Lara Koegst

Oilscapes are to be understood as an aestheticized synthesis of objects of extraction, distribution, processing, and consumption of petroleum and petroleum-derived products. Based on the concept of neopragmatic landscape research, this book addresses questions of the social construction of the relationship between the petrochemical industry and the landscape, as well as individual interpretations and evaluations in this regard. The particular focus is on exploring the possibilities and limits of aesthetic experience of oilscapes as well as the categorizations, interpretations, and evaluations of these aesthetic outcomes. In recourse to the neopragmatic tradition, to the thinking of Richard Rorty, the engagement with ‘sensory induced cognition' is carried out from the stance of irony, directed in particular at the discourse community possessing 'expert special knowledge', with a special focus on methods of representation that are innovative in the context of spatial science. The study area for assessing this approach is Louisiana (United States), which – being spatially quite diverse – has been intensively shaped for more than a century by the activities of the petrochemical industry, as well as its unintended health and ecological side effects.

This book is oriented on testing and developing the neopragmatic approach of horizontal geographies, in which we follow approaches of natural sciences, social sciences, and cultural studies. Regional focus is thereby put on a rapidly changing elemental space and its social representations, characterized by unstable and not well-defined hybridities: coastal Louisiana. This region is highly dynamic: the Mississippi River in particular, with its extensive sediments, has shifted the coastal fringe of present-day Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. This land gain is contrasted by natural processes, but also by processes resultant of human intervention which cause marine encroachment. A complex interplay of different aspects is directly and indirectly leading to coastal land loss which makes the question of how to describe emerging hybrid spaces virulent and highlights the limits of a positivist understanding of boundaries that is also physically geographical. In the neopragmatic tradition, positivist research findings will be framed in social constructivist terms and supplemented by phenomenological approaches to Louisiana's coastal space, thus suggesting the need for and potentials of horizontal geographic integration of different theoretical and methodological approaches as well as researcher perspectives and data bases.

Obwohl mineralische Rohstoffe wie beispielsweise Kies, Sand, Quarz und Naturstein auf vielfältige Weise Grundlagen menschlicher Existenz ermöglichen und garantieren, haben Vorhaben zur Gewinnung mineralischer Rohstoffe vielerorts mit unterschiedlichen Akzeptanzproblemen zu kämpfen. Der planerische Umgang mit Rohstoffsicherung und Rohstoffgewinnung wurde wissenschaftlich bislang hauptsächlich in Bezug auf ökologische oder fachplanerische Problemstellungen, weniger hingegen als teilsystemischer Aspekt in einem soziopolitischen Kontext betrachtet, der durch verstärkten Bürgerprotest und erneuerte Partizipations- und Demokratisierungsbestrebungen gekennzeichnet ist.