Where does a cultural landscape end?

The first thing that strikes anyone looking at the Alberta oilsands developments in Northern Alberta is the scale. Everything is big. The equipment is big, the social and environmental impact is big, the profits are big. The sustained impact on Aboriginal people struggling through the madness is most troubling. As the earth itself, or in mining terms, “overburden”, is removed, the life it sustains is gone too. The Athabasca oilsands production region provides a fascinating yet lurid display of the clash between two kinds of cultural landscapes: the homeland of First Nation and Métis peoples, and the source of raw materials for industrial capital accumulation.

 

In an earlier post, Iain raised the question of scale in cultural landscapes. I would like to expand on an aspect of Iain’s discussion, and in particular his comment that, “a cultural landscape is contingent upon our position within it”; that is, a person’s understanding of a cultural landscape shifts as their physical position on the land shifts.

The casual observations of someone passing through the Alberta oilsands are certainly going to be very different from the perspectives of those who work within the industry itself and who, in very many cases, may have worked in the resource industry sector elsewhere (e.g., mining, forestry, fishing). And what if we take the view of oil company executives in Calgary or environmentalists in Vancouver; how is their perspective affected by their physical remoteness from the actual site where people’s daily lives are entwined with the cycles of production and destruction? Can those non-residents be said to be in or on the cultural landscape of the Athabasca oilsands production region? If not, then how do we measure the participation of non-residents in the reproduction of a cultural landscape?

This kind of question needs to be part of any discussion of how cultural landscapes are reproduced over time (see Iain’s article on this subject), especially since the social processes that are needed to maintain a living cultural landscape are often dependent, to some extent, on money. In southern Africa, for example, remittances from migrant labourers have historically been critical to the maintenance of “customary authority” in the countryside, ensuring not only a piece of land to retire to, but the continuity of a set of land tenure principles as well. Capital is only one linkage between resident and non-resident agents in the reproduction of a cultural landscape; in the case of the oilsands, it is a critical linkage that webs northern Alberta into the global economy. So, as much as the oilsands development is big, socially the actual site of production is only the tip of the iceberg. Actually, the whole oilsands production region isn’t any larger than the traditional territories of any one First Nation in the area, but socially those aboriginal cultural landscapes were much smaller.

The point (yes, yes): from the vantage point of the distant observer, northern Alberta seems remote — somebody else’s shame, like our Three Gorges Dam in China. But consumption requires materials, energy, and processing, all of which require a site; they need to happen somewhere on the land (or sea) through the creation of cultural landscapes. What is remarkable is how easy it is to forget that “industrial production has a site” and, most importantly, that these sites are not simply the cultural landscapes of our own industrial consumption, but the cultural landscapes of the people who lived in those areas before somebody else began to colonize the land with their own cultural landscape. Iain’s article on the conflict between the tourism and fishing landscapes in the Caribbean provides another example of the implications of non-resident consumption, in this case tourism, has for the ability of local people to maintain their own cultural landscapes.

A cultural landscape is not simply a spatial terrain, the perception of which changes according to your physical position within it (i.e., your orientation). Spatially there may only be one physical landscape but there may be many different cultural interpretations of the land co-existing at once. Understanding this multiplicity will depend, in part, on your position within the social networks that are part and parcel of the reproduction of whatever cultural landscapes are being maintained on the ground. This multiplicity allows for change through time, including between generations within one culture, as well as persistence in the face of a materially dominant social order that transforms the land to their own needs. It will be very interesting to see how aboriginal peoples in northern Alberta are able to adapt, and thereby persevere with their own understanding of the land after the madness of the oilsands has subsided.