Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
part of Europe were engaged at this time in a struggle against an emperor based in
Spain who wished to subsume these low lands under the imperial power of a cen-
tralising state. For this reason the maintenance of a common identity was a life and
death matter for these societies, and
landschap
, because it united community and
place, was, according to the geographer Tom Mels, a vital expression of that identity
(Mels, 2006).
Polities of the kind depicted in the Dutch paintings still exist. Examples of con-
temporary regional landscape polities can be found along the coast of the shallow
waters of the Wadden Sea that links modern Denmark, Germany and the Nether-
lands. Farms here are family-based, and many of the dikes are still maintained
through collective local effort. Living with this environment has historically been a
question of 'going with the fl ow.' One does not build sharp barriers against the
water. Rather one allows the water to follow around, through, and even over, the
land according to weather conditions. Modern society tends to defi ne environment
in terms of physical objects external to a society, but this idea is diffi cult for the
people of such a polity to understand because their community has created, through
a gradual process of diking and drainage, the very soil upon which they live, and
which they share with various forms of wildlife, including great quantities of migra-
tory birds. This soil is not seen as being external to their landscape polity, but rather
it is seen to be a 'substantive' part and parcel of their social and legal practices, and
hence their habitus.
3
The word
substantive
, as used here, should not be confused
with
substantial
, because it is meant here in the legal sense of 'creating and defi ning
rights and duties', as in the branch of law that deals with the prescription of 'the
rights, duties, and obligations of persons to one another as to their conduct or
property' (Olwig, 1996b; Merriam-Webster, 2000). Their landscape polity is thus
built upon the culture of a 'moral economy', to borrow a term from the English
historian E.P. Thompson, which involves substantive cooperative community effort,
particularly with regard to the maintenance of its dikes and drainage systems, which
places a legal and moral burden upon members of the community (Knottnerus,
1992; Thompson, 1993). Landscape is thus a practice, something that you do, as
an individual, and as part of a community, and as part of a material habitus. Land-
scape, therefore, is not primarily a scene of an objectifi ed nature that you observe
from a distance, or perform upon as a stage, but a part of the nature of your com-
munity and the customs and values that are deemed normal, and hence natural.
Another way of describing this kind of community's relationship to its material
habitus could be to borrow the concept of 'actant' from Latour, who has argued
that the natural environment is an active participant in the social relations that
determine our environmental agenda, though not a determinant of those relations
(Latour, 1993).
There is an ongoing pressure in the Wadden Sea to 'modernise' by constructing
ever-higher centrally planned dikes that will separate the water from dry land
rigidly. The problem with this, as residents of areas with similar environmental
issues (such as Venice, New Orleans or even the Thames basin) well know, is that
there does not seem to be a technological fi x that can maintain a sharp separation
between water and land. When unusual fl ooding conditions occur, the disaster for
the residents in such 'modernised' areas will become correspondingly greater. The
diked landscapes of the Wadden Sea area, with their moist coastal grasslands, are
a paradise for migratory birds, and this attracts bird-watchers, who would like to
