**4. Discussion**

Even if the figures listed in Table 2 represent only a part of alternative local food provisioning practices, their contribution is significant. Adding together the sources of meat (sheep, pilot whale meat, and sea bird), the estimated annual amount of meat per person is 23 kg, corresponding to the world average annual meat consumption per person in 1961 [81]. Globally, meat consumption has surged, particularly in the more a ffluent regions of the world, and reached 43 kg per person in 2014. Current levels of meat consumption in the Faroes are very high, but returning to a local and more marine-based diet would bring both health and environmental benefits [82]. At the same time, local consumption of fish has probably declined and has to a large degree been replaced with imported meat. Considering the nutritional value of fish and the declining access to this local resource, it is mind provoking to reflect on that fact that if every Faroese inhabitant was provided with half a kilo of fish per day every day of the year, this amount would still only make out little more than 1% of what the total Faroese industrial fisheries catch. From a human health perspective as well as from a sustainability perspective, the consumption of locally caught fish should be encouraged. Here the framework of quiet sustainability can guide policy initiatives to re-evaluate and support traditional and alternative principles of resource distribution, such as informal and traditional food networks and forms of sharing, rather than continuing the process of increased marketization of local (marine) resources.

While the contribution of meat and fat is significant, the food items listed in Table 2 provide only a few percent of the necessary caloric requirements of the Faroese population, to say nothing of modern dietary preferences for food items exotic to the Faroes such as fruits and vegetables. The results in Table 2 also show that although potato production is relatively large (around 20% of total consumption), the Faroese agricultural landscape is almost exclusively used for meat and dairy production and very little space is dedicated to cultivation of food crops for direct human consumption. This pattern reflects the traditional land use described in the previous sections, where imported grain was an integral element in the traditional Faroese economy and diet, supplemented with local grain and brassica production. While local meat and dairy production has remained relatively stable into modern times, cultivation of food crops for human consumption has probably decreased. Many people still keep a potato plot, but recently there have also been attempts, both commercial and non-commercial, to introduce new crops and cultivation practices and to reintroduce traditional practices in order to increase local production of vegetables and grains. New initiatives more in line with mainstream global sustainability discourses are also emerging. For instance, urban gardens of a more metropolitan appearance than the common potato and rhubarb gardens are popping up, and locally produced food is increasingly promoted as sustainable, healthy, and of a higher quality than imported food. Here, the Faroese case can be seen in comparison to another island study of dietary change and quiet sustainability practices. In their study on the Greek island of Samothraki, Petridis and Huber [83] (p. 263) propose to reinforce the sustainable elements of traditional practices by "associating them with values that find resonance within the community, such as health, localness, and quality." In the Faroese case this strategy has been successful, at least to some extent. One particularly interesting example is the member group called *Veltan*, an initiative on the Faroese island of Sandoy, where a group of community members have organized themselves around the ambition to cultivate and grow vegetables, and also to preserve and build new knowledge. *Veltan* members produce food for their own household, and production is also commercial aiming to provide the Faroese market with local produce. Some of the recent initiatives can be seen as elements of purposive transitioning and of enhancing resilience and local production, but not necessarily with ecological sustainability as a primary goal. As in Samothraki, the desire for healthy, local, "organic" food may be a promising avenue for sustainability transitions of the food and land managemen<sup>t</sup> system.

Another aspect of traditional food production, or quiet sustainability practices, which becomes evident in the analysis, is the fact that production has remained relatively stable during the past century even if population grew more than three-fold. The number of sheep has remained relatively stable, as have whale catches. Catches of sea bird have probably decreased, but this is mostly a result of the dramatic global decline in seabird. This characteristic of agricultural food provisioning practices in the Faroes may be contrasted with the changes occurring in the exploitation of the marine environment in the export-oriented industrial fisheries (and aquaculture), where production has increased dramatically, both in absolute numbers and per capita. In the Faroese case, two distinct spheres of social metabolism are arguably discernible in the di fferences between industrial and export-oriented production, and food provisioning practices that are oriented towards local production and distribution. Moreover, these distinct modes of social metabolism are producing very di fferent cultural landscapes. The industrial metabolism of the Faroes consists of large material and energy flows, and further investments in industrial capital stocks, i.e., infrastructure, serve to reinforce a process of increasing metabolism that cannot be considered viable, at least not in a long-term perspective, and neither does it comply with the o fficial sustainability goals of the Faroese Government. (The Faroese governmen<sup>t</sup> has signed the Paris agreemen<sup>t</sup> and the Faroese parliament also in 2009 unanimously voted for passing a resolution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% relative to the 2005 emissions level in the decade between 2010 and 2020. In spite of these intentions, greenhouse gas emissions have increased by almost 10% relative to the 2005 emissions level.) In other words, maintaining this industrial landscape requires an ongoing and unsustainable flow of resources.

