••••
Landscape is not environment — not Umwelt, in von Uexkhüll’s terms. As one takes part in the characteristics of landscape (temperature, visibility and the like), landscape remains at a distance, which may really be insurmountable — but treating landscape as non-environment attempts a direct engagement, if not with the landscape itself, then with the remoteness of it.
••••
Landscape is not nature — it is a negotiation of space where human and non-human may constitute itself. In the presence of matter, landscape is the ultimate locative determinant, an overlap of innumerable agencies almost entirely unaware of one another.
This is not an attempt at a definition.
••••
The failure of landscape theory is it raises questions that want to be answered reductively, almost as if converting landscape into interior space, something less uncooperative. Even cultural terms, given cultural definitions, get blurry. Landscape is only half cultural. Perhaps, theory could turn poetic. The readership is already in the single digits.
••••
Cozens’s monochrome studies were antinaturalistic: geomorphology doesn’t run on randomized shapes created ex nihilo. But they do suggest a reversal — that landscape, in turn, could be seen as a number of flat stains. Dimensionality matters only in motion. Sight is a stationary projection and doesn’t care.
••••
Occasionally, you get a glimpse into a timeline of regrowth — where after two hundred years, a lava field is only yet occupied by lichen, soil accumulation now even ready for basic plants. Geologic timelines are tales of pressure — these are the tales of catching dust.
••••
Enter modern aesthetic theory. A Heideggerian landscape would be a promise of fullness — Adornian would warn against it as form of entrapment. Their overlap is engaging the land as medium, and that is precisely our condition: a stepping out, amalgamated with every ethical problematics, benign only when temporary, local, and small.
••••
The desert is almost entirely absent from the US painting of Westward expansion — instead, it shows lush valleys, game and water sources immediately at hand. Places to take first. All of the inhospitable in-between appears later as action scenes, mythologized remembrances of conquest, made for the winners’ self-praise. It took O’Keefe in the 1930s to fill the gap.
••••
Gendering the landscape as female is usually interpreted as passivity, but it answered for natural disasters also. The Bacchae illustrates this best — an old fear that once unrestrained, a woman can rip her own son’s head off without even recognizing him. Thus, an earthquake could have been seen as just landscape at her most Dionysian, so to speak.
••••
Ecological all-connectedness lingo is so impotent not for the lack of verity, but by being rooted in economics, quantifiable relations, the exact mode of thinking revolutionary for the moment the environment was conceived of, useless against the paradigm that conceived it. Valuating trees as dollars saved on air conditioning — works in a presentation; leads to a dead end.
••••
PhilPapers survey shows a curious (albeit not a statistically significant) correlation between moral realism and objective aesthetic value — and also a tendency to underestimate how common this opinion is.
Perhaps one should write about trees as the opposite of violence, Bertold.
••••
Modernism has produced both the bleak industry-adjacent housing ghettos and the national park system — an idealistic compartmentalizing of the nature/culture divide. Now, when the two are mixed, they are still mixed in pure form, as green areas on top of waste treatment plants, making one more at ease with overproduction, rather than seeing it as something unsolved.
••••
Certain pictorial traditions — notably, American and modern Chinese — equate the grandeur of natural and man-made, canyons in concord with hydroelectric dams. How this works may have to do with having the natural grandeur serve social mythology — in this case, that of the destined Eden, or a good state. Idealizing the land is, in this case, prerequisite.
••••
Everything vernacular speaks of coherence, landscape is no different. Things exist in agreement, be it between soils and seasons, rocks and buildings, paths and their directions — a metaphor of a world one can indeed live in, if not entirely understand it — rapidly decohering into a terra near the outskirts. For the commons, clarity is alignment with daily use.
••••
Sometimes, invasive species look really beautiful — fitting, somehow in tone with the land, such that their removal will take away something precious — all while still choking out the rest of the ecosystem. The feeling doesn’t have to be wrong; perhaps it is simply a byproduct of the inherent goodness of things.
••••
Wherever violence is present on the landscape, it asserts itself against the explorer’s will — which is what makes it violence in the first place. Thus a military radar would have a warning one may not look at it during its operation, so as to not irradiate the irides. A metaphor so stark it hardly needs specifying.
