Send message to Contributors

Contribution short abstract:

Our paper challenges the surface-centered notion of the landscape through a metabolic approach. We focus on how the vital yet obscure matter, faeces, circulates in heavily visited yet scarcely infrastructured nature-based tourism destinations. Thus, we analyse touristic landscapes in the making.

Contribution long abstract:

As a walker, I move through the world, when I eat, it is the world that moves through me. Annemarie Mol 2021

Waste-management infrastructures in nature-based tourism (NBT) destinations are often scarce, partly because “waste bins do not belong to the atmosphere of the wilderness” (Inkinen & Peura 1993) and partly because maintaining them is difficult and costly. Visitors are encouraged to “leave-no-trace” by carrying their garbage out. However, the principle of leaving-no-trace is a hopeful illusion, diverting attention to the absence and invisibility of traces caused by moving on the surface instead of their presence and effects (see e.g. Brown, 2015). This illusion stems from the modern notion of the landscape as a surface, shaped by human presence and activities, and experienced primarily through the ocular (Ingold, 2011; Vannini & Vannini, 2018). However, living beings do not merely move on the landscape’s surface, rather, their traces enter the circulation of the landscape. This co-constitutive relationship is exemplified by the metabolic cycle of eating and defecating (Mol 2021). By focusing on anthropogenic faeces - including droppings of animal companions - in the landscape, we seek to disrupt the illusion of purity maintained by “leave-no-trace” policies and challenge the idealised touristic notion of the landscape rooted in the nature-culture binary. Following faeces enables us to tease out how visitors join the circulations of the landscape rather than walk on its surface. The paper is based on collaboration between four Nordic research institutions, focusing on increasingly crowded Nordic NBT areas.