Linking Nordic landscape geography and political ecology - Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography - Volume 69, Issue 4

In december 2013 a meeting was held in Trondheim organised by the Norwegian network for political ecology. I contributed with a presentation on my experience and thoughts of differences and common themes between Nordic landscape geography and Political Ecology. I also drew some lines back in time to the postwar European landscape research and the strong, mainly German tradition of historical landscape research.

Here is an abstract

Three related schools of landscape and land use studies are described and analysed: European post-war landscape history, Political Ecology and Nordic landscape geography. For each of them their social and political context, their main study objects and their position towards a normative vs. value-free scholarly work is analysed. I suggest that the success of European post-war landscape history was partly based on its strive for a value-free science and against previous ideological misuse of settlement history. Political ecology on the other hand took an open normative stand and developed in the context of the Sahel crisis where it provided a radical answer to Malthusian simplifications. In contrast to that Nordic Landscape Geography grew as an intellectual reaction to emerging European landscape policies and against an Anglophone understanding of landscapes as scenery. The paper finally speculates on challenges ahead and suggests an agenda for studies of labour and landscapes.

and here the link:

Linking Nordic landscape geography and political ecology - Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography - Volume 69, Issue 4

If you cannot access the article  please send me a mail (mats.widgren@humangeo.su.se.se) and I will send you the article

The Norwegian network will this year have its third meeting -- in Bergen. The theme this year is Power in Political Ecology.