Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with a degraded mining area and its forthcoming environmental rehabilitation, describing the local landscape as an arena for negotiating a social reality that owes its existence and current redefinition to both ‘local’ and ‘global’ dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

The paper deals with the environmental rehabilitation of the São Domingos post-mining landscape, located in Mértola (Southern Portugal) at the heart of the Iberian pyrite belt. After several decades of abandonment, following the end of extractive activities in the late 60's and in face of the degradation of the natural environment, the Portuguese State granted to a state-owned company the concession to design and promote the environmental rehabilitation of the area. The paper presents the first insights of a ongoing multidisciplinary research project regarding the total value (environmental, socio-economic and cultural) potentially generated by the rehabilitation process.

The case under examination exemplifies well the contrast between a globalised notion of common good, in the case of environmental preservation, and a local focus on dimensions of human life of a different kind, regarding namely the enhancement of daily life quality in the still inhabited area of the former mining-complex. However, one should not be too fast in assuming a simple contradiction between globalised environmental concerns versus other locally defined priorities. The paper proposes a more detailed description of such relations through an approach to landscape as the physical expression of an arena of negotiation by different sorts of social actors. It describes and discusses the mutually implicated effects of natural processes, human experience and governance in shaping and reshaping a mining landscape that owes its existence and current redefinition to both 'local' and 'global' dynamics.