Industrially Harvested Peatlands and After-use Potential: Understanding Local Stakeholder Narratives and Landscape Preferences

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed much debate on the turn towards community within landscape management and planning. This is particularly evident in the European Landscape Convention which asserts the legitimacy of local preferences and citizen involvement in policy processes. This paper explores a bottom-up perspective on people-place relationships in a changing landscape, through assessing the after-use potential of industrially mined peatlands in Ireland and the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes. The mining of the peatland resource has a longstanding tradition in Ireland, however, significant attention has now focused on exploring market and non-market uses of remains after harvesting has finished resulting in a cutaway landscape. We argue that local people's everyday experiences of the landscape is a legitimate form of knowledge and should provide a key input into deliberative planning and management processes. Drawing largely on an interpretive research approach, we assess key local narratives in relation to harvested peatland landscapes and explore local people's after-use preferences. There appears to be strong support among the local community for amenity/biodiversity after-uses, which are currently not reflected in public policy debates. We review people-place relationships and discuss the role of ethnographic research in a peatland context as well as defining the relevant stakeholders. Finally, conclusions are developed to identify wider lessons for people/place relationships within the context of landscape management and planning.

Novel ecosystems and social-ecological resilience

“…Aronson et al 2010 As humans abandon an area, and cease to impart any energy into it, from a landscape level down to individual species and communities, ecological processes will take over in their absence. However, humans do not necessarily just abandon damaged areas completely, so a new relationship emerges (Collier and Scott 2008 and what opportunities may be missed. Therefore, novel ecosystems may present society with opportunities to measure social-ecological resilience, and their paired transitioning could be illuminating on theoretical as well as practical levels.…”

Conflicting rationalities, knowledge and values in scarred landscapes

“…In addition, seventeen actors emerged and were also interviewed (n=42) over the research period, having been identified from national and international conference presentations, media appearances, recent appointments or referrals from a key stakeholder. Other local or residential stakeholders (or space-holders, if following the Schmitter (2000) participant definitions in table 2) were interviewed via random, targeted ethnographic sampling and these are reported elsewhere (Collier and Scott, 2008). The interviews reported here yielded a large body of technical information that will be necessary for the potential creation and management of new landscapes after cessation of harvesting.…”

Novel ecosystems and the emergence of cultural ecosystem services

“…Other supposed cultural ecosystem services, such as 'inspiration', 'sense of place' and 'cultural heritage', are likely to have a high value within intact peatland (and indeed all) landscapes, but these have yet to be quantified. An exception of 'social relations', where it is shown that modern communities living within industrial peatlands have associated high social values to these post-mining, recovering landscapes (Collier and Scott, 2008).…”