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Short abstract

Contrasting two research projects on peatland restoration and agricultural intensification, this talk discusses the differing ways the grounds of former agricultural resource frontiers are encountered in present and future Norway.

Long abstract

This talk will focus on the ways the creation, intensification and restoration of agricultural fields and forestry plots has been a resource frontier for the Norwegian state. Throughout the twentieth century, “uncultivated” ground throughout rural Norway became a frontier for the expansion of agriculture and forestry. Under the guise of freeing up resources for extraction and creating social welfare, vast areas of grasslands, scrublands, wetlands, and swamp forests were drained, plowed, planted and fertilized. While the creation of new farm and forestry land continued well into the 1980s, some drained and replanted landscapes were already being abandoned in the 1950s. By the end of the twentieth century, these landscapes had transformed in two ways: vast swathes of land were abandoned, while elsewhere the remaining farms expanded and land was farmed more intensively.

In the remains of this past frontier, people across Norway approach its aftermath with widely diverging strategies. By combining each of our research on peatland restoration and agricultural intensification respectively, we will show how the 20th century resource frontier of agricultural expansion has been turned on its head by new land use regimes. Through these cases we show that value follows a binary management of either full intensification of fields or the full restoration of these landscapes.

By bringing these cases together, we explore how farmers and government bureaucrats encounter the landscapes of past rural frontiers in diverging ways, but also how these different approaches converge in the creation of new frontiers of knowledge and futuremaking projects.