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The Earth is Not a Globe: Landscapeversus the ‘Globalist’ AgendaKenneth R. Olwig aa Landscape Architecture , SLU-Alnarp, SwedenPublished online: 18 Jul 2011.

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The Earth is Not a Globe: Landscapeversus the ‘Globalist’ Agenda

KENNETH R. OLWIGLandscape Architecture, SLU-Alnarp, Sweden

ABSTRACT ‘Globalism’ can be defined as a mode of thought deriving from the practice ofthinking globally, both literally and figuratively. Globalism not only informs major trends withingovernance and economics, it also informs environmental issues, not least those related to globalwarming. It will be argued, using the example of the production of energy and power, that theremay well be a built-in contradiction between globalism and the interests of landscape as thediverse place of people, polity and nature. This study discusses the theoretical and practicalimplications of such a contradiction.

KEY WORDS: globalism, globe, landscape, global warming, energy, scale

Landscape vs ‘Globalism’?

Landscape has entered the contemporary European environmental agenda in largemeasure due to the promulgation of the European Landscape Convention (ELC)under the aegis of the Council of Europe (2000, chpt. 1, art. 1). Landscape,furthermore, might be entering the world’s environmental agenda due to efforts toexpand the brief of the ELC beyond Europe (e.g. Egoz et al., 2011). The scale ofinfluence of the landscape agenda obviously cannot be compared, however, to theglobal environmental agenda, as manifested, for example, by the global UN ClimateChange Conferences (COP).1 This paper will address the relationship between thetwo agendas, asking whether we are simply dealing with a question of the generaland the particular that might be characterized by an obvious complementaryrelationship, or whether the introduction of the figure of the globe generatesintrinsically opposing agendas. Thus, if the general temperature of an area increasesthis could have a damaging effect upon a particular landscape. Efforts to combat orameliorate this general rise in temperature might be seen to also help to protect suchlandscapes and thereby have a complementary effect. But, if the attempt to combatglobal climate change involves the building of giant wind turbines, atomic powerplants, and the planting of energy crops, cannot the global cure for a perceivedglobal threat pose a manifest threat to landscape?

Correspondence Address: Kenneth R. Olwig, Landscape Architecture, SLU-Alnarp, Box 58, Alnarp

230 53, Sweden. Email: kenneth.olwig@slu.se

Landscape Research,Vol. 36, No. 4, 401–415, August 2011

ISSN 0142-6397 Print/1469-9710 Online/11/040401-15 � 2011 Landscape Research Group Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2011.582940

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The answers to the above questions might be sought at the level of empirical data.This paper, however, will examine the relationship between the two agendas at themore meta-theoretical and structural level of semiotics, discourse, and ideas, andhence ideology (Olwig, 2009; Steger, 2007). This paper will thereby seek to avoid thedestructive effects of poisoned debates concerning the existence, for example, ofglobal warming. Focus, instead, will be upon the idea of the global and thatof landscape as ways of framing the environmental agenda. The issue, then, is notwhether or not there is global warming, or some other global environmental issue,but what are the possible effects of taking a ‘globalist’ oriented approach uponlandscape. Landscape is understood here as defined by the ELC as: ‘‘an area, asperceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction ofnatural and/or human factors’’ (Council of Europe, 2000, chpt. 1, art. 1). The ELCtherefore focuses upon landscape as the place of people and polity, requiringsignatory states, for example, to: ‘‘recognise landscapes in law as an essentialcomponent of people’s surroundings, an expression of the diversity of their sharedcultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity’’ (Council ofEurope, 2000, chpt 2, art 5; Olwig, 2007).

