Paper short abstract:

We mean to explore the possibilities of landscape as an instrumental element used by individuals in the course of social conflicts, mainly when access to environmental resources underlie the quarrel. The case of a conflict between peasants and a mining corporation in Portugal is to be analysed.

Paper long abstract:

Our conceptual point of departure revolves around the idea of landscape as a social-historical process embedded in an engagement between humans and their surroundings. When conflicts over ecological resources occur, landscape idealization might convey a social memory of such past engagements man/environment, more than mere objectifications of perceived horizons. Further, landscape idealization may convene a glance of the transformations brought upon the environment and the way locals perceived and dealt with it. What if social movements, at a particular time, make use of landscape as a socially and historically rooted category, incorporating it amidst the trends of social conflicts? The paper addresses this question, analysing a conflict that opposed a group of smallholder peasants to a mining company in Portugal in the 1970's. Against the will of the company to dredge the small vegetable gardens and orchards, the opposing landowners recalled the damages infringed upon their agrarian resources and original rural landscape by the mining companies that dredged the valley from 1912 to 1949. Pleading to avoid the destruction of their properties, the defiant landowners used an idealized rural landscape that overstated the advantages of organic pre-industrial agriculture opposed to the mayhem generated by mining. The analysis of the conflict at hands might contribute to improve knowledge on how local collective resistance action takes shape and how environmental issues interfere with the process, besides the fundamental political, ideological and economic factors laid out as the basis for social movements.