A contested landscape is a discursive landscape, where different worlds com-pete to be expressed through that landscape and to have a future and a sense of community in that landscape. It is widely held among landscape theorists that “Landscape” is in itself a contested term that is notoriously difficult to define. Setten (2006) has noted how the term “landscape” is used in many different ways. Landscape has become an acute issue in Sápmi because Fen-noscandian modes of landscape assessment and valuation rarely lend an ear to Sámi landscape concepts. To sort out how landscape studies may approach such questions, this thesis aims to engage analytically with a multiplicity of ways of understanding the many readings of Sámi and Fennoscandian land-scapes.
The Nordic legacy in landscape research in cultural geography is suspended
between the accounts of a substantive landscape, where the term “landscape”
means an area governed by law and custom (Olwig, 1996), Both approaches were close to notions of place and oppose the British concepts of landscape as “a way of seeing”. Many landscape scholars have articulated the ways in which Nordic approaches to landscape and meanings of the term differ from mainstream English landscape concepts. ‘Justice and injustice are embed-ded in, maintained, and contested through the landscape’ (Mels and Mitchel, 2013, 211). The nature-culture divide permeates the Norwegian environment and cultural heritage management; landscape is governed as nature, while built heritage and culture landscapes are governed as culture. In consequence, landscape is split across governance agencies. The European Landscape Convention (ELC) promote cultural diversity and actively involving civil society and citizens in landscape management. According to Michael Jones and Marie Stenseke, the ELC:
emphasizes that landscape is not an exclusive field for scientific and technical specialists but the concern of everybody, and advocates an enhanced role for public participation in landscape issues. (Jones and Stenseke, 2011, 5)
Islandic geographer, Benedictsson, calls for an idea of reintroducing aesthet-ics in landscape research. Those landscape studies that probably most inti-mately discuss the Indigenous landscapes of the European North are carried out in the research environment that is affiliated with the Sámi University of Applied Science in Kautokeino, the Arctic University of Norway. Two special editions of Dieđut (Andersen, 2002; Jones and Schanche, 2004) explored Sámi landscape approaches. This thread was, however, not pursued in land-scape theory but in phenomenological approaches to landland-scape and place in anthropology and philosophy by Ingold (2011), Meløe (2006), Greve (2014), and Nergård (2006). The Sámi landscape studies from the 2000s did not gain a stronghold within landscape theory. North Norwegian, Sámi and interna-tional scholars interested in Sámi and North Norwegian land and water rights issues have articulated how Sámi, Kven, and North Norwegian landscape concepts differ from the majority Norwegian concepts (Schanche, 2002;
Skålnes, 2003). Studying the literature on Sámi landscape terminologies and landscape relations is key to develop the basic understanding of landscapes in the European Arctic that is needed in order to go in dialogue on the prospects of those landscapes.
From the National Romantic period, the Sámi were externalised from and assimilated into the national identities in Fennoscandia. In order to learn
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about Sámi people’s perceptions of landscape, Schanche (2002) proposes that it would be appropriate to learn Sámi landscape terms. The most known of these terms is meahcci, in the plural: meahcit. It is translated into the Norwegian term mark, in the plural: marker, and utmark. Utmark has been implemented in legislation as the meaning of meahcci, and it translates as
‘uncultivated land.’ Both steps in this translation are mistranslations that are thoroughly critiqued by Sámi scholars and scholars that study Sámi land-scapes. I will return to this critique shortly. For now, it is sufficient to note that that meahcit are significant landscapes that are connected to traditional usage, spirituality and care.
We know that industrial mining impacts all businesses in markene/the meah-cit, as well as coastal fishery, and that Sámi reindeer pastoralism is impacted by wide ranges of landscaping activities: hydropower and logging, a surge in wind power licences, power lines and extended infrastructure of leisure cottages and tourist facilitation, to mention a few. Aquaculture appropriates the coast, mine tailings’ disposal in fjords and deep-sea mining prospects make stakes in marine ecosystems, unseen seabed landscapes. Landscape terminologies, characterisations and debates have all these holes and open-ings agape to the exploitation of peoples, of environments and of histories.
The perforations are also passage in time. With the present discourse on the European Landscape Convention as a point of departure, the thesis juxta-poses landscape concepts, which, due to hegemonic practices and despite the current emphasis on multidisciplinarity, are kept separate in decision-making processes, with consequences for landscape.
1.1.3 Extraction
The number of different prospects and plans in rural areas in the European Arctic is surging, while, at the same time, health services, public transport, schools and police services are centralised. Extractive prospects place materi-al and discursive claims on landscapes, while conjuring expectations of future wealth. Extractivism (Acosta, 2013) is a term that was first coined in Latin America to describe how governments and global industries work in tandem to extract researches from the peripheries without giving anything back to the communities that hosts the extractive industries on their land. In 2016, Emma Wilson and Florian Stammler edited a special issue of The Extractive Indus-tries and Society about Arctic communities and extractive indusIndus-tries.
The prioritising of extractive modes of resource management, including oil, gas, mining, forestry and fisheries, within the political economy and development planning has been termed ‘extractivism’
and is also associated with colonial and neo-colonial policies of appropriation. (Wilson and Stammler, 2016, 1)
The Extractive Industries and Society, Special Issue on the Arctic, edited by Emma Wilson and Florian Stammler (2016) has a circumpolar scope.