••••
There often appears to be a certain anxiety about focusing on things entirely outside of oneself in that, as the narrative goes, we’re still entirely trapped in the subjectivity of our senses, and thus writing about landscape is simply projection. The crude version of the response would probably be that landscape is capable of killing its inattentive viewer, without as much as noticing them. Room temperature may be subjective; mountain conditions aren’t.
••••
In a way, we can’t actually project ourselves onto the landscape because being there entails a need to define oneself once again. Projection is, of course, a failure, but it’s a failure to be, not just to separate. Which is another reason anthropomorphizing the land is hardly an issue: the land is much more likely to terramorphize the viewer, as it already does.
••••
Greek φύσις originally meant growth, then being, then composition, and now it’s all material reality and its workings. Cartoon villains struggling for world domination have something to learn from words.
••••
Timothy Morton famously suggested that the whole might as well be smaller than the sum of its parts. One does not need to agree — but if we took landscape to be a composite entity, made up of pushes and pulls of constituent agents — it appears both more and less impoverished at the same time. Perhaps the entire descriptive principle is at fault, but at which stage.
••••
Jared Diamond, echoing Rousseau, once called agriculture the worst mistake of the humankind — and while the statement does not stand well to scrutiny, it’s nonetheless hard not to be reminded of it when seeing a plowed field in the Arctic, a self-imprisonment for the sake of predictability.
••••
We make nothing entirely on our own. Landscape produces our food, building materials and electricity, we just learned how to tap into it. The reason we think of land as a passive agent is because of the history of land ownership. Ownership is projected passivity.
••••
It’s impressive how even in the most hostile environments, their indifference always on full display, man still manages to think they’re still somehow about him. A British polar expedition was once stranded on the ice during the long night, yearning for the sun to appear again — which it did, whole two weeks early because of the atmospheric lensing, an event wholly interpreted as a divine intervention. I mean, sure, why wouldn’t God move the sun for an Englishman?
••••
Habitable parts of uninhabitable areas induce an illusion that the world exists for and because of people. Uninhabitable parts dispel that illusion. The same, to a lesser extent, applies to navigable parts of non-navigable areas: we carry the illusion with us on the paved roads and inside air-conditioned vehicles, as if it itself was part of our ecological niche.
••••
Roads and paths are the elements of consensual logistics: it’s the route that a critical number of actors agreed to be of the least distance and effort, and they last only as long as the consent does.
Free roaming is different in that it is strictly between the actor and land itself.
••••
If landscape, as W.J.T. Mitchell suggests, is the dreamspace of ideology, then ideology in turn can be subverted through landscape.
••••
Landscape is almost entirely absent from cave paintings, and so are maps. The earliest examples come from the Neolithic — on the Çatalhöyük mural, where the top-down view of a village is juxtaposed against a volcano eruption. It’s as if landscape as a concept was a Neolithic technology, something emerged from altering the land.
••••
Wartime detritus is everywhere in the Arctic. In a land that preserves so well that the village floors from thousands of years back are still visible — does the violence of the war still linger? Do places somehow retain it, or are they redeemed by the grass growing thick on the nitrogen where the blood was spilled?
••••
It’s curious that in the Western tradition, the emergence of ‘true’ landscape is concurrent with the writing of Descartes, where the primacy of the subject turns the entire world into a picture — thus, a naturalistic landscape becomes the ultimate representation of the world.
••••
Interestingly enough, the current use of the word ‘space’ also dates to about the end of the XVII century. Space and landscape are contemporaries.
••••
We’re never told exactly why the fruit of the ground was rejected. Could it have been that even late into the Neolithic the agricultural process was seen as an act of impiety towards the earth — or perhaps that a settled life in general was seen as a stepping stone to enslavement?
••••
American nature photography is normally without people. You’ll never find a single person in a Sierra Club calendar. Yet some things, like bridges, lighthouses and railroads, are shown often, openly, as if bereft of human agency and natural in themselves — indirectly suggesting the area is both beautiful and accessible, a place for some prime real estate.