‘Globalism’ is here defined as a mode of thought deriving from the practice ofthinking, framed by the figure of the globe, which also structures an agenda. Byagenda is meant a ‘‘program of action’’ (NOAD, 2005, agenda), and what is ofconcern here is the way ‘globalism’ can work to frame a program of action thatdiffers from that of landscape as understood, for example, by the ELC. Thetheoretical approach taken derives from the contested tradition of landscape studiesidentifiable with the landscape iconography of Denis Cosgrove and Steven Daniels(1988), the phenomenology of Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) and Tim Ingold (2000), and myown approach, inspired by semiotics and text analysis (Olwig, 2002, 2004). The term‘globalism’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘‘the belief, theory, orpractice of adopting or pursuing a political course, economic system, etc., based onglobal rather than national principles; an outlook that reflects an awareness of globalscale, issues, or implications’’ (OED, 1989, globalism). It is a concept that has beenidentified with politics and economics, particularly in the context of globalization(Cox, 1999; Steger, 2007), but it is also applicable to environmentalism’s focusupon global environmental forces (Latour, 2004). Globalism can thus be applied towidely disparate phenomena, ranging from governance and the economy to ecology(Robertson & White, 2007; Stiglitz, 2003). The ‘ism’ in globalism indicates a formof ideology, as in (new) liberalism, socialism or environmentalism, which mapsknowledge in a particular way (Cox, 1999; Steger, 2007). The semiotics ofglobalism’s particular ideological power, however, derives from linking an iconicshape to a particular rationale (Cosgrove, 2001). Globalism informs politics andeconomics, but also environmentalism. Environmentalism is used here in its originalsense to refer to an ideology that gives primacy to the environment as a determinatehistorical driving force, and it should not be confused with the use of the term torefer to the ideas of environmentalists active in diverse environmental movements(OED, 1989, globalism, environmentalism; Robertson & White, 2007).

Globalism, it will be argued, can have the effect of reducing the shared diverseheritage of landscape as place to locations within an hierarchically scaled space, inwhich, as the biologist Yrjo Haila puts it, ‘‘the human/environment system is viewed,

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as it were, from a distance, and the system is analysed as a unified whole’’ (Haila,1998, pp. 70–71). In this case globalism can be seen as a threat to the differentiateddiversity of landscape, especially, as will be argued, when economic and politicalglobalism synergizes with globalist environmentalism. As the anthropologist ofscience Bruno Latour puts it:

The ecologists were a little too quick to pat themselves on the back when theyput forward their slogan ‘Think globally, act locally.’ Where ‘global thinking’ isconcerned, they have come up with nothing better than a nature alreadycomposed, already totalized, already instituted to neutralize politics. To think intruly ‘global’ fashion, they needed to begin by discovering the institutionsthanks to which globalism is constructed one step at a time. (Latour, 2004, p. 3)

The following text will seek to begin the process of discovering the process by whichglobalism has been constructed by taking a close look at the semiotics of the figure ofthe globe itself.

The Origins of Globalism

The link between the figure of the globe and climate and society was impressed uponthe early modern European imagination by the Renaissance rediscovery of a workon geography and global cosmography by the renowned second-century Alexan-drian Greek astronomer and astrologer Claudius Ptolemy (Ptolemy, 1991). Thiswork provided an important basis for modern cartography by conceptualizing theglobe in the shape of a uniform gridded abstract space of longitude and latitudewithin which places are plotted as locations. The practical value of this globe wasmade apparent when Columbus made use of it in his voyages of exploration, whichhelped set in motion the age of exploration, and its ideological value becameapparent when, for example, the Jesuits used it to promote the imperial expansion ofCatholicism (Cosgrove, 2001). The discovery of Ptolemy’s globe is also thought tohave been central to the development of the techniques of linear perspective thatwere used to reduce landscapes of place and polity to the abstract uniform spatialframework of the map (Cosgrove, 1984; Olwig, 2002). Thus, whereas on a globe ormap the viewer looks from the top down at the lands of the Earth, in a perspectivalview the angle of projection changes so that the same space is seen horizontally ininfinite space.

Ptolemy was particularly interested in the relationship between position on theglobe and climate because he believed that if one could locate differing regionallandscapes of the world on the globe in relation to the equator and the poles onecould then predict their climate and, in an early example of environmentalism,their social character (Olwig, 2002, 2004). This correlation might seem eminentlyreasonable but it had disastrous consequences for early settlers from Europe’s oldEngland to America’s New England because they were not prepared for the harsh,cold, New England winter since they expected that a climate at that latitude wouldbe literally parallel to Spain’s. A similar kind of problem bedevils some present-dayscientists. Bjarne Andresen, for example, a physicist at the Danish Niels BohrInstitute who specializes in thermodynamics argues that:

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It is not possible to scientifically construct something that one can reasonablycall a global average temperature. Neither thermodynamically nor statistically isthis possible. (My translation, Andresen, as quoted in Rasmussen, 2008, p. 10;see also Essex et al., 2007)

This statement does not mean that there is no climate change. What it does mean isthat the complex diversity of the landscapes and temperatures of the Earth cannot befully represented by the uniform space of the globe. Whereas a globe has thesmooth spherical surface and the uniform isotropic space of a Euclidean geometricfigure, the Earth is irregularly shaped and its physical landscapes are both highlyvariegated and covered by seas of water and atmosphere moving in chaoticallycomplex and changing ways. This is why people can occasionally experienceunseasonably cold temperatures at a time when scientists believe that globalwarming is occuring.

