Kenneth Olwig - Justice, Power and the Political Landscape

The editors of this book live and work continents apart, one, Don Mitchell in North America, the other, Kenneth Olwig, in Northern Europe. As Olwig sits down to write his contribution to this introduction the radio drones on in the background. The country where he resides, Denmark, is having a national election and his concentration is broken by the voice of a politician who tells an interviewer that she knows the political landscape of the country, and she knows that the citizenry is tired of the present governments dependence for power upon the support of an ultra nationalistic and xenophobic right wing party. Those who normally work with landscape tend to identify it with physical phenomena like trees, lakes, hills and buildings, and many of them will wonder what the political landscape, to which the politician refers, has to do with their understanding of landscape. The answer is quite a bit. The vote in this election will have an effect upon the degree to which the Danish physical landscape in the future will continue to contain fenced in camps, complete with razor wire, for refugees denied entry into Denmark, but unable to go home because their homelands are unsafe. The election might also, if this particular politician is right, facilitate the creation of Moslem cemeteries and purpose-built mosques, complete with their characteristic domes and towers, which will change the character of the Danish landscape.

Across the sound dividing Denmark from Sweden, where Olwig commutes to work, there have long been cemeteries in Malm where the Moslems from Denmark could go to bury their dead, and there also is, unlike in Denmark, a mosque whose white minarets pierce the characteristic grey sky except, of course, when arsonists with firebombs have blackened them. The character of religious buildings is actually not a new issue in Scania, the ancient Danish landscape territory where Malm lies. Scania, like other such landscapes, is politi cal in the sense that it is home to a polity that has shaped it through a history that goes back to ancient times, when custom was law. Scania became incorporated into the Swedish state in 1658 after the Swedes defeated the Danes in a war. The Swedes then embarked upon a cultural cleansing of the landscape that not only included the execution of Scanians that remained loyal to Denmark, but also changed the appearance of the churches and other features in the physical landscape so that they would look more Swedish (Germundsson 2006).

Meanwhile, on the other side the Atlantic, Mitchell could witness strikingly similar questions about the political landscape being raised in the midst of Americas (never ending) election. In October, New York State governor Eliot Spitzer announced a plan to make it possible for undocumented (illegal) immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. The rationale was straightforward: drivers licenses are an essential tool in regulating the streets and highways, assuring drivers are insured, and decreasing the possibilities for fraud. Despite the fact that a number of other states already make such licenses available, and despite the go-ahead given the program by the US Secretary of Homeland Security, nativists latched onto the plan and attacked it as a form of amnesty for people in the country illegally. But what does this have to do with the landscape, the landscape, for example, of farms, idyllic apple orchards, small cities and rural towns across Upstate New York, where Mitchell lives?

The question of illegal aliens, by which is almost always meant Mexicans, is now a critical one in New York State, more than 2500 km away from the nearest border crossing with Mexico. Farmers here, not only in California or Texas, are feeling the effects of a broad-scale crackdown on undocumented workers and are afraid their crops will have to be left to rot with disastrous consequences for an already marginal farming region, and its bucolic landscape. Across the country, in fact, meatpackers, construction companies, hotel corporations, and countless other businesses are contemplating a perhaps radically changed labor market, and all of this affects different landscapes.