The cause célèbre and scholarly discourse: a reply to karl benediktsson

Abstract

In 'Scenophobia, geography and the aesthetic politics of landscape' (Benediktsson 2007), Karl Benediktsson implied that a broad range of landscape geographers, including myself, who have questioned the dominance of the scenic in approaches to landscape, were afflicted with 'scenophobia' (Benediktsson 2007, pp. 214, 209). l In the present commentary it is implied that I support the 'refashioning of landscapes in the image of capital' insofar as I 'rehearse the precise argument used by the corporate actors in the that has taken place in Iceland' (Benediktsson 2008, p. 83). It is this in Iceland, concerning large-scale transformations of a scenic wilderness landscape in order to make electricity from hydro power, that has provided the measure against which much landscape geographical theory has been weighed by Benediktsson and found wanting. Benediktsson's engagement in this debate, as he tells us in the present commentary, was motivated by 'a deep personal feeling' and the desire to make 'a politically poignant argument' concerning this Icelandic environmental cause celebre in which he was, as he put it in the article, 'appalled by the landscape transformations wrought in this part of country, which was not so long ago largely without direct evidence of human energies, but with the energies of various forces of nature all the more visible' . I inadvertently became involved in this debate because I was asked by the editors to comment on a special issue of GeografiskaAnnaler: Series B, Human Geography on landscape in which Benediktsson's article appeared (Olwig 2007; Setten and Mels 2007). The problem with political causes in which the concept of nature is involved is that nature is arguably the most ideologically loaded concept in the language, and this means that is easily polarized between the natural and the unnatural, the native warional and the non-narive national (both roots share the root not meaning to be born) (Olwig 1995). The counterpoising of global industrial corporations to the native natural Icelandic landscape scenery of my country is thus easily inscribed within a nationalistic discourse built upon the fear of the alien other, whether or not this is the author's intention (Groening 2007). This is especially true in a situation in which national identity is rooted in the ideology that its founding fathers colonized a wilderness, so that the nation is essentially born out of nature (Olwig 1995). The Icelandic case resembles many other cases where differing natural ideals collide. Commonly, the difference lies in that one side sees nature in