posterpresentation June 2013

Reading the Landscape - Project Mission

“Reading the Landscape: 
A Hermeneutic Approach to Environmental Ethics.”

 

The overall purpose of this project is to develop a new approach to environmental ethics that is better able to deal with moral conflicts arising from ongoing, large-scale landscape changes in Europe, notably as result of rewilding. The project seeks to develop a novel approach to environmental ethics, that recognizes the role of narratives in human relations with environments and acknowledges the close relation between landscape interpretations and notions of (moral) identity.  
   Understanding the meaning of a landscape is a never ending process, not just because we constantly gain new knowledge of a landscape, but also, and more importantly, because the meaning that a landscape conveys is part of an ongoing conversation about who ‘we’ are and what the world is to ‘us’. Philosophical hermeneutics has shown that the texts that we read, and that help define our culture, are important for understanding ourselves and forming our moral identity. Starting from the idea that landscapes are like 'texts' in need of interpretation, this research project will develop a theory of landscape ethics that connects interpretations of landscape, issues of identity and environmental ethics. A hermeneutical environmental ethics acknowledges that landscapes can be ‘read’ in multiple ways; and that the moral narratives about the meaning of the environment which are based upon these readings often help to deal with the pull of competing and often incommensurable environmental values. Can such a perspective help to understand and reflect upon existing landscape conflcits?
    In the core project, Martin Drenthen will develop a theoretical framework capable of understanding the relation between landscape interpretation, place-based narrative identity and moral identity. The project will start with expanding the traditional focus of philosophical hermeneutics on written texts to include environments, discussing possibilities and limitations of the metaphor of landscape as a text in need of interpretation, and connecting the hermeneutic approach to existing perspectives in environmental humanities. Finally, the project aims to develop a narrative landscape ethics, exploring the possibilities for an ethics of the legible landscape which is relevant for environmental practices (notably ecological restoration practices).
    Three sub-projects will test the usefulness of the hermeneutic perspective in environmental ethics for the evaluation ecological restoration projects:

• PhD 1: The Ethics of Ecological Restoration in a Cultural Landscape (Andrea Gammon)

This PhD sub-project will examine, explicate and articulate normative motives at play in conflicts about ‘rewilding’ projects, where natural processes and entities are deliberately introduced in cultural landscapes. It will examine existing attempts to recognize the importance of sense of place in nature conservation and incorporate elements of heritage landscapes in the design of ecological restoration projects. The project will compare different strategies to combine new nature projects with the care for cultural landscape heritage. (Starting date: June 1st, 2013)

• PhD 2: The Ethics of Coping with Ecological Discomfort  (Mateusz Tokarski)

The PhD sub-project will examine, explicate and articulate normative motives at play in conflicts regarding the recurrence of predators such as wolf and other ‘inconvenient’ species, which challenge our perceived notions of identity and our sense of place. It will specifically address controversial cases where the new predatory species are perceived by some as threat or nuisance, and welcomed by others who consider them as to ‘belong’ in a certain place. The project will examine the role of narratives in various attempts to take away fears and change the prevailing negative cultural image of predators. (Starting date: April 1st, 2013)

• Postdoc: Towards a Narrative Legitimization of Nature Conservation (Glenn Deliège)

This sub-project will examine narrative legitimizations of nature conservation and ecological restoration. It will explicate, articulate and examine the implicit moral narratives about the human-nature relationship which motivate actual restoration projects today and critically reflect on existing legitimization strategies by conservationists and restorationists. Moreover, it will urge restorationists to reflect on the meaning of 'sense of place' and identity in conservation issues and challenge them to include the human dimension in their nature narratives. (Starting date: June 15th, 2013)
 
All projects will explicate and articulate existing underlying moral experiences that can explain the relation between landscape interpretations and notions of self between conflicting parties, with the aim of broadening the perspective and deepening the moral debate about the landscape.

The project will run from 2013 to 2017. Klick HERE for a full project description.

NEWS (July 2012)

Martin Drenthen (Radboud University, Nijmegen) has been awarded a VIDI Innovation Research Incentive Grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for his 5-year project “Reading the Landscape: A Hermeneutic Approach to Environmental Ethics.”

This project will be carried out at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands).