The White Horse Press Full Citation: Johnson, Sarah, Ed. Landscapes
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The White Horse Press Full citation: Johnson, Sarah, ed. Landscapes. Themes in Environmental History series. Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2010. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3491. Rights: All rights reserved. © The White Horse Press 2010. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. For further information please see http://www.whpress.co.uk. Landscapes compiled by Sarah Johnson Themes in Environmental History, 2 ‘Themes in Environmental History’ is a series of readers for students and researchers. Each volume aims to cover a prominent subject in the discipline, combining theoretical chapters and case studies. All chapters have been previously published in the White Horse Press journals Environment and History and Environmental Values. 1. Bioinvaders (2010) ISBN 978-1-874267-55-3 2. Landscapes (2010) ISBN 978-1-874267-60-7 Further volumes forthcoming. Copyright © The White Horse Press 2010 First published 2010 by The White Horse Press, 10 High Street, Knapwell, Cambridge, CB23 4NR, UK Set in 10 point Times All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, in- cluding photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-874267-60-7 (PB) Contents Publisher’s Introduction Sarah Johnson v Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination Ronald Hepburn 1 Aesthetics in Practice: Valuing the Natural World Emily Brady 15 Aesthetic and Other Values in the Rural Landscape John Benson 30 Admiring the High Mountains: The Aesthetics of Environment John Haldane 47 What We Owe the Romantics Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman 57 Artists with Axes Tim Bonyhady 78 Thomas Pringle’s Plantation Damian Shaw 97 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and the Search for a Populist Landscape Aesthetic Renee Binder and G.W. Burnett 111 ‘Penetrating’ Foreign Lands: Contestations Over African Landscapes. A Case Study from Eastern Zimbabwe Heike Schmidt 123 Engineering Miracles: Water Control, Conversion and the Creation of a Religious Landscape in the Medieval Ardennes Ellen F. Arnold 148 Environmental History and the Construction of Nature and Landscape: The Case of the ‘Landscaping’ of the Jutland heath Kenneth R. Olwig 173 ‘Forsaken Spot’ to ‘Classic Ground’: Geological Heritage in Australia and the Recuperative Power of the Deep Past Kirsty Douglas 196 ‘Welcome to the Atomic Park’: American Nuclear Landscapes and the ‘Unnaturally Natural’ John Wills 223 Landscape and Ambience on the Urban Fringe: From Agricultural to Imagined Countryside Joseph Goddard 247 Index 273 Publisher’s Introduction Sarah Johnson William Cowper wrote in his famous pre-Romantic poem The Task, that The Love of Nature’s works Is an ingredient in the compound, man (IV, 731–2) This sense of the innateness of landscape appreciation1 co-exists in long literary and philosophical tradition with intersecting sets of (often program- matic) discourses about how, precisely, human beings might formulate, com- municate and respond to their apprehensions of landscape’s aesthetic value. The present volume offers a dialogue between philosophical explorations of landscape aesthetics and historical case studies in which definitions of and responses to what is understood as ‘landscape’ are enacted upon the natural environment, shaping both Nature and the viewing subject. Setting the Scene The title Landscapes has quite deliberately been chosen, despite Benson’s contention that the ‘the terms “country”, “countryside” or “land”’ are pref- erable to ‘“landscape” with its implicit reference to the representation in painting of a view from a particular standpoint’ (n.2, p.45). The picturesque tradition of landscape connoisseurship to which this objection refers will often be felt between the lines of the essays that follow. However, the term, as Olwig makes clear, has a highly suggestive evolution – originating in a Germanic word for a place of ‘felt, cultural identity’ (as opposed to either a topographical or political unit), the place to which an individual would proclaim affinity, the place shaped by but also shaping a people. The notion of ‘shaping’ remains in the word’s next incarnation – as a piece of natural topography translated into the shape of a picture. It was from this pictorial sense that the term returned, newly inflected, to be applied to the physical land, in the sense of a natural view that recalled a landscape painting, firstly in a ‘landskip garden’ and then, in the later eighteenth century (after garden designer William Kent ‘leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden’2), in the countryside at large. Landscape therefore became ‘a scene perceived, as in a theatre, from a particular point by an individual’ (definition of landscape cited by Olwig, p.180, from Webster 1963). The theatrical reference, whose ancestry can be traced back at least as far as Pliny the Younger’s praise of the vista from his Tuscan villa as ‘a vast vi Introduction amphitheatre such as could only be a work of nature’,3 has useful resonances. The amphitheatres of Ancient Greece were commonly designed around the local topography and tended to be sited on hillsides, the rows of seats echo- ing the gradient of the surrounding terrain. Indeed when visiting one of the unrenovated minor archaeological sites in Turkey, it is often hard to discern the boundary between theatre and hillside, so perfectly was the architectural style fitted to the topography. Moreover, Greek theatres commonly faced the sea, which would have provided a backdrop to the performance; nature, then, was called in to the theatre space. European travellers to exotic lands during the Enlightenment frequently invoked the ‘amphitheatre’ as a metaphor for the landscapes they saw, and fittingly so as it calls to mind not only a physical form but certain connotations that should be borne in mind in any discus- sion of landscape aesthetics. The Europeans were play-actors in a drama of discovery, as well as spectators of nature’s scenes, an ambivalent role that encapsulates well the dynamics of landscape appreciation.4 In construing a ‘landscape’, one does more than simply look; one acts, by interpreting and thus in some sense altering what is seen. The observer creates the ‘amphi- theatre’, by mentally supplying the boundaries. This chimes with Leo Marx’s view that, broadly, landscape is shaped land, not raw matter. It involves contrivance and premeditation, and the ordering and shaping may be physical (as in agriculture or gardening) or metaphori- cal, ‘accomplished by an act of mind or imagination’5 that may be verbal or visual. Peter de Bolla reminds us that ‘landscape only looks the way it does on account of an interactive relation among viewer, physical land and cultural imaginary’, going on to state that ‘we only ever see what we have learned to see’.6 Whilst the viewer’s culture will not wholly obscure the reality of what is seen, the viewing subject is constantly shaping and being shaped, learning by looking how to see landscape. Landscape is never, then, a static given. As Hepburn here observes, in viewing a landscape, ‘the purely sensory component – colours, shapes, sounds, tactile sensations, smells’ of landscape appreciation does not exist in isolation: we apply pre-conceived ideas to it; ‘we conceptualise, we recognise, we add context, background, seek out formal relationships – reflectively’ (p.1). ‘The colour of the glass’7 The papers in the first section of this volume all deal with the impact of acquired ideas on the apprehension of landscape. This is both various (the range of such ideas covers philosophical aesthetics, religion, literature, biol- ogy, geology, agriculture, ecology and economics among many others) and variable, in that individual taste partly depends on the ideas that have primacy vii Introduction in the individual consciousness – though, as Brady argues, ‘possessing an intersubjective grounding’ and developed in a public context (p.16). Acquired ideas intervene between the viewer and the viewed. Hepburn observes that whether one’s religious bent is toward seeing in Nature the ‘divine archetype’ of the perfect Creation or a deeply flawed remnant of the Fall will inevitably colour one’s response to it (p.6). Benson notes that tracing a landscape’s history ‘on the ground … may constitute an aesthetic experience … even though, viewed ahistorically, the landscape is a dreary decaying one’ (p.39). Brady points out that scientific knowledge can influence aesthetic valuing, positively and negatively’: appreciation of ‘the unscenic – even of the creepy- crawly – may be possible through immediate, sensuous appreciation anchored in scientific understanding which provides a background ecological story to what might otherwise appear, superficially, as ugly’ (p.18); but, conversely, we may moderate our apprehension of beauty in the light of knowledge about detrimental effects on the environment, humans or biodiversity, as in the ‘cases of beautiful non-native species crowding out, damaging or even causing the extinction of other species’ (p.19). Both philosophical essays and case studies interrogate the interactions of ideas and land. Douglas describes how scientific knowledge about the ‘deep past’ in South Australia can confer public value on otherwise unre- markable landscapes; at Lake Callabonna, for example, with its remarkable Pleistocene fossils, she writes that ‘geological heritage [is] harnessed in the development of a landscape aesthetic appropriate to the “arid”, “flat”, “mo- notonous”, “barren” country of north-eastern South Australia’ (p.210).