The Global Medium is the Message

The iconic NASA photograph of the Earth seen from an Apollo spaceship may be‘‘the most commonly published photograph in all of history’’ (Gore, 2006, p. 15).It has played a key symbolic role in arousing global environmental consciousness,for example, in the iconography of the highly influential illustrated lecture, movieand book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming andWhat We Can Do About It by the American politician, environmentalist,businessman, Nobel Prize and Oscar Academy Award winner Al Gore (Gore,2006). As a picture taken from one spaceship of another ‘spaceship’ – the Earth –the NASA photograph has the felicitous effect of making people aware that we are‘all in one boat’, but it also has the sly effect of making the irregular figure of theEarth appear to be coequal with the geometric figure of a globe. In this photograph,taken from an immense distance, the Earth appears to be a perfectly sphericalglobe. What makes photography so duplicitous, as Susan Sontag famously pointedout (Sontag, 1973), is that it seems to be a direct expression of reality, not arepresentational form. Magritte’s well known painting of a pipe, with the sub-text,‘‘This is not a pipe’’, is effective because Magritte’s surrealistic, hyper-real,obviously painterly style gives away the point. No, this is not a pipe, it is a paintedrepresentation of a pipe (Foucault, 1983 [1973]); Olwig, 2004). The same is not trueof the NASA image of the Earth, which appears to be a direct, scientific expressionof the Earth as a globe, a perception reinforced by the idea that it wasphotographed from a spaceship window by an astronaut on a scientific expedition.It could also, however, have the sub-text, ‘This is not the globe (but a photographicrepresentation in which the Earth resembles a globe).’ As Denis Cosgrove hasshown, the power of this image lies in great measure in the fact that it is therealization of millennia of human imaginings of the Earth as a globe. The imageexisted in human representations of its imagined form well before it actually wasphotographed from space. What people see in this kind of image is thereforepreconditioned by generations of fantasizing about what it would be like to occupya position in space like that of the sun, ‘Apollo’s eye’ (Cosgrove, 2001). The mediumof the globe thus also bears within it a powerful centuries-old message of the god’s

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eye perspective to be gained from the top-down view embodied in the globe(McLuhan, 1964). The medium of representation for these millennia, however,was not photography but, as befitting an ancient Greek god, the geometries ofcartography.

Scale, Cartography and the Global Imaginary

A globe has the perfect form of a sphere, which is a geometrical abstraction. As anideal the sphere, like the point and line, does not exist as a concrete material object,but only as an abstract idea of a geometrical figure. In principle, therefore, there isonly one sphere, which is the archetypical geometrical idea, and this is one reasonwhy the sphere has long been regarded as the most perfect geometric form, and oftenbeen identified with a singular God or, as in the case of the sun, with a singularspherical eye, ‘Apollo’s eye’ (Cosgrove, 2001). The singularity and unity of thesphere means that its geometric isotropic space can be scaled upwards or downwardswithout any distortion. Ptolemy’s cartographic techniques were derived from a workthat was originally named his Geography, but which in the Renaissance was re-titled‘Cosmographia’ because it was, in effect, concerned with the mapping of the earthlyglobe within the space of a larger spherical cosmos (Ptolemy, 1991). This space wasthe three-dimensional space of a spherical globe that itself was nested within a scalarhierarchy of spheres, graduated like the rungs of a ladder (the word for ladder inLatin is scala, the root of scale). Today, these spheres have been replaced ingeography books with, for example, the geosphere and its surrounding atmosphere(including the stratosphere, the ionosphere and the outer space beyond), but theprinciple of scaling global phenomena according to discrete nested spheres stretchingfrom the local to the global and the cosmic remains.