In contrast, traditional social metabolism in the Faroes produced a sustainable, diverse, and bio-productive landscape. The traditional Faroese land and resource managemen<sup>t</sup> system presented in the previous section enhanced the bio-productive potential and capacity of the land to continually provide vital ecosystem services. This success was partly based on the ongoing investment in appropriate capital stocks including so-called landesque capital. The concept of landesque capital has been developed within the field of historical political ecology and may be understood as a specific form of capital stock, i.e., "enduring, non-alienable anthropogenic modifications of landscapes that increase physical productivity per unit of space" [84]. It enables an analytical discussion and separation between two forms and strategies of growth, namely growth as a result of net increase of in-situ bio-physical growth, photosynthesis for instance, and growth as a result of resource appropriation from other systems. As the term of landesque capital enables analysis of this dimension of human-nature interaction, it is useful for investigating the long-term sustainability and productivity of land managemen<sup>t</sup> systems, both in the past and in the future.

Various forms of landesque capital associated with the traditional land managemen<sup>t</sup> system are still visible in the Faroese landscape. The stone walls, which marked the border between the infield and the outfield, are one example. Another typical form of landesque capital are the agricultural terraces, *bríkar* in Faroese, on the steep slopes of the infield. Reducing the steepness of the land made them easier to work and prevented soil erosion. A less visible form of landesque capital is the improved quality of soil and pastures through cultivation and grazing practices. All these forms of landesque capital required considerable and continuous investments of labor, as well as intimate knowledge of the environment. The Faroese landscape has been intensively exploited for close to two millennia, even the least accessible cli ffs being used for grazing. And yet, most of the ecosystem services available to the first settlers were sustained or enhanced through the centuries and well into the twentieth century [67,69]. Even the biodiversity of the Faroese landscape may be considered a form of landesque capital, the ecosystem co-evolving with people to produce the Faroese cultural landscape. In this sense, the high levels of biodiversity and productivity of the traditional Faroese landscape should be seen as a result of human activity, not as something remaining in spite of it. Policy attempts at increasing food production or enhancing biodiversity that are not attentive to this crucial role of culture in processes of homogenization and diversification of ecosystems are bound to fail their goal.

The concept of landesque capital helps to illuminate the distinctions between di fferent forms of capital stocks, and the implications of these for (island) sustainability and resilience. Material stocks, or capital, can materialize as commercial artefacts, such as disposable consumer goods, or as improved soil, depending on the cultural organization of social metabolism. The implications for sustainability and the bio-productive capacity of the natural system are compelling. While certain forms of industrial stocks, such as the industrial fishing fleet in this case, obviously serves to increase production, it also relies on very large volumes of external resource flows. When it comes to the fossil energy required to sustain Faroese industrial fisheries, the access to this energy is ultimately dependent upon global market relations or monetary relations. Changes in these relations are largely out of local control and may cause capital stock in the form of an industrial fishing vessel to become immediately unproductive. In comparison, investments in landesque capital, for instance in improved pastures and soil, is less vulnerable to external factors. As Widgren [85] (p. 61) puts it, landesque capital has a tendency to survive in di fferent social contexts because "unlike monetary capital, which is fluid in space but fixed in time, landesque capital is fixed in space, but 'fluid' in time." This makes landesque capital hard to appropriate in comparison to capital and resources that can be transported away. The formation of capital stocks as landesque capital or as some other form of stock has a lot to do then with how the social metabolism of a society is related to the outside world [9,86]. Interestingly, Petridis and Huber [83] (p. 282) in their discussion of quiet sustainability on the island of Samothraki direct attention to this potential association between landesque capital, dietary changes, and sustainability transformations. They propose that a reevaluation of older farming systems, such as agricultural terraces, and its association with changing dietary demands for local produce can work to increase both ecological and human health. A reevaluation of these older farming systems would, however, have to entail a reevaluation of the time required to maintain such forms of landesque capital, and more generally of maintaining biocultural landscapes. The issue of time and sustainability is also mentioned by Smith and Jelicka [21] in their discussion on policy changes to promote quiet sustainability. They sugges<sup>t</sup> that more radical steps towards enhancing quiet sustainability would require consideration of economies of time within households and communities, for example, the length of the working week. The fundamental question of how people spend their time, how monetary value is attributed to di fferent modes of time use, and how that relates to both ecological and human well-being is generally overlooked in mainstream sustainability discourse.
