Resistant actors, resistant landscapes? A historical political ecology of a forested conservation object in exurban southeastern Pennsylvania

Abstract

Exurban political ecologists (ExPE) are interested in landscape contestations, particularly where material–cultural entanglements play out through land-use decision-making processes. ExPE research highlights the role in-migrants and long-time residents play in the balance between conservation and development of landscapes, often highlighting informal and formal advocacy that shapes specific outcomes. These entanglements often appear to hinge on attempts to integrate conservation science into planning. Drawing on a case from south-eastern Pennsylvania, USA, this article examines the ways that exurban actors, histories of land-use and in-migration and county planning practice produce place-specific conservation objects. Success here derives from realising long-standing landowner desires through social intervention, rather than implementation of science-informed planning. This case demonstrates the role of geologically distinctive landforms in exurban advocacy, which enable a particular landscape history of urbanisation in Metropolitan Philadelphia.