Whose landscape? A political ecology of the ‘exurban’ Sierra

Abstract

In rural places that sit at the uneasy crossroads between ‘traditional’ natural resource-based production and ‘new’ economies and cultures of aesthetic landscape ‘consumption’, ideas of landscape become increasingly important and contested. This paper examines one such conflict in Nevada County, California - a former mining and ranching community in the Sierra Nevada that has experienced rapid ‘exurban’ in-migration and gentrification. In-migrants brought with them particular ‘aesthetic’ or ‘consumption’ views of landscape that long-time residents with continuing ties to the ‘old’ production landscape viewed as political threats. These tensions have recently ignited a political firestorm over a proposal by the environmentalist-dominated county government to incorporate landscape-scale aesthetic and environmental principles into county planning. The ferocity of this contest reflects the multiple issues at stake, including competition between different forms of rural capitalism, class conflict and social control, and cultural frictions. At each level of this multi-tiered conflict, ideas of landscape are key. Together, political ecology and new cultural geographical studies of landscape provide powerful insights into the ways that the politics of landscape - revolving around the question of who ‘owns’ the landscape or decides how it ‘should’ look - become a pivotal node in the shifting human-environment dialectic.

Locating Spatial Variation in the Association Between Wildland Fire Risk and Social Vulnerability Across Six Southern States

“…This expansion heightens the contrast between rural, forested lands and the urban environment. When such growth occurs either in the short term or over longer time periods, it can destabilize rural community social, cultural, and environmental/ecological structures (Hurley and others 2008;Ghose 2004;Hurley and Walker 2004;Walker and Fortmann 2003;Faulkenberry and others 2000).…”

Volunteer Meanings in the Making of Place

“…Economies built on extraction, have been replaced with economies of real estate (e.g, Brogden and Greenberg, 2003;Ghose, 2004;Walker and Fortmann, 2003). Amenity migration has become an important factor in explaining population growth, particularly differences in growth among counties (Nelson, 2006).…”

“…In many instances, changes in environmental management at the county, community, and parcel level have led to land-use conflicts over environmental management priorities (Shumway and Otterstrom, 2001). Walker and Fortmann (2003) locate the source of these land-use conflicts in the American West in the cultural and economic changes that accompany amenity in-migration and that result from the competing rural capitalisms that result from these changes. Importantly, Walker and Fortmann argue that one set of rural capitalism emphasizes protecting the quality of natural landscapes through planning and development-related decisions, precisely because these positively impact real estate values.…”

Landscapes with different logics: A physicalistic approach to semantic conflicts in spatial planning

“…Conflicts in the area of planning, resulting from the dual interpretation of the landscape, are almost in every case based on the characteristic spatial game in which the rural and urban landscape types clash (Walker, fortmann 2003;Antrop 2004b;Molema 2012). In the geographical space this interaction gives rise to different effects and can be interpreted in different ways, with attention paid to characteristic phenomena and reference systems.…”

“…important in defining landscapes and in spatial planning (Masuda, Gavin 2008;Bossuet 2006;Smithers et al 2005;Walker, fortmann 2003), as any mistakes perpetuate the stagnation of poorly developing regions and may undermine the growth of those which to date have been growing rapidly. Such categorical statements in landscape studies are not always a goal in itself.…”