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The Environmental Transformation of “Empty Space”: From Desert to Forest in the Landes of Southwestern France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2023
Abstract
This article explores the environmental transformation of the moorland (landes) of southwestern France from a much maligned “wilderness” or “empty space” to a forested landscape coveted for its productive potential as well as its aesthetic beauty. This occurred in two stages from the eighteenth century to the present and was effected by the French state and local landowners. It bears resemblance to processes of environmental change in North America, Central Asia, and Africa, where states and colonial or imperial powers took measures to develop alleged empty spaces through seizure, development, and settlement. Drawing on paradigms of colonial rule and Henri Lefebvre’s theory regarding the production of space, the article examines the eradication of the “wilderness” of the region of the Landes, which led to the displacement of its pastoral populations and the end of their way of life. It explores the role of technology in consolidating the power of territorial states and empires and the significance of the parallels that can be drawn between the Landes and France’s overseas empire. Finally, it attests to the porosity of the boundary between man-made and natural landscapes, while illuminating the process by which the artificial forested landscape of the Landes ironically came to be redefined and revalorized as “natural” national heritage that was ripe for environmental protection by the second half of the twentieth century.
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References
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48 Quoted in Brown, Pine Plantations, 3.
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58 Lescarret, Le dernier berger: études des moeurs (Bordeaux: A.-R. Chaynes, 1858).
59 Ibid., 151.
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61 Edmond About’s novel was published in the same year: Maître Pierre (Paris: Hachette, 1858).
62 Julien Aldhuy, “La transformation des Landes de Gascogne,” 2–19.
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79 Quoted in Ford, Natural Interests, 149.
80 Quoted in ibid., 150.
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82 Tessier, Enquête sur les incendies dans les landes.
83 Testimony of M. Callen, conseiller général of Saint-Symphorien in the Gironde, in Faré, Enquête sur les incendies, 12.
84 Testimony of M. Cazavielh, conseiller général of Belin in the Gironde, in Faré, Enquête sur les incendies, 18.
85 Ibid., 59.
86 Ibid., 402.
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91 Quoted in Pooley, Body and Tradition, 32–33. Pooley argues, though, that the importance that even Arnaudin attached to the Landais landscape came to him quite late.
92 Ibid., 33.
93 Ibid.
94 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), 3. Also see Lowenthal, David, “Nostalgia Tells It like It Wasn’t,” in Shaw, Christopher and Chase, Malcolm, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 27 Google Scholar.
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96 Ibid., 12.
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104 At https://museedupatrimoine.fr/theme-1/musees-de-france/4-musees-populaires-et-ecomusees.php (last accessed 9 July 2022).
105 Scott, Seeing Like a State.
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