••••
It’s not that we are alienated from natural land, but land in general. People walking the Creek St. may be unaware it refers to an actual creek, presently underground — up until the street collapses into a sinkhole. We are not good at this. Infrastructure is constantly reworked and rebuilt, only to find new unforeseen issues. You can’t A/B test a storm drain.
••••
Petrarca may not have been the first person to ascend a mountain for pleasure — but having been remembered as such (and also as someone immediately ashamed of such nonsense), must he also bear the mark of the first man truly alienated from it, a proto-Romanticist and anti-Jerome?
••••
The proponents of the picturesque claimed to be after the ‘real scenery’ that would be true to nature as opposed to the forcibly harmonized one. Yet, their approach was also theatrical, which even the word ‘scenery’ implies. It focuses on what can be seen from a specific point of view — a window, a path, a summit — thus turning nature into a series of living tableaux.
••••
All land is mid-formation — but sometimes it rises faster than erosion can smooth it out, making a jagged, uneven landscape, still in perpetual flux. Settling such a land is similarly a process of constant change, a history of ecological takeover by introduced and invasive species, rise and fall of new industry, unreliable and stopgap. An undecided sublime.
••••
Sometimes, a place is lucky: it gets tied with a context of violence, but escapes having violence happen within it — spared the scathing that some receive by strategic consideration, and some by simply being where the violence “took place”. Still, they were chosen: in an act of topological sacrifice, their geography singled them out as the sites where, should violence happen, it will commence. An unerasable choosing.
••••
The American myth of the dark forest is largely an inherited European narrative, formed in a different age, culture, and, most importantly, a different ecosystem. Yet this myth is still projected onto the modern young, often unsustainable monoculture forests that are largely results of reforestation, their histories openly visible in the land: one can identify plow terraces, lack of pillows and deadfall, uneven numbers of older and younger trees — all pointing either to agriculture, pasture land, or clear cuts. What then is a ‘true’ forest?
••••
City is placelessness. Optimized for shipping of goods and people, dedicated zoning, passage and property regulation, cities are measured in units and directions of movement. Dead ends are an oddity, something to be reworked — but until then they are possible places, small halts in the river flow. Few and far, they compose a separate city: reclaimed, peaceful.
••••
It's only true that places carry their history with them — social to geologic, the best and the worst of it. What's unclear is how we're supposed to take it. Places of tragic deaths and daily commutes, sources of freshwater for lands too far away to consider immediately related, historical sites detached from their contexts, local industry bordering with protected animal habitat, unorganized territories under unclear jurisdiction and enduring representation in mythologized past — all mixed together, the only thing one can actually clearly see around still, simply, beauty.
••••
What do we do if a theory of landscape necessitates a theory of everything? Accumulating data breeds new specialties, but adds to the fragmentation — while landscape is something walked, a sense of intimacy mixed up with logistics. In the end, what we carry out is perhaps gratitude, and a sense of non-human.
••••
There always is a degree of uncertainty in the world — yet the things available to us present themselves always so readily, so completely. Trees, poles, colors, signs, crossings and shapes — are the structural populace of the world, ever so prominent at the edges of habitat where human presence is inessential, interdependency showing itself in diffused signs.
••••
The tundric landscape resists those primary modes of interpretation that the West has inherited from XIX century painting — so it's no wonder that during the mid-1800s' the Arctic was deemed indescribable, the primary attempts of representation resorting to meteorological tables and scientific illustration. This not only makes the tundra as close as you can get to the 'landscape as is', devoid of human context and ideology — but also, a place where the rare familiar may seem most foreign and out-of-place.
••••
The language of landscape is usually that of persistence — though often it seems that a lot of young context is being poured into old skins. Within a few decades one and the same site can transition from a salt marsh into an industrial dumping ground, then back into a salt marsh — different parts still showing their old incarnations. And as the people that live nearby continue to come and go, the newcomers are likely to think this is how the place always was.
••••
The lyrical affirms a reality of received experience without subordinating it to explanatory means — a clarity without comprehension, when nothing needs to be done. It is this sense of limits that makes it akin to a sense of place.