Ptolemy’s scalar cosmography arguably persists today as an unexamined, taken-for-granted dimension of the concept of scale, with its implication that the wisdom ofthe global scale, at which one should ‘think’, is superior to that of the local scale,at which one should ‘act’. J. K. Gibson-Graham examines this dimension of scale, inthe article ‘Beyond Global Versus Local’, writing:

As geographers we are taught that at the global (technically, the ‘small’) scalegeographic details are sacrificed for broad patterns of differentiation andhomogeneity. And at the local (or ‘large’) scale broad patterns may not bevisible but fine details can be registered. Thus, a higher ‘level of abstraction’ isattached to the more extensive scalar view and concreteness is associated withthe more limited scalar perspective. Already, differential valuations are entailed.Deep in our epistemic bones we prefer abstraction to concreteness and are readyto give more power to general and extensive processes than to specific andintensive ones. (Gibson-Graham, 2002, p. 31)

The cartography historian David Woodward similarly argues regarding thegeometric figure of the square in the Mercator projection of the globe:

There is a good reason why the rectangular Mercator projection of the world isstill used on the wall of the strategic planning room, despite its immense

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distortion of the area of the higher latitudes . . . The rectangular grid issomehow a Western metaphor; the more abstract the geometry, the morepowerful the image. The coordinates become targets of opportunity ordestruction, divorced from the reality beneath. (Woodward, 1989, p. 14)

Woodward also offers an explanation for the influence exerted by the globe and mapwith their gridded graticules:

The semantic distinction between the map and the territory has often beenexpounded. The map is not the territory; the graticule is not the world. Whenparallels and meridians become ‘merely conventional signs’, we need tounderstand not only their abstract nature but also their rhetorical power.Curiously, the representations are thus not mere shadows of reality, poorsubstitutes for or trivializations of the physical world they represent, but areagents of human thought and action, worthy of study on their own terms.(Woodward, 1989, p. 15)

The etymologically primary meaning of the word ‘local’, as in ‘think locally, actglobally’, is: ‘‘characterized by or relating to position in space’’ (Merriam-Webster,1994, local). ‘Local’ and ‘locality’ therefore have a different origin and connotationsfrom that of ‘place’ (Merriam-Webster, 1994, place). The geographer Yi-Fu Tuanpoints out that locality and place have quite different meanings:

As location place is one unit among other units to which it is linked by acirculation net; the analysis of location is subsumed under the geographer’sconcept and analysis of space. Place, however, has more substance than theword location suggests: it is a unique entity, a ‘special ensemble’; it has a historyand meaning. Place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people. Placeis not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also areality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people whohave given it meaning. (Tuan, 1974, p. 213)

The word ‘local’, in other words, suggests location in isotropic space, and a certainbinary between the larger spatial context and the local situation within that space.When thinking globally the local thus is, strictly speaking, defined according to theco-ordinates where the lines of latitude and longitude meet at a specific point. Theabstract mathematical precision of such locational coordinates lends the global-localequation a certain authority, suggesting that global issues can be linked to preciseplaces. Woodward has noted how this transformation of places into locations inspace ‘moved towards the more abstract notion that space can everywhere beaccorded the same importance. It allowed the idea that a framework of expansionand control could be superimposed on the finite world as a means to systematicdomination’ (Woodward, 1989, p. 12). He continues: ‘The global graticule providesa framework of domination. It enables an imperial court to manage its empire, achurch to display the extent of its missionaries, or a space agency to track itssatellites. The map pins are in themselves almost a metaphor for control’(Woodward, 1989, p. 14).

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The Global Imaginary

When Gibson-Graham writes, ‘Deep in our epistemic bones we prefer abstraction toconcreteness’, and when Woodward notes the power of abstraction in humanthought, both refer to ideas that lie at the heart of one of history’s most influentialphilosophical systems, that of Platonism – that is, the idea that the materialphenomena of the terrestrial landscape are an imperfect reflection of perfectgeometrical archetypes (Latour, 2004). It should be remembered, however, thatPlatonism is closely tied in origin to the sort of geometric representation that weknow from Ptolemaic cartography (Olwig, 2002). To the ancient eye, unaided bytelescopes and other instruments, the heavenly orbs, like the sun and moon,appeared to be perfectly spherically smooth and regular, much as their orbitsappeared to be perfectly circular, whereas the Earth seemed deformed bycomparison. Ptolemy, who is thought to have been influenced by Platonism, thuscreated a mapping system in which a perfect geometric framework, that of the globewith its lines of latitude and longitude, is overlaid upon the more imperfect form ofthe Earth. The geometrical figure of the globe, in this way of thinking, is the idealarchetype of the Earth. It also, in emphasizing the imperfect character of bodily,earthly life, in contrast to the perfection of the heavenly spheres, generated a mind/body dualism, also found in the Platonic influence upon the Christian counterpositioning of the heavenly to the earthly. This dualism is thereby potentially presentin the idea that one should think globally but act, with the body, locally. A typicalglobe embodies this dualism in-so-far as the image of the landscapes of the Earth as atangible topological surface are overlain with the spherical Euclidian geometricgraticule of the lines of latitude and longitude, with which we think when we wish tolocate a place on the globe.

