ABSTRACT
Environmentalism is often identified with singling out stretches of land in order to protect them from the ills of modernity. Since the 1970s, the number of protected areas has constantly been on the rise, and they have significantly shaped our ‘way of seeing, understanding and (re)producing the world’ (West et al. 2006: 252). This strategy has recently come under critique from a newly formed movement or strategy called ‘postenvironmentalism’. Postenvironmentalism was introduced by the American activists Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2004) in a manifesto called ‘The Death of Environmentalism’. They argued that creating just another nature reserve is not enough to face the challenges posed by global climate change. Instead, the need for mitigation of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the effects of a changing climate makes active management of landscapes indispensable. In the anthropocene, they argue, the separation of nature from culture and landscape from development does not make sense any more. The concept of the anthropocene was introduced by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) as a consequence of the increasing and irreversible influence of humanity on the earth system, with anthropogenic climate change as the most prominent example. In this chapter, I discuss the anthropology of landscapes in light of these recent developments
and in order to adjust its theoretical and methodological foundations accordingly. In the first part, I introduce the current dilemma of environmentalism and show the relevance of the concept of postenvironmentalism for landscape studies. In the second part, I apply this concept to the anthropology of landscapes. From early on, cultural anthropology and related disciplines such as cultural geography were critical of environmental concepts which tried to explain cultural behavior exclusively as a result of natural constraints or to legitimize politics in the name of nature. Instead, there is a long tradition of focusing ‘on the ways in which naturalized environments reverberate with cultural significance’ (Ogden 2011: 27) and on ‘the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conversation projects’ mainly in protected areas (West 2006: 251). The question is how people actively shape, administer and inhabit landscapes (Krauss 2005b); a question which is already addressed and reflected for example in the European Landscape Convention (Olwig 2007). In the last part, I present some examples of my own fieldwork at the German North Sea coast, which includes both a ‘classical’ national park and a newly emerging wind energy landscape. In the conclusion, I will argue that the anthropology of postenvironmental landscapes focuses on the dynamics of assemblages and networks that
bring the landscape into being. In doing so, landscape studies contribute to the adjusting of environmental politics in the face of current and future global challenges.