••••
Groves, as spaces, are self-made. There is no one to sweep the floor. We discover them in the same way we discover freshwater sources and walkable paths — as anomalies, benevolent, maybe, but mostly just separate from the chaos between. This suggests selfhood, inarbitrariness, something beyond a coordinate grid.
••••
Sometimes a place is continuously occupied for millenia, and then one day it’s a national border, with a “PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK” sign next to the archeological trivia — and you have to wonder: what does this even mean, ‘at my own risk’? Am I to merely get arrested, or shot on sight?
••••
Volunteering at public parks is a lot of killing — which gets strange, as you are perfectly aware invasive species aren’t doing anything wrong, the whole thing gaining Kurtz’s “without judgment” vibe (sadly, not in the book) — and worse yet if you just, like, really love wormwood. And wish it no harm at all.
••••
Geography is an inheritance of romantic nationalism — a fixation on borders and landmarks making up macroentities, partially or wholly imagined. Uluru is either in Australia the continent, or Australia the country; native accounts are treated as not geography — as if one story topped another on the basis of better maps. And which of them are better?
••••
The making of an altered terrain is not dissimilar to that of a representational image: it is composed, framed-out, it uses displaced materials in low supply, and it eventually sets tone. An altered land is representational of itself. Hence, an overlook, a “living panorama”, is the best chance for a spectator to enjoy the view without suspecting something is deeply off.
••••
Ritter called landscapes aesthetic experiences par excellence, on the basis of viewer’s disinterestedness — but it is not entirely true. People may not work the land like they used to, but try and challenge the popular notions of nature whatever they may be (worst of all, national), and the reaction goes off the rails. In the emotional landscape, everyone is suddenly a landowner.
••••
We keep reconstructing groves — first, by turning them into temples, now by turning them into parks — a recurrent domestication of sacred space that was originally self-made, found, unmitigated by anything social. It’s as if a need of placehood was part of human cognitive modernity, concurrent with language, art, religion, and game.
••••
Medea hypothesis is fascinating — basically, saying evolutionary complexity leads life to upend chemical composition on a global scale, killing itself in the process, and getting everything to roll back to bacteria, the only biosphere both stable and reactive enough in the long run. It speaks of the very nature of life from the chemical standpoint: inequilibrium.
••••
In “50 Steps to Landscape Thinking”, Thomas Oles proposes we get down on our knees and dig — something that would presumably look comical to our land-unalienated ancestors, a yet another symbolic action as distance. Residual Romanticism’s insistence on non-belonging is in stark contrast to Emersonian ownership in the metaphysical sense — but both, importantly, only obsess over people. The outside is still only a stage.
••••
In Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist”, it’s once the bounds are overstepped that a seasonal tide feels like a retribution. We know that nature is always changing. If we take the fact seriously, any and all change gets morally neutral, mass extinctions included. Ecology becomes moral through guilt.
••••
At present, the legality of environmental protection still bases itself on people. The biosphere has no standing. The achievement of earlier movements was to refocus ideas of public ownership, which in the West are descended from Roman law.
This is a mostly dead end — as in, cannot be optimized any further. Whether it will suffice is yet to be seen.
••••
Protection is a claim of sovereignty — all the more so since we tend to protect our own niche: woods, meadows and river flows, areas that would otherwise be used up and built over. If we believed they really belonged to nature, it would have to be given a legal standing — something too consequential to actually be considered. When we say we protect — we mean it is ours whole.
••••
The irony of this writing is, of course, its attempt to present landscape theory as explicitly not a wilderness. In truth, it is more of a HAZARD sign at the entrance.
••••
Gated communities often employ a pronounced createdness: guards, walls, pools of sharp geometric figures, a locality based solely on a contractual title. Others attempt to hide it in faux-traditional architecture, posing remoteness minutes away from the downtown, in a private holdout on public land. Both are signaling inefficiency, a refusal to live as the land does.
••••
One of the earliest observations on the effects of anthropogenic deforestation is found in Plato, of all people (Critias, iioC—iiiD) — a philosopher, studied throughout in his talking the virtues of man and the ideal objects, all but erased on practical consequences of land use. Only the magnitude is surprising; the fact in itself is not.