A consequence of the mind/body dualism is that the mind is seen to be active,universalizing and abstract whereas the local is concrete, particular and passive,doing what it is told to do by the mind, as J. K. Gibson-Graham writes:

We are all familiar with the denigration of the local as small and relativelypowerless, defined and confined by the global: the global is a force, the local isits field of play; the global is penetrating, the local penetrated and transformed.Globalism is synonymous with abstract space, the frictionless movement ofmoney and commodities, the expansiveness and inventiveness of capitalism andthe market. But its Other, localism, is coded as place, community, defensiveness,bounded identity, in situ labor, noncapitalism, the traditional. (Gibson-Graham, 2002, p. 27)

Gibson-Graham goes on to point out, in relation to landscape, that:

Of course, in such a representation localities are not passive, or not entirelyso. They interact in the process of transformation, creating a heterogeneouslandscape of globalization – but somehow global dominance is untrans-formed in the interaction. Thus it is the global that appears as a telos on themove in the ongoing process called ‘globalization’. (Gibson-Graham, 2002,p. 27)

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Gibson-Graham’s argument brings to the fore the issue of economic globalization’seffect upon landscape, in much the same terms as landscape degradation is discussedin the ELC. The globalized economy is seen in the ELC as playing a negative role indestroying ‘‘an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere’’ because‘‘changes in the world economy are in many cases accelerating the transformation oflandscapes’’ (Council of Europe, 2000, preamble). The point of the Convention is toprovide a tool to defend local landscapes against the sort of developments thatGibson-Graham identifies, but to do so it is necessary to counter what Gibson-Graham calls the ‘telos’ of globalization, which has the effect of casting theparticularity of European landscape into a role in which ‘‘the global is a force, thelocal is its field of play; the global is penetrating, the local penetrated andtransformed’’ (Gibson-Graham, 2002, p. 27).

The Perspective of Scale

Globalism, as noted, tends to reduce complex landscape phenomena to singularabstractions. This reduction is related to the qualities of scale that may appear to bea natural ‘given’, but which are arguably socially constructed (Marston, 2000). Theearthly globe, as noted, was set in Ptolemy’s cosmography within a cosmos that wasitself perceived to be a scalar series of nested delimited spheres, ranging from themacro-cosmos of the universe to the micro-cosmos of the Earth. It was this globethat played a role in the development of perspectival representation.

Perspectival representation of the landscapes of the Earth emerges when the top-down vertical projection of a standard map is tilted so that a horizontal view of ascene of the Earth emerges. When the angle of cartographic projection is changed,and one looks out into the space of a linear perspectival drawing, an illusion of depthis created which smoothes over the discontinuities between the scales of the differingspheres, and draws the singular eye out into a singular point in infinity (the lines ofperspective focus on one eye). Perspective thus creates the illusion of a both unifyingand infinite singular space that seamlessly bonds the scaled spheres of the universeand the layers of the landscape into a universal totality. It must be remembered,however, that perspective is fundamentally a form of illusion. We cannot perceiveinfinity and we do not use only one fixed eye or see the world from a single point, butrather experience it largely through bodily movement and the use of all the sensesand both eyes (Ingold, 2000). Furthermore it must also be remembered that agraduated scale implies a single common denominator (e.g. the absolute Newtonianspace of the map, or pitch in music), and the multivariate, heterogenic phenomenaof the Earth cannot be meaningfully understood in terms of such a commondenominator. Even when differing phenomena are mapped at differing spatial scales,the form of space used to frame the map remains the same. As Haila points out:

The perception that all sorts of environmental problems are connected in aunified environmental (or ecological) crisis is built upon a metaphysical beliefthat the human environment is a unified whole . . . In modern environmental-ism, the human/environment system is viewed, as it were, from a distance, andthe system is analysed as a unified whole. A global view of environmentalproblems is a view of the globe from a spaceship . . . . A critical divide is whether

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interactions are assumed as linear or non-linear. Linear (Newtonian) systemsare scale-invariant; one can move from any level to any other without change inthe structure of the interactions which make up the system. In non-linearsystems, this is not true. Processes have their characteristic, restricted spatialand temporal domains . . . . Cause effect chains across dynamically separateddomains cannot be deduced by the Newtonian linear model . . . (Haila, 1998,pp. 70–71)

The globe, however, is not just a basis for the map, and linear relationships of scale;it is also perceived to move in a perfect, circular path. This is also foundational toanother dimension of globalism, that of the cycle.

