Global Amenity Migration: Transforming Rural Culture Economy and Landscape, edited by LaurenceA.G. Moss and RomellaS. Glorioso. 2014. Kaslo, British Columbia: The New Ecology Press. 435. ISBN: 9780993635106. $76.00

Lawrence Moss and Romella Gloriosa assemble 24 chapters and 42 authors from all the continents and from a large variety of disciplines to make available utopian emotions, shared intuitions, careful witnesses, and prospective reflections on the “colonization of areas by a middle class thirst for authenticity”—as amenity migration is named in a quote of Lawrence Moss (p. 83). The divide is either “living in the countryside,” as the amenity migrants want to do, or “living from the countryside” as historical settlers always did, to serve themselves and outsiders, with their resources, tools, deeds, and beliefs, and also to migrate when the competitiveness of their services to outsiders changed due to outside causes. This idea of competing and schizophrenic uses of “mother land” is also in the book where the difference is highlighted between regions of consumption of amenities and regions of production that, jointly with the environment, created and sustained those amenities (p. 190). What drives this new colonization movement? Does it create sustainable places? What can be done to guarantee such sustainability? Those are the questions addressed by the authors in a long, well-structured, and pleasant to read piece of work. Utopian emotions are implicit in all the text and that is probably what makes the reading so interesting. The dedication to the son of the editors, Cézanne, and his generation, is revealing, partly because the painter Cézanne showed how the beauty of the landscape is in the eyes of the painter, and in those who love paintings. Actually, amenity is often taken as beauty (p. 86), but beauty is not necessarily related to good or even to just. Does the landscape and those who created it have a say? Are these locals the creators and the artists? Or are the outsiders that worship and desire the amenities? Is there space for both through Catholic Sunday masses as it is described in the book (p. 92)? Emotive utopians do not seem to care: they reject what was created in the urban fast food culture of workaholic consumers and assume that by slowing down the complex relationships between nature and the self, and between the self and the society, it is possible to create a better world (p. 94). Shared Intuitions based on particular cases rather than on sound-generalized evidence from reality is mostly what we can get on amenity migration from this nice book. It is said that amenity migration refers to movements of people from urban areas to rural areas in search of environmental and cultural amenities (p. 67). Nevertheless, the instinct also suggests that it is a process associated with rural gentrification, stimulating the creation of nonshared visions of the same world (p. 75) and distinct ontological universes in the same territory (p. 88). In some cases, peripheral regions can be seen just as specialized residential areas (p. 102) designing inequalities with former settlers while, typically, aiming at a democracy of people living in real places (p. 119). Careful Witnesses provide some proof that goes further than the shared intuitions. What makes the argument resistant is the ability of the opinions to fit with common sense related with sources of income, land ownership, and political participation. Regarding the source of income, it is said that the lack of employment in amenity areas has been a problem for those who do not bring other sources of income with them (p. 53); actually, amenity migrants, besides including wealthy and often seasonal migrants (p. 260), also comprise poor people living on minimal income schemes attracted by lower costs of housing in the countryside and with marginal small activities in agriculture and tourism (p. 209). Concerning land ownership, the argument is that rich people from outside buy land as consumption and make land unproductive for traditional uses while changing the local multiplier effects of the land value. All this can be done without any restriction to avoid that process (p. 59) and this is strongly associated with the gradual disappearance of small ethnic communities, long protected or disguised in regions close to remote national borders (p. 241). Finally, vis-à-vis political participation, there is some evidence that although collaborative management is becoming easier through the use of digital technologies (p. 173), seasonal amenity migrants usually do not attend public meetings and do not volunteer for collective works (p. 151) while generating high hidden costs because developing land as properties fragments the ecosystems and creates pressure to protect those fragments from wild fires at the expense of others (p. 177). What about prospective thinking? There is not much on that. Mainly worries and divided hearts. Where is rationality when most of the exposition is related to emotions, intuitions, and partial evidence believable though common sense? Even without reason could we make a divide between, on the one hand, the good guys of nomadic, emotional, intuitive and smart authors, and, on the other hand, the folkloric settlers? And vice-versa when the supposed good guys are the bad ones? Labeling places or people as either rural or urban is not particularly useful (p. 273). In fact, there seems to be a flexible cycle of amenity migration—from visitors, to seasonal migrants and to long-term outsiders that then can sell their houses or hand them over to relatives (pp. 288 and 373), eventually generating long-term equilibriums between tradition and globalization (p. 306). As happens in any migration movement, there are the ones that are engaged with the place and the ones that become frustrated and move away (p. 323). In all, amenity migration is both an opportunity and a threat to sustain the integrity of natural ecologies and their symbiotic human communities (p. 11; p. 361). The issue is whether some planning is possible to manage spatially defined environments with time-referenced unrooted impacts. Can places be restricted (p. 59)? Do we need to constrain flows of amenity migrants with the intervention of the government (p. 339 and p. 354)? Or we just need constraints on the resource use that sustains the existing settlers (p. 368) and, at the same time, qualify land use planning (p. 403)? The danger, I would say, is to take an ideological and utopian attitude that has guided some public interventions in the countryside. This book on global amenity migration provides a very useful and nice to read set of texts that look at the recurring and reinforcing phenomenon of amenity migration from different disciplinary and, sometimes, ideological perspectives and looking at quite a variety of regions around the world. Amenity migration is a cysergic event, good and bad at the same time. On the one hand, it interconnects people and territories raising the value of both. On the other hand, it can degrade those territories with their people because it is based on unrooted and alien cultures that try to “marry” an embedded and often fragile ethos. Like any marriage, it can be paradise or hell. And like marriage, it only works with respect, trust, humbleness, and proximity—or love, using a less politically correct wording. In fact, the main problem of the book is that it does not tackle appropriately the two main issues that are at stake when nomadic and sedentary attitudes interact with each other. On the one hand, the spatial dimensions of families and, on the other hand, the interconnected spatial distribution of property rights over localized resources. Where are the children that require school services, the elderly that request company and health care, and the unemployed that demand space and opportunity? How are land and property transmitted from generation to generation and what about the sense of belonging is fructified? It seems that the book only talks about new nomadic tribes without family shifting from workaholic nightmares to amenity “pastures” around the world while forgetting the ones that sustain those intrinsically cultural amenities to produce and host relatives and, why not, all the others that like and respect those symbiotic cultural, familiar, creative, environmental, and cysergic landscapes?

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