••••
Jus soli can be interpreted as a newborn’s right over land, or a land’s right over newborn. We think of legalese as founded on precision — but it turns into ambiguity in the face of uncountable and abrupt, waters that aren’t there and rains that may not come. It may also be an uneasy ally, a way to bypass the archaic treaties without having to abolish them first.
••••
To further the muddying. A belief, common during the Westward expansion — that “rain follows plow”, and somehow also mines, rails and telegraph wires — was narrowly vindicated through study of airborne microbes, capable of forming precipitation. The theory then was mistaken mainly in focusing on people, rather than soil and rain for their own sake.
••••
So, are we, or are we not separate from nature? Differences in kind are modal, which is to say arguable. At particle level, life is an irrelevant quirk of mid-scale organization — but once the differences in kind are introduced, there is no limit to them, differences in kind in differences in kind. As soon as something can have a soul, it can have many.
••••
Binary logic is tied with Platonism, perfect forms that open the world to the strangeness of things, but then limit it to just one kind of strangeness — hence the nature/culture divide. So while Clarke’s “things we did not make” does, certainly, ring true — the unending debate whether or not we are nature, is largely missing the point. Nature is not nature.
••••
A poetic theory of landscape would treat its own sentences as something akin to places — uncertainties, hovering at an entity-like level of being, but never quite coming together in a definitive whole. Boundaries are most real when they are half-boundaries. Everything else needs to be propped up by force.
••••
Sustainable production restages the same narrative of man’s gentle stewardship of the world civilizations have talked about since the Neolithic — the implication being that, despite everything, we perceive ourselves in control.
It’s not that solutions derived from guilt are not perfect — it’s that they aren’t innocent either.
••••
Polar explorers spent years in preparations, funding, selecting crew, all to get to the damn place, and then still called it “accursed land” in their field notes. Why? For all the hostility (really, indifference) of the place, it takes wanting to be there to actually go. Or else these most adamant of men really did just want to claim it all for the crown, in which case… what a waste.
••••
It is bizarre to hear a park ranger say the woods at night spook him into perceiving his own humanity. Belonging is a created problem. If the criteria is inseparateness, it is achieved through presence and risk, having to walk the ground, breathe, suffer the elements — none of which is exclusive to marmots and St. Jerome. Putting a high bar on belonging is a fantasy of being apart.
••••
Left alone, the land usually remembers — or lets go on a geological time scale. So there’s a mild irony in that human impact can only be erased by ways of a bigger impact, a very manual task. A nuclear weapons plant can be raised, covered with soil brought over, and grass will grow. But does it really become — a grassfield?
••••
In the context of Prynne’s “Huts” — if landscape and language are not dissimilar, then the impoverished/seasonal/deathcamp refuge is not a fitting parallel for prosody. Sure, the open field is a place to die of exposure, and a fully urban setting is surrender to readyspeak — but the nomadic, for all it can be, can not be illiterate. It necessitates closeness.
••••
Landscape is not a neutral subject — it is a total one. Hence the reason it can be used in pictorial arts for every imaginable agenda, but also why it makes evident a pictorial incompleteness.
Being elusive makes it an inexhaustible counterforce. This is good. If we really were in control, we would probably just die out.
••••
Landscape research often delves into the question whether the term itself is at all coherent or needs to be thrown out. It may seem an overreaction — but the ontological ambiguity is the point, in the same way that being a person persistently carries a haunting of being, conceivably, not a person.
••••
Anthropogenic climate change can be described as decaying history, a dethronement of instrumental systems that should, ideally, use everything and leave nothing behind.
Pollution is the stuff of remainder meanings.
No wonder it often appears beautiful, in the most conventional sense.
••••
In Enūma Eliš, the state is the true creation; the world and everyone in it a mere byproduct. The natural is not just subordinate — it is a legacy of defeated revolt, a guilt-based enslavement. Rivers obey irrigations because they are of a dead god. Opposing development is thus reenacting a cosmological failure — which, on some level, is something we still believe.
••••
Expanding the list of ironies. The immense popularity of barn, pasture, cornfield and other rustic agricultural imagery — fetishizes the labor of the last class of people that don’t really have a sentimental relationship with the land. It’s not only that we urbanites don’t want to kill the cattle we eat — we’re also just plain glad someone somewhere still does it.