The Globalist Cycle

Though the globe is a static spatial form it has a temporal equivalent in the notion ofthe cycle. The word ‘cycle’ comes from late Latin cyclus and Greek kuklos, meaning‘circle’. In Ptolemaic cosmography the heavenly bodies of the cosmic spheres movedin circular orbits appropriate to Plato’s notion of heavenly perfection.

Even though the term ‘cycle’ today does not, strictly speaking, require circularmovement in space, but rather just ‘‘a series of events that are regularly repeated inthe same order’’ (NOAD, 2005, cycle), the connotations of circularity still adhere tothe idea of the cycle. The imaginative power of this circular motion is reinforcedby the circular shape of the global orb and the (apparently) circular orbits of theheavenly bodies. The hydrologic cycle is an ancient idea that gained authority duringthe Enlightenment with the rise of modern science at a time when it was also widelyseen to reflect the teleological wisdom and purpose of God and Nature due to itscircular motion linking the heavens with the Earth (Tuan, 1968). Scientists today nolonger think of the hydrologic cycle as having such a simple structure (Linton, 2008),but the popular imagination is still informed by ideas in which cycle and circle arelinked and give meaning and purpose to nature – as illustrated by the diagrams ofgiant circles of arrows linking heaven and Earth found in Gore’s Inconvenient Truth(Gore, 2006). In globalist discourse, however, it is not water’s cleansing andrefreshing cycle that is in focus, but the cycle of ‘carbon’ which is much less wellunderstood, thereby opening the way for even more powerful imaginings of thecarbon cycle’s cyclical/circular nature. When the carbon cycles are coupled withcataclysmic scenes of destruction, images can be called forth, if only subliminally, ofBiblical Armageddon visions of flood and fire and other cyclical doomsday visions ofhistory.

Cyclical cosmography is related to a cyclical cosmology, which is concerned withthe origin and development of the universe, and hence with both scientific andreligious thought. The movement of the cosmic spheres was thereby linked to acircular teleological conception of history in which the world cycles between ages,each beginning and ending with revolutionary cataclysms. Similar ideas are found inapocalyptic cosmology, as exemplified by the Biblical diluvian flood and the fire nexttime, and in classical Greek thought (Lovejoy & Boas, 1935; Plato, 1961). This kindof apocalyptic thinking can also be found in the present-day concern with climatechange which, as the anthropologist of science Joseph Masco has argued, has its

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origins in the fire next time imaginaries generated by atomic testing and the threat ofatomic war. As he puts it:

The first years of the Cold War were, in short, a period in which the globalbiosphere was quite literally militarized by the US nuclear state, but it was alsopositioned as a comprehensive object of scientific research in the earth,atmospheric, and biological sciences . . . . A nascent understanding of theimpacts of technology on the biosphere was established, formulating theresearch questions that would ultimately inform a theory of climate change.(Masco, 2010, p. 15)

Masco emphasizes, furthermore, that we are dealing with a globalism that has itsroots in the literal figure of the map, the globe and its representation with the Apollophotographs of the Earth (Masco, 2010).

The link between the apocalyptic imaginary and climate change gained its fullpower with the image of the ‘nuclear winter’ projected by some of America’s leadingscientists, and which was compared to the imagined destruction of the age of thedinosaurs due to the literally global impact of an asteroid (Masco, 2010). The linkbetween nuclear attack and environmental disaster, as Masco points out, persists forexample in the discourses surrounding the efficacy of the US’s Homeland Securityagency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and in innumerable Hollywood disastermovies. The movie version of Gore’s illustrated lecture and book An InconvenientTruth (Gore, 2006), likewise is full of apocalyptic film footage; the movie’s trailorproclaiming that ‘‘This is by far the most terrifying film you will ever see’’ (http://www.climatecrisis.net/trailer/). The difficulty with the use of such imagery is thatthough it may prove effective in the short run in generating public concern, in thelong run its playing upon global imaginaries of a mythic and gargantuan sort leadsto a politics which demands equally gargantuan, and problematic, global solutions,such as huge atomic power plants, mega-sized wind turbines and climate engineering,such as that promoted by the skeptical environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg (Fleming,2010; Lomborg, 2010).

