Mapping the Land: Spatializing State Nature

Abstract

In 1965 it was estimated that Belgium had 607,142 hectares (ha) of forested land, while Finland had 21,800,000 ha (6,500,000 of which were swamp forest). France, meanwhile, had 111,800 ha of swamps and marshes (étang en rapport), compared with the Federal Republic of Germany’s 188,000 ha. Of its total land area of 24,402,000 ha, the UK had 7,541,400 ha of unimproved grazing land being grazed by a staggering 28,967,000 sheep. Further estimates revealed that the Netherlands had 7,990 ha of dunes and 50,700 ha of land designated as muddy flats. Perhaps what is most unusual about these figures is that they don’t appear at all unusual. What, after all, could seem more normal than knowing such detailed statistical facts about a series of modern European states? These figures are actually taken from a World Land Use Survey, which was conducted in collaboration by a series of states during the middle of the twentieth century. Despite their seemingly routine character, however, what interests us about these figures are the links they reveal between nature, the state, and space (or more specifically land). The figures presented above have two things in common: first, they are all statistics about the natural world, which have been organized through specific reference to nation-states (France, Belgium, the UK); and secondly, they all (with the exception of the statistics on British sheep) describe nature by making reference to its spatial form—or more accurately its extent (hectares of marsh, forest, dune, etc.). This association between nature and land is, we argue, a significant one. We claim that historically the idea of land has provided different nation-states with a mechanism for making sense of nature and for ordering it spatially. In light of the historical perspective on nature–state relationships provided by Chapter 3, this chapter analyses how state–nature interactions are mediated and played out within space. While recognizing the diverse range of ways in which state–nature relations have been spatialized over time, here we focus our attention on one crucial site of state nature—the land-use map.