to Lapland makes clear – that it is precisely in the negotiations between these perspectives that our engagement with any landscape, both as individuals and as societies, is shaped and takes on substance.

To illustrate this point, it might be useful for us to think of the Swedish Lapland which Linnaeus visited as both an inhabited place and a mediated space. As an inhabited place, Swedish Lapland was the home of the Sami: an historically contingent location and a geophysical entity which provided the Sami with their livelihood, their place of dwelling, and the environmental conditions which framed their way of living. The Sami had adapted to these conditions and had named in their own language both their surroundings and their acts of living among those surroundings. One ofvalue. In Selma Lagerlöf's story of Nils Holgersson's journey around the entirety of Sweden, for example, which was written for schoolchildren at the beginning of the twentieth century, the geese observe of Lapland that:

> up there are to be found both a large mountain region and a large lake district and a vast forest area and a vast agrarian area and a large archipelago. It is more than most kingdoms can pride themselves on having within their borders.50

The use – cultural, scientific, industrial – of the Lapland region came to be seen as essential to the modernity that Sweden sought to construct, and twentieth-century rhetoric echoes the arguments made by Linnaeus in his application to the Royal Society of Sciences, in which he insisted that an area so