The nuclear winter generated by nuclear war was the expected outcome of hugefires, and the resultant black carboniferous smoke, blocking out the sun. In present-day thinking this black smoke has been replaced by a ghostly invisible form ofcarbon, CO2, that has the reverse catastrophic effect of heating up the globe. Globalwarming thus becomes a question of the production of energy and power in anabstract global space. Globalist thinking thus emphasizes the production of energyand power leaving a carbon footprint in locations that can be pinpointed within acirculation net located within isotropic geometrical space that is scaled between theglobal and the local. Furthermore, with this emphasis and spatial structuring,globalist discourse is also inevitably a discourse that elides the distinction betweenthe power of energy in the sense of physics, and the globalized socio-political-economic power that accrues to those who control the production of power(Commoner, 1976). Globalist discourse has thus become a discourse of power,involving global conferences making global decisions backed by globalized politicaland economic power, which, as will be argued, can be against the interests oflandscape understood to be the diverse place of a polity and its environs.

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The relationship between globalism, globalized power and landscape will beshown in the following section with the aid of two illustrative cameo cases. The firstis taken largely from the conclusions to a previous special issue of LandscapeResearch on ‘Landscapes of Energies’ (Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010a); the second isbased largely on an analysis of sources in magazines and newspapers reflecting thepopular debate concerning renewable energy in Denmark, a pioneer society in thisarea. These cases illustrate how the globalist imaginary, and the power it helpsgenerate, might conflict with the idea of landscape as framed in the ELC.

Globalism and Power

The focus on the loci of power production, according to the socio-economist AlainNadaı and the geographer Dan van der Horst, leads to a:

recurrent tendency to centralise and industrialise energies, by and for thevirtues of economies of scale or free market, so as to make them ‘Energy,’ ahomogenous commodity that is more easily traded and transferred. The currentrise of industrial wind power is illustrative of this. It is nowadays backed up by aglobal industry producing turbines which have grown in size and capacity so asto match the prevailing pattern of large scale plants producing hundreds orthousands of megawatts of electricity. (Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010b, p. 148)

This is a situation, however, which comes into conflict with landscape since ‘‘theincentives such as ‘fixed tariffs’ or ‘green certificates,’ which are set in place forfostering the development of new energies, generally do not account for landscapes’’(Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010b, p. 149). This is because:

Most of the assumptions and the (mathematical) economic models underlyingthe design of energy policies rely on the implicit assumption of an isotropicspace, except for energy gradients (e.g. solar power, wind speed, tidalcurrents . . . ). Landscape, by the virtue of its heterogeneity, is resisting theuniversality of these views. It introduces heterogeneity and uncertainty in thedeployment of renewable energies. (Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010b, p. 149)

The basis for landscape’s ‘heterogeneity’ lies in the fact that its energy is not justsomething that is produced at certain localizable points of power. Landscape, as asocial and material phenomenon, is energy and power (Mitchell, 2007). It is energybecause the shaping of the material landscape requires the use of forms of energyranging from the energy of thought and movement embodied in humans and animalsto the energy embodied in the soil, in slopes, in drainage, in hedge and tree growth,etc. Once energy has become embodied in the landscape of a place through theactivities of people and polities, for example, as a terraced field or a shelterbelt, itbecomes a source of productive and consumptive energy for perhaps centuries. It is,as Nadaı and van der Horst write, something that ‘‘can be invested or embodied inlandscapes when they have been consumed in order to shape, to build or to maintainlandscapes’’ (Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010b, p. 148). ‘‘In such cases,’’ they argue,‘‘energies have become part of the landscape’’ (Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010b,

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p. 146). As they put it, energies underlie ‘‘the mechanical work and the trophicprocesses which endow landscapes with their current materiality. They are part oflandscapes as a quality but they require measures, codes, norms and conventions tobecome perceptible’’ (Nadaı & van der Horst, 2010b, p. 146). The character of theuse, non-use, conservation or storage of energy, as exemplified by the design,construction, insulation and placement of buildings in the landscape, is thus ascritical to the health of the environment as the production of energy. As AmoryLovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, points out, the resulting ‘energy efficiency’from such measures ‘‘is generally the largest, least expensive, most benign, mostquickly deployable’’ means of reducing energy related environmental threats, but it isalso the ‘‘least visible, least understood, and most neglected way to provide energyservices’’ (Lovins, 2004, p. 384).

