Producing landscapes of environmental justice: exploitation of woodlands and wetlands and deep historical geographies of justice on Gotland

Tom Mels

doi:10.1007/s10980-021-01284-w

Abstract

ContextThe importance of justice is increasingly recognized in environmental policy making. Research on environmental justice offers an important perspective on landscape transformations, both natural and social.ObjectivesThis paper asks how current work on environmental justice might contribute to the development of socio-environmental knowledge of the biophysical landscape. The paper explores the relations between environmental justice thinking and the production of a distinctively capitalist landscape.MethodsThe paper builds on a review of environmental justice and landscape literature and, for the empirical part, on archival studies and secondary sources.ResultsThe paper shows that there remains a disjunction between landscape studies and the environmental justice literature. It provides a theoretically informed approach of bringing together environmental justice scholarship with the transformations of a contested and distinctively capitalist landscape. By studying changes in woodlands and wetlands on the island of Gotland, Sweden, it uncovers a process of the production of landscape that elicits “deep” historical geographies of environmental justice. The massive exploitation of wetlands and forests shows how an approach encompassing environmental justice in conjunction with forms of resource exploitation and conservation can help grasp changes in the landscape.

Highlights

What is to be gained from coordinating the study of the biophysical landscape with environmental justice scholarship? The question may seem to ask for the obvious, because discussions about environmental justice are often precisely about the patterns and events that produce the landscape
If there is one key insight that the environmental justice movement has consistently been voicing over the past four decades, it must be this: environmental concern and social justice do not exist in separate realities but need to be seen as coexisting and developing interdependently
As suggested in this paper, there is much to be gained for landscape ecology from an extended engagement with this field of social theory

Summary

Introduction

The question may seem to ask for the obvious, because discussions about environmental justice are often precisely about the patterns and events that produce the landscape. Despite the rather widely acknowledged commonalities and connections between landscape, environmental concern and justice thinking, they have been pieced together in fragmented ways. This contribution lays out an approach to landscape that takes seriously the struggle over environmental justice as part of the socio-environmental production of landscape, which is to say, of the specific material and discursive conditions and relations that go into its making. The conditions of capitalist production are central to current developments regarding environmental justice

Objectives

Results

Conclusion