced
the new wave of non-representational landscape
studies. Exceptions to this general observation
are rare (e.g. Batterbury, 2001) and those are
limited to referencing Mitchells (1996) The Lie
of the Land, a work that is approvingly cited in
non-representational writing for its critique of
NCG (e.g. Rose, 2006). Just as troubling, works
in the non-representational landscape school
wholly ignore political ecologys critical
engagement with landscape. Troubling, because
there exists a series of significant but unacknow-
ledged convergences in the theorization of land-
scape in the two literatures, suggesting that both
camps have missed opportunities for mutually
beneficial engagement.
One of the most common refrains in the non-
representational landscape studies is a call to
focus on the daily lives of social actors, on
everyday experience (Rose, 2002: 457), on
processual daily practices(Gareth and Metzo,
2008: 224), and on mundane activities and
struggles (Scott, 2006: 493). This refrain is a key
part of a critical response to NCGs perceived
obsessions with elite representations of land-
scape, landscape as spectacle, or landscape as
precoded with meaning. The critique is typically
accompanied by frequent references to embodi-
ment or embodied, thereby highlighting the
corporeal, material, and experiential qualities
of landscape. The everyday andthe embodiedare
thus keywords in non-representational landscape
studies. For better or worse, suchhighlylocalized
explorations of daily lives in place have been a
mainstay of political ecology studies. What
could be more mundane, more everyday, than
the production, reproduction, and maintenance
of the suburban American lawnscape (Robbins
and Sharp, 2003)? What exemplifies embodied
experience more than peasant farmers every-
where millions of times, over many generations
scooping up bits of soil, mixing it in their palms
with their own saliva, kneading the mud between
their fingers, feeling its texture, smelling it,
846 Progress in Human Geography 35(6)
tasting it, naming it, and transforming it through
everyday cultivation practices? Political ecology
starts in such moments with the land managers
and their direct relations with the land (Blaikie
and Brookfield, 1987: 27). And it is from such
everyday practices that landscapes are produced,
experienced, and given meaning.
Once we move beyond localized, everyday,
embodied practice, however, non-representational
landscape studies and political ecology can seem
less like mutually intelligible dialects and more
like distinct languages. What is the starting point
for much political ecology (i.e. embodied expe-
rience) is, it seems, the endpoint and sole interest
of much non-representational landscape. Much
non-representational work is uninterested in
asking, much less answering, the question of
how or why the embodied, self-knowing subject
appears in any particular landscape at any partic-
ular moment, hence emptying fromthat moment
all social and political content (see Merriman
et al., 2008). Political ecology, in contrast, seeks
to answer exactly those questions, through the
chain-of-explanation model or other macro-
structural theoretical framings. Thus a political
ecology study analyzes the production and
maintenance of an environmentally toxic subur-
ban lawnscape as the combined effect of individ-
uals desires for direct, embodied encounters
with nature and falling rates of profit in the
agro-chemical industry (Robbins and Sharp,
2003).
The degree of mutual intelligibility of
non-representational landscape with political
ecology depends on the approaches taken.
Non-representational landscape work is evol-
ving and fragmenting. If the approach taken is all
individual agency and no structure then the
commonalities with political ecology are mini-
mal (e.g. Rose, 2002). However, there are other
approaches that underscore the significance of
social relations of power in the experience of
landscape. In this work, the challenge is not to
representation per se. Rather, the focus is reor-
iented toward the instability and multiplicity of
representations, how ideologies and meanings
work . . . through representational practices
(Mitchell, 2002: 384), and representations as
performative (e.g. Dewsbury et al., 2002; Gareth
and Metzo, 2008). These themes can be found to
varying degrees in much of the political ecology
work cited herein (e.g. Robbins, 2001; Walker
and Fortmann, 2003), but they are neither fully
explored nor directly engaged with post-NCG
landscape studies.
Work by non-geographers perhaps best
demonstrates the theoretical and empirical
potentialities of a more direct and explicit con-
versation between two human geography
fields, political ecology and landscape studies.