Samsø

The problem of landscape and power can be illustrated by the example of Samsø inDenmark, a pioneer in the development of wind power (Nielsen, 2002). Samsø is a144 sq. km. bridgeless island in the Kattegat Sea, with a population of c. 4000.Though Samsø was encouraged by the Ministry of Environment and Energy startingin 1977 to become Denmark’s ‘renewable energy island’, nothing happened until alocal resident, Søren Hermansen, took on the leadership for the effort. Hermansenunderstood that the islanders were not individualists, but a community that rarelytook an initiative without looking toward their neighbors. The reason for living onthe island, he figured, was ‘social relations’, and he decided that ‘‘this renewable-energy project could be a new kind of social relation’’ (quoted in Kolbert, 2008,p. 71). This insight worked because it meant that he had to accept that theimplementation of alternative sources of energy would take time. Once key peoplebegan to become engaged, however, the whole island would rapidly becomeinvolved. The result was that by 2001 fossil-fuel use on Samsø was reduced by half,and by 2005 the Samsinger were producing more energy from renewable sourcesthan they were using, and exporting the surplus to the mainland (Kolbert, 2008).

The main source of energy is the wind turbines built on land and sea either byindividuals or by cooperatives, but this is supplemented by a multitude of othersources, such as heat pumps, insulation, voltaic panels, energy transmitting windows,energy conserving architecture, etc. Samsø is now the place where internationaljournalists and researchers go to see the Denmark that turned a grassrootsproduction and use of windmills into a major wind turbine industry, but Samsø isnot prioritized by the present Danish government. In 2001, a conservativegovernment, oriented toward economic and environmental globalism, took powerand the thrust of energy policy shifted from encouraging individuals andcooperatives to build wind turbines to promoting the power industry by demandingthat the municipalities allow planning permission for the construction of 1000 hugeland-based turbines 100 to 150 meters in height plus 37 trial turbines up to 200meters in height. They are intended to replace 5000 of the present windmills whichaverage 49 meters (Andersen, 2007). Some 180 gigantic turbines were hoped toreplace 1000 small windmills by the end of 2009, but there is mounting opposition inthe areas affected and a number of municipalities have either dropped building plans,

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or have reduced the height to a maximum of 80 meters (Andersen & Beiter, 2007;From & Pihl-Andersen, 2011). The result has been that wind-turbines have becomecontroversial leading to what is seen to be a ‘‘not in my back yard’’ mentality(Andersen & Beiter, 2007; Dahlager et al., 2008) having the effect that whereas 748mills were built as recently as 2000, as few as six per year have been built recently,despite the government’s threat to force municipalities to accept the construction oflarge scale turbines in their area (Andersen, 2007; Dahlager et al., 2008). The onlyarea where construction has increased is at sea, where they are costly to build.

Conclusion

The point of this paper has been to question the effects upon the landscape of placeand polity of a particular way of structuring the understanding of the world that hasbeen termed ‘globalism’. Globalism implies an assumption that the Earth is a globeand that there is a scalar spatial relation between the global and the local. This isproblematic, however, because the complex physical and social interactions that takeplace on the Earth cannot be reduced to the common denominator of scalar isotropicspace. The problem, however, is not just one of static geometry, but also one of thetemporal understanding of the cycle as a circular process. The hydrological and thecarbon cycles take on enormous ideological power when conceptualized as circularprocesses linking the spheres of the heavens and the Earth. The most powerful formof the cycle as circle, however, is that embodied in the eschatological idea that theuniverse itself is doomed to a cyclical pattern of birth and apocalyptic death. Themost problematic dimension of globalism may well be its implicit threat that if wedo not think globally and act locally the globe is doomed. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if it is allowed to determine environmental and social policiesthat oversimplify the shaping of the complex social and biotic realms that constitutethe Earth’s landscapes. The Earth is not a globe.

Note

1. There are other scalar global environmental agendas, such as that of biodiversity (see Haila, 1998), but

there is not enough space to deal with them here.

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