Landscapes Of Conflict

Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportunity in abundance. With the passing of time, however, Oregon’s citizens — rural and urban — would find themselves entangled in issues that they had little experience in resolving. The same trees that provided income to timber corporations, small mill owners, loggers, and many small towns in Oregon, also provided a dramatic landscape and a home to creatures at risk. The rivers whose harnessing created power for industries that helped sustain Oregon’s growth — and were dumping grounds for municipal and industrial wastes — also provided passageways to spawning grounds for fish, domestic water sources, and recreational space for everyday Oregonians. The story of Oregon’s accommodation to these divergent interests is a divisive story between those interested in economic growth and perceived stability and citizens concerned with exercising good stewardship towards the state’s natural resources and preserving the state’s livability. In his second volume of Oregon’s environmental history, William Robbins addresses efforts by individuals and groups within and outside the state to resolve these conflicts. Among the people who have had roles in this process, journalists and politicians Richard Neuberger and Tom McCall left substantial legacies and demonstrated the ambiguities inherent in the issues they confronted.

Conflict Landscapes explores the long under-acknowledged and under-investigated aspects of where and how modern conflict landscapes interact and conjoin with pre-twentieth-century places, activities, and beliefs, as well as with individuals and groups. Investigating and understanding the often unpredictable power and legacies of landscapes that have seen (and often still viscerally embody) the consequences of mass death and destruction, the book shows, through these landscapes, the power of destruction to preserve, refocus, and often reconfigure the past. Responding to the complexity of modern conflict, the book offers a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach, which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain. Dealing with issues such as memory, identity, emotion, and wellbeing, the chapters tease out the human experience of modern conflict and its relationship to landscape. Conflict Landscapes will appeal to a wide range of disciplines involved in studying conflict, such as archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, art history, cultural history, cultural geography, military history, and heritage and museum studies.

Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning. Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual burning of grasslands and light-burning of understory forest debris. Early Euro-American settlers who thought they were taming a virgin wilderness were merely imposing a new set of alterations on an already modified landscape. Beginning with the first 18th-century traders on the Pacific Coast, alterations to Oregon's landscape were closely linked to the interests of global market forces. Robbins uses period speeches and publications to document the increasing commodification of the landscape and its products. "Environment melts before the man who is in earnest," wrote one Oregon booster in 1905, reflecting prevailing ways of thinking. In an impressive synthesis of primary sources and historical analysis, Robbins traces the transformation of the Oregon landscape and the evolution of our attitudes toward the natural world.

Landscape conflicts, for example in connection with / in view of the energy transition, climate policy, transport policy, nature conservation, the extraction of mineral raw materials, the design of urban landscapes or tourism are potentially associated with high economic, social and political costs even before a possible escalation. It is therefore undoubtedly useful to gain a better understanding of landscape-related conflicts in terms of their causes, their course, their dynamics, their inherent logic and possible regulatory procedures. Frequently, such conflicts manifest themselves in particular in different claims and aspired or arrogated interpretative sovereignties concerning what can or may be considered together as 'landscape' (here understood as a special case to 'space'), and these conflicts are not limited to the economic dimension, but they also ignite in social, political and cultural, often also in aesthetic and moral questions. The contributions to this anthology therefore focus on the question of how landscape conflicts can be seen as a productive social normality and be brought to a non-violent and not necessarily consensual settlement.

This book is an attempt to blend traditional empirical, objective archaeological analysis with the study of changing patterns of landscapes and, through them, people and places and the relationships between them. The author focuses on late Iron Age southern Scandinavia through to early medieval polity of Denmark, a time of regional transformation from many autonomous, complex, middle-range societies into a unified, centralized state.

In an era of rapid urbanization, peri-urban areas are emerging as the fastest-growing regions in many countries. Generally considered as the space extending one hundred kilometres from the city fringe, peri-urban areas are contested and subject to a wide range of uses such as residential development, productive farming, water catchments, forestry, mineral and stone extraction and tourism and recreation. Whilst the peri-urban space is valued for offering a unique ambiance and lifestyle, it is often highly vulnerable to bushfire and loss of biodiversity and vegetation along with threats to farming and food security in highly productive areas. Drawing together leading researchers and practitioners, this volume provides an interdisciplinary contribution to our knowledge and understanding of how peri-urban areas are being shaped in Australia through a focus on four overarching themes: Peri-urban Conceptualizations; Governance and Planning; Land Use and Food Production; and Solutions and Representations. Whilst the case studies focus on Australia, they advance a variety of tools useful in discerning processes and impacts of peri-urban change globally. Furthermore, the findings are instructive of the issues and tensions commonly encountered in rapidly urbanizing peri-urban areas throughout the world, from landscape valuation and biosecurity concerns to functional adaptation and social change.

Land disputes in Israel are most commonly described as stand-offs between distinct groups of Arabs and Jews. In Israel's southern region, the Negev, Jewish and Bedouin Arab citizens and governmental bodies contest access to land for farming, homes, and industry and struggle over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. "Natural," immutable divisions, both in space and between people, are too frequently assumed within these struggles. Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines—both physical and social—have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people's everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and "their" landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries. Ultimately, Dwelling in Conflict highlights opportunities for boundary crossings, revealing both contemporary segregation and the possible mutability of these dividing lines in the future.

Tina Thurston’s Landscapes of Power; Landscapes of Conflict is a thi- generation processual analysis of sociopolitical evolution during the Iron Age in southern Scandinavia. Several red flags seem to be raised at once. Are not archaeologists now postprocessual, using new interpretive approaches to - derstand human history? Is not evolution a discredited concept in which - cieties are arbitrarily arranged along a unilinear scheme? Should not modern approaches be profoundly historical and agent-centered? In any event, were not Scandinavians the ultimate barbarian Vikings parasitizing the complex civilized world of southern and central Europe? Tina Thurston’s book focuses our attention on the significant innovations of anthropological archaeology at the end of the twentieth century. A brief overview of processual archaeology can set the context for - preciating Landscapes ofPower; Landscapes of Conflict. During the 1960s the emergent processual archaeology (a. k. a. the New Archaeology) cryst- lized an evolutionary paradigm that framed research with the comparative ethnography of Service and Fried. It was thought that human societies p- gressed through stages of social development and that the goal was to d- cover the evolutionary prime movers (such as irrigation, warfare, trade, and population) that drove social and cultural change. By the 1970s prime movers had fallen from favor and social evolution was conceived as complicated flows of causation involving many variables.