Comparative landscape studies circling about the Arctic often do so by means of imaginary journeys along the Arctic Circle. Such transects make a car-tographic cut through the territories bordering the Arctic Ocean and evoke concerns of geopolitical and national interest; Indigenous peoples’ rights;
opportunities for the extractive industries; new global trade routes; security;
species extinction, and global warming. Such cartographies have been of vital importance to the scientific and popular understanding of the climate crisis. The Will to Drill - Mining in Arctic Communities (Dale et al., 2018) is a careful consideration from the social sciences about the conduct of the min-ing industries in the Arctic. The book chapters are ordered in three themes:
landscape, legitimacy and social acceptance. The editors Dale, Bay-Larsen and Skorstad have all carried out case studies in North Norway, and the book covers a high number of mining cases and discourses in North Norway, Sweden, Finland and North-West Russia. This view of landscape includes procedural justice in landscape planning, and how the term landscape may regain relevance in discussions of extractive prospects in the Arctic, includ-ing legal texts, in order to understand legal rights and procedural justice, and policymaking. Sámi law expert, Susann Funderud Skogvang (2013), confirms that both the exploration and the extraction of minerals in indigenous areas are highly controversial issues. In her review of the new Norwegian Mineral Act, one of the problems she identifies is that:
The Sami people are not given the special right to consult in mineral matters, nor the right to benefit sharing. Likewise, the important meaning of indigenous traditional knowledge is ignored. (Skogvang, 2013, 343)
Since the start of the 19th century, national states have perforated their interior, coastal and oceanic territories to prepare them for prospecting companies that accentuate the perforating activities, which, in turn, makes for extractive activities on land and at sea. Recently, the much-needed green shift or green new deal has been co-opted by the mining industry lobby and has become a new pivot point in the mining industries’ quest for social acceptance of their area’s extensive and polluting activity. Dealing with how the extensive land-use changes that are planned to curb carbon emissions will affect Arctic culture landscapes is a growing issue. Climate emergencies
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are paradoxically accompanied by ‘climate opportunism’ (Kristoffersen, 2016) by the Arctic states, perpetuating oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.
In state and corporate attempts to organise more sustainable development, there is greenwashing of the rhetoric of industrial prospects. Prospecting companies are on a quest to obtain ‘a social licence to operate’ (Wilson and Stammler, 2016). Posing with mineral-dotted core samples in their hands, mineral prospectors claim to own the answer to the core questions of sustainable development: to mine the minerals needed for the green shift.
Prospective knowledge extraction includes strategies to invoke acceptance for environmental degradation, a change in values among politicians, citizens and denizens. Echoes of such responses loom in governmental agencies and media records. The Norwegian Minister of Commerce claims that we need to open mines, in order to have minerals for the green shift. But the problem is far more complex because the climate emergency is entangled with an ongoing ecological catastrophe. The interaction with the surrounding community and environment is regarded by the mining industry as external to mining, as externalities (see Deneault and Sacher, 2012, 31). Changed uses of areas on land and in water, together with global heating and pollution, cause an unprecedented extinction of flying, running and swimming species. Loss of biodiversity is ultimately threatening human livelihoods.
The green shift is about that now, at last, we have realized that the total load on Earth’s natural systems has been so high that no one any longer can get away with isolating business from its externalities. (Lie, 2019)
Fennoscandian landscapes are put on the agenda through every development measure that requires an Environmental Impact Assessment because impact on landscape is one of the themes that are assessed.
1 . 2 O N T H E S T U D Y
This thesis addresses issues of contested landscapes in the Arctic that are also sites of resistance. In focusing on the outfield and coastal seascapes, I assemble issues such as nature resource management and traditional knowl-edge, social-ecological systems, biodiversity loss and resource extraction.
Inquiring how extractive prospects conjure contested landscapes, I have conducted a critical case study of the material and discursive conditions in power-saturated relations to landscape. I have been in the anticipated impact zone of the Nussir and Ulveryggen mine, together with reindeer pastoralists,
mineral prospectors, fishermen, environmentalists and local residents. I have travelled to mining sites in Sápmi/Fennoscandia and to the Canadian Arctic, to see how global mining operates in the Arctic. At various conferences and through media studies, I have seen how cartographies, diagrams, photos and landscape representations are employed in the extractive discourse.
The working methods are based in the arts and humanities and the discipline of Landscape Architecture. I take a transdisciplinary orientation that learns from postcolonial, feminist and Indigenous approaches in cultural geography, anthropology, critical cartography, development Studies, heritage studies and material semiotics. In conducting the study, I have employed qualitative, reflexive and design research methodologies. Methods used in the study are ethnographic fieldwork and analysis, combined with multimodal discourse analysis. I have documented and analysed the field experiences, both in text and through visual techniques, such as mapping, drawing, photography, and infographics. I have been in direct proximity to everything I write about, I have had conversations about everything, and I have kept up to date in the transdisciplinary academic written discourse.
Approaching the dynamics of the Arctic’s contested landscapes includes finding ways of decolonising landscape architectural methods. This extends to a critical review of the role the built-environment professions play in the service of public land-use policy. Such enquiries include calls for speculation on how to develop tools to understand and engage with landscapes that already exhibit and are likely to continue to present contested trajectories towards the future. Pondering how landscape architecture might contribute – not only in negotiating multiple human interests and preconceptions but also in nurturing the benefits of numerous species, plants, animals and insects, sentient beings on the move with an expectation to find the land habitable – I have developed a method of Counter Prospecting. This thesis brings forward examples of how Counter Prospecting offers openings to address prospective exchanges with Sámi reindeer husbandry from a landscape perspective.