Serge Briffaud

The Nature of Resources

The development of hydroelectricity in the French central Pyrenees at the beginning of the twentieth century was met with strong resistance in the name of landscape preservation and the protection of the tourist resource that landscape represented. Space had to be shared, and some reserves of picturesque features were obtained from the industrialists, in exchange for a free hand in tourist development. This chapter analyses how the interaction between the different stakeholders brought about this spatial partition and shows the ambivalence of the discourse constructed to legitimise it. By examining the case of the protected site of Gavarnie in depth, it sheds light on the social issues that were emerging as a background to the resistance to hydroelectricity and its impact on the landscape and shows how, through this resistance, the power of an external elite acting as a self-proclaimed aesthetic authority was imposed on communities in the mountain areas.

The Nature of Ressources. Conflicts of Landscape in the Pyrenees During the Rise of Hydroelectric Power

In 2000, at the dawn of the adoption of the EU Directive on renewable energy, a green-red alliance opened a political window for the emergence of a genuine wind power policy in France. Yet today, after more than 10 years of one of the highest feed-in tariffs in the world, the installed capacity in France is still low. Wind power, if it is to be developed at any significant level, has to fight against the centralization of both French energy policy and landscape protection. In this context, the landscape processes, which take place when wind power is either planned or sited at the local level through open governance, are places and occasions for institutional and social innovation that contribute to building decentralization. This chapter examines the ways in which wind power development has raised tensions over the centralization of both energy and landscape policy in France.The development of hydroelectricity in the French central Pyrenees at the beginning of the twentieth century was met with strong resistance in the name of landscape preservation and the protection of the tourist resource that landscape represented. Space had to be shared, and some reserves of picturesque features were obtained from the industrialists, in exchange for a free hand in tourist development. This chapter analyses how the interaction between the different stakeholders brought about this spatial partition and shows the ambivalence of the discourse constructed to legitimise it. By examining the case of the protected site of Gavarnie in depth, it sheds light on the social issues that were emerging as a background to the resistance to hydroelectricity and its impact on the landscape and shows how, through this resistance, the power of an external elite acting as a self-proclaimed aesthetic authority was imposed on communities in the mountain areas.This chapter discusses the way in which cross national comparison shall be approached. We assume that energy landscapes emerge at the crossroads of energy technology development and changes in current landscapes. We successively discuss different frameworks for approaching technology devel-opment and landscape change, before turning to the recent literature about landscape and renewable energy development. We conclude that cross national comparison of landscapes of energies should be attentive to the type of landscape tradition at work in each country and account for the fact that the development of renewable energy endows these traditions with a renewed existence. Depending on the extent and the focus of the conflicts or controversies raised around RE projects, the method and focus of the analysis shall differ.

Une montagne de paradis

Le mont Aiguille en Trieves, considere au Moyen Âge comme une merveille en raison de son inaccessibilite, est gravi en 1492 sur ordre du roi Charles VIII. La ressemblance est manifeste entre les descriptions du sommet proposees par les grimpeurs et les representations contemporaines du jardin d’Eden. Cette ascension apparait ainsi comme la conquete d’un symbole, qui, par elle, s’incarne et devient lieu. Elle sera a maintes reprises evoquee par la suite, de Rabelais a Restif de La Bretonne, en passant par les recits populaires locaux, comme l’acte condamnable par lequel un monarque orgueilleux a tente d’affirmer son essence divine.