Whose landscape? A political ecology of the ‘exurban’ Sierra

In rural places that sit at the uneasy crossroads between ‘traditional’ natural resource-based production and ‘new’ economies and cultures of aesthetic landscape ‘consumption’, ideas of landscape become increasingly important and contested. This paper examines one such conflict in Nevada County, California - a former mining and ranching community in the Sierra Nevada that has experienced rapid ‘exurban’ in-migration and gentrification. In-migrants brought with them particular ‘aesthetic’ or ‘consumption’ views of landscape that long-time residents with continuing ties to the ‘old’ production landscape viewed as political threats. These tensions have recently ignited a political firestorm over a proposal by the environmentalist-dominated county government to incorporate landscape-scale aesthetic and environmental principles into county planning. The ferocity of this contest reflects the multiple issues at stake, including competition between different forms of rural capitalism, class conflict and social control, and cultural frictions. At each level of this multi-tiered conflict, ideas of landscape are key. Together, political ecology and new cultural geographical studies of landscape provide powerful insights into the ways that the politics of landscape - revolving around the question of who ‘owns’ the landscape or decides how it ‘should’ look - become a pivotal node in the shifting human-environment dialectic.