••••
Something is true when it participates in the world — in other words, its structure may be semantic, but its basis is ontological. This is how features like form, style and composition are of the things they invoke, making it a vicarious, but persistent connection, an indistinguishable process of presence and absence, a melting and a withdrawal.
••••
Contemporary takes on New Topographics get strangely purist, far more so than the original crowd, outside Jenkins, has ever been. Fields of invasive plants, windbreaks and marked trails are often denied recognition as man-altered, pushed out by the aesthetics of deadpan walls, masquerading as method. Devolving into a genre.
••••
However unintentionally, botanical literature does treat the plants as willful and independent agents. They use toxins and spread seeds.
A further step would probably be to ask whether the plants could also be used by toxins.
••••
Local toponyms are predominantly functional, deriving from use and hazards of given sites. Non-local toponyms — the names of national figures, commemorations and industry terms — all subjugate the local to things explicitly elsewhere. A pretended ownership by distant interests and dead men. Only mountains, occasionally, still belong to the gods.
••••
In Appleton’s concept of prospect/refuge, being seen is only a problem when hiding from other people — as he bizarrely uses Hobbema’s “Alley at Middelharnis” to illustrate the refuge benefits of a ditch, something the painting was really not aiming at. Thus, not just this, but all painting is subverted into geography of human-on-human violence.
••••
Could the language of landscape be non-propositional? Things aren’t structured as statements, the models are. A rock or a tree might as well be a poem — giving itself to a totality of being that is unknown to it. A bearer of itself.
••••
Ironically, most of Altdorfer’s unpeopled landscapes really do feel without subject — a failure that is entirely compositional — so the harmonic powers of sainthood and form are essentially the same. Creation, revolving around a footbridge.
••••
The separateness of cities is already present in the earliest literature: Gilgamesh is said to have built the walls. Should it surprise that the rest of the story is his coming to terms with mortality — with the walls ending up both his eventual consolation, and the medium of his record?
Walls are, after all, archaeologically persistent. Some of Uruk’s still stand.
••••
‘Development’ is, of course, a misnomer. Early industrial era explorers wrote of the wilderness as God-forsaken, accursed, malevolent &c, all on the basis that the place lacked a convenient cow pasture at the moment of their arrival. The implication is not just that development is bound to human needs — it’s that meaning itself can not exist outside them.
••••
Studying landscape is antinaturalistic in the sense that it makes a manual task of what everyone else assumes to be performing casually and without effort. The catch is ubiquitous. John Constable’s Cornfield made asses of Salon judges for not knowing shit about agricultural cycles; it now makes asses of the general public buying its reproductions on dinnerware.
••••
There is a sameness to old growth communities, be they tropical, boreal or temperate — a visible balance in the pushes and pulls in the composition of species. Spaces are neither barren, nor choked, having no extraneous input, and no awareness of each other — driven, ironically, by overproduction and a dependency on decay.
••••
Environment emerged as a concept just as the Columbian exchange was destroying the ecological balance across the globe, suggesting that something like the von Humboldt’s Naturgemälde is not conceivable in an unconnected, but undisturbed state. It means that only a vanishing world can be captured. Not an exciting thought.
••••
Both climate change science and its denialism grew out of the nuclear war research — sometimes, down to the individual actors. It helps frame the issue. Sure, greed explains the industrial interests, but to the common denialist the unifying theme is apocalyptic, saying that we can poison the world just like we said we can bomb it — and life will go on as it always has.
••••
How places entangle themselves with violence is something one does not necessarily wish to talk about — but the subject forces itself on the speaker regardless, even if in obtuse ways. Violence, by definition, is nonconsensual. It’s only fitting that the theme of violence is as well.
••••
This writing does not unify, propose, or explain. Cautiously poetic, it attempts an emergence from a kind of interior space onto a kind of an outside. If the land is indeed semiotic, writing about land is, in part, a translation, a striving after an in-between language, unmediated by meaning. Turning one’s own language into this hidden one is the terminus of poetic speech.