Book Review: Land, Law and Environment: Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries
| Published date | 01 June 2002 |
| Date | 01 June 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100207 |
| Author | Penny English |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
ALLEN ABRAMSON AND DIMITRIOS THEODOSSOULOS, Land, Law and Environment:
Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries. London: Pluto Press, 2000, 224 pp., £16.99 (pbk).
This book provides a diverse collection of studies that touch on a central theme in
contemporary debate in cultural and geographical study as well as law.
Diversity is a key word here. Of the 10 chapters, the first and last chapters are by
Abramson and the remaining eight are all by different authors. The geographical and
cultural contexts of these could scarcely be more wide-ranging, spanning the globe,
as they do, from Fiji to the Caribbean by way of India and the Ukraine.
The book sets out to offer ‘a cross-cultural understanding of the ways in which
property, land and identity are inextricably tied together’. The context and starting
point is current writing that focuses on the symbolization of space.
The opening chapter by Abramson is tantalizing: it touches on a number of themes
that would be worthy of deeper exploration. The concept of embedded meanings
within the land is one that is crucial to the linking of identity, whether personal or
national, with specific places. This idea is one that has been increasingly recognized
as fundamental to claims to ownership of land, strengthening the relationship between
the mythical and symbolic aspects of land and the strictly legal issues of ownership
and control. Abramson discusses the development of the idea of landscape as a site of
nostalgia and freedom at just that historical moment of profound demographic change
from rural to urban population. Land thereby displays a dualized nature as both an
object with a use-value and a symbol with meaning. However, the clear distinction
drawn between a moral and emotional relation of identity and a property relation that
rests on contemporary legitimacy depends on a theoretical concept of property that
takes little account of the dynamic nature of property as a set of social relationships.
The reality on the ground, as well as in theory, is more complex.
Nevertheless, the chapters provide a wide-ranging and welcome source of case
studies that illustrate the complexity of these various ‘articulations of the jural and the
mythical’.
Land is contested in each case, but the nature is far from uniform. A few examples
demonstrate this complexity. On the Greek island of Zakynthos, the local people
oppose a Marine National Park that will protect the endangered Loggerhead turtles.
This places legal restrictions on their freedom to develop small-scale tourist activity in
a society that has within living memory been transformed from tenants to small-scale
landowners. Environmental measures are seen as a violation of hard-won property,
founded in a Lockean concept of absolute rights. In contrast, at Manchester Airport,
the roles are reversed. Here, protest is for rather than against environmental conser-
vation. The opposition to the commercial exploitation of the land to build a second
runway is grounded in an emotional engagement with the land, which contrasts with
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200206) 11:2 Copyright © 2002
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 11(2), 307–319; 023938
07Book reviews (bc/d) 5/17/02 8:50 AM Page 307
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