GV333      Half Unit
Politics of Public Lands

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Pre-requisites:

Students must have completed GV101 before taking this course.

This course seeks to analyse wilderness areas and rural public lands more broadly, from the perspective of the underlying political conflicts surrounding usage and access. Clearly land as a resource (national parks, wilderness areas, conservation areas, forests, wildlife refuges, recreation areas, areas of scientific interest, and so on) has always been a source of conflict, but recent trends in labour (WFH), lifestyle choices, and broader population growth, have heightened these conflicts. This course uses the unifying framework of the 3 I’s (interests, institutions and ideas) to explore lands in a variety of global settings. These may include the American West, the Scottish Highlands, Australia and the Arctic.

With respect to interests, it examines conflicts between and among property developers, mining industries, recreationists, homeowners, and other interested parties such as indigenous peoples.

The course also looks at the relevant institutional framework in each regional case, and how the governing institutions manage (or fail to manage) competing claims.

The ideas component of the course explores cultural norms (e.g., rural/urban), values (traditional/modern), identity, and even psychological/emotive attachments to certain lands, to understand these more intangible sources of conflict.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Essay (1500 words)

Students are expected to produce an essay of 1,500 words in the AT.

Ksenija Hanacek, et al, “On thin ice – The Arctic commodity extraction frontier and environmental conflicts,” Ecological Economics, Volume 191 (2022), 107247, 1-15

Roy Jones, et al, “Re-turning Inwards or Opening to the World? Land Use Transitions on Australia’s Western Coast,” Geographical Review, 112:3, (2022) 422-443

Monica Tennberg, et al, eds, Indigenous Peoples, Natural Resources and Governance: Agencies and Interactions (Routledge, 2022)

Robert A. Lambert, Contested Mountains: Nature, Development and Environment in the Cairngorms Region of Scotland, 1880-1980 (White Horse Press, 2001)

Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th edition (Yale University Press, 2014)

Justin Farrell, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Adam M. Sowards, Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Exam (80%), duration: 120 Minutes in the January exam period

Presentation (20%)

The presentation is an individual assessed presentation in the AT. Students will be provided information at the beginning of the course to guide them on what is expected in a presentation. Both content and delivery will be assessed.