Informed by both fields, but falling neatly in
neither, anthropologists have approached land-
scape not solely as elite discursive construction
or symbolic vista, but simultaneously as embo-
died encounters with water up to the armpits
and nauseating odor (Ogden, 2008: 217).
While giving attention to the corporeal and
material, Ogden (2008) also recognizes that
both popular and scientific understandings of
landscape are deeply embedded in European
colonial representations of wilderness and
savagery. Moreover, she directly links domi-
nant scientific representations to local, every-
day knowledge and practices, demonstrating
historically how residential knowledge
move[s] up the chain of ever-authoritative
command (p. 219). Similarly, Raffles
(2002) ethnohistorical investigation locates the
scientific command of rainforest ecology in the
intellectual pool of local knowledge and pro-
foundly undermines the representation of
Amazonia as a European-discovered wilder-
ness landscape. He develops an understanding
of Amazon landscapes that closely echoes the
themes of NRT approaches:
We have been wading in terra anfbia, an amphi-
bious world of mobile porosities where land and
water become each other, and where humans and
non-humans are made and unmade by those same
Neumann 847
sediments that bring histories and natures flooding
into the immediacy of the now. (Raffles, 2002: 182)
Raffles Amazon landscapes are permanently
becoming and made intimate through the trans-
formative labor of individual agents in an every-
day political economy (p. 181), embedded in
international scientific initiatives, state systems
of governmentality, and the extractive activities
of multinational logging companies.
IV Conclusion
Since the late 1990s, political ecology studies
have both embraced and critiqued the limitations
of NCGs representational landscape theoriza-
tions. In doing the latter, they anticipated many
of the criticisms that have emerged in NRT-
inspired landscape studies of the past decade.
Just as Matless (2003) found common themes
and problematics among the three landscape
perspectives in the Handbook essays, one can
observe that all three share common ground
with muchworkin political ecology. The possibi-
lities for productive intercourse between non-
representational landscape and political ecology,
however, are largely dependent on the form
of non-representationalism with which one
engages. Non-representational is a rather all-
encompassing, ill-defined position supported by a
disparate variety of theoretical foundations ranging
from performance theory to Marxism. On the one
hand, non-representational approaches that are
highly personalized, experiential, and individua-
lized while eschewing any social-theoretical,
historical, or structural explanations will have
the least to say to political ecology and vice versa.
On the other hand, non-representational
approaches focusing on how landscape works in
providing meaning (Crouch, 2010), exploring how
representations are performative in themselves
(Dewsbury et al., 2002), or conceptualizing land-
scape as inescapably political (Mitchell, 2001)
are clearly of importance to political ecology.
Landscape in political ecology tends not to be
conceived as static representations of power, but
as applications or expressions of power that have
significant material consequences for peoples
everydaylives, includingwhereandhowtheyman-
age individual and collective livelihoods, and are
therefore subject to contestation and competing
representations (FairheadandLeach, 1996; Walker
and Fortmann, 2003; Robbins and Sharp, 2003).
Although shifts in approaches to landscape in
political ecology and human geography more
broadly often paralleled one another, this was
not an outcome of sustained interaction between
the fields. The presence of parallel develop-
ments in the absence of productive interaction
is a pattern that I observed in preparing the two
previous progress reports. I want to close both
this contribution and the series with a few com-
ments about this observation. Political ecologys
strength lies in is its interdisciplinarity and pro-
pensity to poach without inhibition across the
boundaries of other disciplines. The same might
be said about geography more generally. It may
be, however, that intradisciplinarity suffers for
the sake of interdisciplinarity. I do not have a
ready explanation for this phenomenon, though
a few causal forces seem relevant. One is the
pressure to publish original work, a feat per-
haps more easily accomplished by engaging
with work outside the discipline than with the
writings of ones colleague in another geography
department. Another is the problem of transla-
tion. The trans-Atlantic passage is hard on disci-
plinary categories. For example, what is social
on one side is cultural on the other and each
term can convey different meanings in either
contexts (Cresswell, 2010). My primary interest,
however, is not in explaining the absence of
intradisciplinary dialog, but rather in modestly
suggesting that more is lost than gained in failing
to explore the productive tension between
political ecology and human geography.
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