Mediating Landscape and Memory

"“For as long as our records go back, we have held these two things dear, landscape and memory. Each infuses us with a different kind of life. The one feeds us, figuratively and literally. The other protects us from lies and tyranny. To keep landscapes intact and the memory of them, our history in them, alive, seems as imperative a task in modern time as finding the extent to which individual expression can be accommodated before it threatens to destroy the fabric of society.”

— About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez

In choosing the heading for this blog I borrow both from the Barry Lopez quotation above, and from Simon Schama’s magnificent 1995 book, Landscape and Memory. Schama’s objective in that book was to explore the impact of landscape on art, culture, imagination and politics. I draw too on Robert Macfarlane’s talk on “Landscape and the Human Heart”.

I begin with a brief apology for returning to a theme of local politics and history – the residues of colonial history in New Zealand/Aotearoa and the confiscation of land in the 19th century – which will be outside the experience and probably interest of many readers. My point here, however, is not to dwell on that history but rather to use it as vehicle for thinking about a contemporary role for mediation – and for mediators who are not the usual audience for these Kluwer blogs – in resolving the current consequences of historical events.

In taking this approach I also echo my mediation colleague Denise Evans’ recent brief commenton the lessons for mediators in the case of competing land claims over a place called IhumÄ�tao."

Read in full:  

Web-link: http://mediationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2020/02/26/mediating-landscape-and-me...
Source: NZ Centre for ICT Law & School of Law, Auckland University
Language: English
Contact: Ian MacDuff