Artistic and Scholarly Approaches to Engineered Environments

Global Environment 10 (2017): 4–20 © 2017 The White Horse Press. doi: 10.3197/ge.2017.100101 introduction Manufacturing landscapes: Artistic and scholarly approaches to engineered environments Helmuth Trischler ost scholars working in the field of environmental humanities in general and of environmental history in particular agree in understanding large parts of nature as altered by humans. The landscapes that we are faced with today are culturally constructed environments, most often industrialised landscapes, shaped by human interventions in one way or the other over thousands of years. Scientists, who are trained to define human introduction interventionsM into nature in a more rigorous way, have assessed that less than a mere one-quarter of the Earth’s ice-free land masses is still in a more-or-less ‘natural’ state, i.e., largely untouched by human activities. Hence, landscapes are human made, they are manufactured. In his works, the renowned Canadian photographer and filmmak- er Edward Burtynsky* has used the lens of his camera to reveal a nature altered by humans. Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ depict mines and quarries, oil fields and salt pans, factories and shipbreaking yards, railcuts and dams, ir- rigation schemes and aquacultures, homesteads and urban centres, agricultural fields and river deltas. His connected series of pictures are deeply rooted in the photography tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the industrial landscape reflects the aesthetics of the sublime; at the same time, he has ‘vigorously refo- * Photographs © Edward Burtynsky, Courtesy Galerie Springer Berlin / Nich- olas Metiver Gallery, Toronto. Figure 1. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Colorado River Delta #2, Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico, 2011’. Due to human interventions the river delta has not seen any water from the river over decades and is now a desert. The photo also serves as the cover image of the multiple award-winning documentary Watermark by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky, released in 2013. cused and extended’ this tradition by forcefully stressing the human impact upon the environment.1 Burtynsky understands his images as ‘metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attrac- 1 Mark Hayworth-Booth, ‘Edward Burtynsky: Traditions and affinities,’ in: Lori Pauli (ed.), Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada / Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 34–39, here 38. – I’m very grateful to Brenda Black for her comments and her invaluable editorial support. Special thanks go to Don Worster for all his support in making this special issue happen. INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 6 Figure 2. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Oil Fields #27, Bakersfield, California, USA, 2004’. For Burtynsky oil serves ‘as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat’. tion and repulsion, seduction and fear’. His artwork points to the uneasy contradiction that we are ‘drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success’.2 In 2006, Burtynsky complemented his numerous photographs of engineered nature with a film that followed him to China as he trav- elled the country documenting the transformation of the environment 2 Edward Burtynsky, ‘Exploring the Residual Landscape’, http://www.edward- burtynsky.com/site_contents/About/introAbout.html GE7 through massive industrialisation.3 The prize-winning documentary, again entitled Manufactured Landscapes, extends the narrative of Bur- tynsky’s photographs into the genre of moving images, making it possible to explore even further the complexity of human interventions into nature by means of technology. China’s oscillation between tradition and rapid industrial modernisation proved to be a perfect case to reflect on the multiple natures of manufactured landscapes. We followed Burtynsky to China and borrowed from his works, although in a slightly modified version, when we held our fourth international environmental history conference on the campus of Renmin University in Beijing in May 2015. Backed with financial support from Renmin’s Center for Ecological History and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, the conference ‘Manufacturing Landscapes – Nature and Technol- ogy in Environmental History’ hosted 25 speakers, about a third of them from China and the others from Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Republic of South Korea, Sweden and the United States, along with moderators and an engaged audience. But if we leaned on Burtynsky for our conference title, we were open to exploring new ways and innovative approaches to better under- stand the history and presence of engineered environments. The concept proved fruitful for scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines, as the contributions collected in this volume show. Roughly speaking, the types of landscapes explored fall into three main categories, although the boundaries often blur and overlap: agricultural landscapes, in which the needs of particular crops create distinctive ecological systems; chemical landscapes, in which pol- lutants from human activities such as mining and industry leave toxic and lasting traces in the surrounding water, soil and air; and engineered landscapes, in which humans reshape waterways, cut into hills and bridge valleys to build power stations or expand trans- port infrastructure. The contributors draw on insights from genet- ics, ecology, the history of science, economics and politics to shed light on the way these landscapes arise, and more importantly, the 3 Manufactured Landscapes, dir. Jennifer Baichwal (Canada, 2006), 90 mins. INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 8 factors that influence their change over time, whether this is a shift from a predominantly rural society to an industrialised one, or from a planned economy to a market-based one. They also make clear that the role of nature in this process is not necessarily passive – frequently in seeking to control other organisms we find ourselves adapting to their needs, or we discover that natural processes do not function in quite the way we expected. These unanticipated conse- quences create a tension that runs through this volume. Textile production is perhaps one of humanity’s oldest industries, one that blends plant and animal husbandry with manufacturing in a particularly striking way. Much has been written about the cotton gin and its role in both the Industrial Revolution and the politics and society of the early United States. In China, silk has been no less important and, as Edmund Russell argues in his contribution to this volume, the silk industry is the result of a coevolutionary partner- ship between mulberry trees, silkworms and humans that altered landscapes and enabled people in east Asia to create complex socie- ties marked by gender divisions and social hierarchies. As Russell has shown in earlier publications, by adapting plants and animals to do work for people, breeders have been fashioning biotechnologies for thousands of years.4 Similarly, silkworms and mulberry trees evolved traits that benefited themselves. People capi- talised on those traits, and intensified their expression through do- mestic relationships. People pushed the evolution of silkworms and mulberries in new directions to maximise their economic value. This story demonstrates the fruitfulness of Russell’s concept of evolutionary history, both in a heuristic sense to generate novel questions and in an analytical sense to allow for innovative interpretations. By unit- ing history and biology, two fields that have long faced in different directions, this approach creates a fuller understanding of the past than either field can produce on its own. The concept acknowledges that humans have become a biological agent shaping evolution, and 4 Edmund Russell, ‘Coevolutionary history’, The American Historical Review 119/5 (2014): 1514–1528; Edmund Russell, ‘Evolutionary history: Prospectus for a new field’, Environmental History 8/2 (2003): 204–228. GE9 human-induced evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history.5 Here, we learn how silk cultivation led to the creation of a character- istic physical landscape in lowland areas of China: the mulberry and fish pond system. Mulberry trees are planted on embankments surrounding artificial ponds that together form a self-sustaining nutrient cycle: The silkworm waste provides food for the fish, and the nutrient-rich mud at the bottom of the ponds becomes fertiliser for the mulberry trees. China has undergone rapid industrialisation in the last several decades, a process that has disrupted many of the country’s traditional agricultural systems and brought with it significant challenges. Mov- ing inland, Yang Wenjun takes us to northern and eastern China and explores another traditional landscape, one in which straw was once a key element of the rural economy. A by-product of the cultivation of grains such as rice, wheat and maize, straw was valued as a source of fuel, fertiliser and fodder. Straw was also a visually dominant presence in the landscape: it was used for a variety of construction pur- poses, such as fencing and roofing material, as well as various everyday items (woven mats and hats), and it was not uncommon to see heaps of straw mixed with manure to decompose

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