ABSTRACT
Farmers constitute a decreasing proportion of the population, in Norway as well as other European countries. They do, however, have a significant influence on how rural landscapes are shaped and altered. This is important for the remainder of the population ‘given the symbolic relationship between national identity and the rural landscape’. 1 Thirty years or more of environmental problems caused by increasing industrialisation of agriculture in the Western world has, however, unsettled the symbolic relationship between national identity and the rural landscape. This is because conventional agriculture in the West is frequently seen as detrimental to biodiversity, to historical, cultural, aesthetic and recreational values and resources, in addition to symbolic and identity values in agricultural landscapes.
