Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 23

the frontier is seen as 'free', so it is taken, and this inevitably means conflict
and violence. Cronon and colleagues say:
Sometimes, it was perpetrated by individuals, and sometimes by the military power
of the state. Always, it drew dark lines on a landscape whose newly created borders
were defeated with bullets, blades and blood. 49
Today, such frontier experiences are played out in the rainforests, swamps,
hills and mountains of Latin America, Africa and Asia, and in the land-
scapes overwhelmed by modern agricultural technologies and narratives.
What is gained is one thing - more food. What is lost has been too often
invisible. Yet what is equally important are the cognitive frontiers inside
of ourselves. We each have a journey to travel if we are to find new ways of
protecting our world, while at the same time producing the food we need.
It Does Matter Who Tells the Story
Who gets to tell the stories matters greatly. Every piece of land or
landscape contains as many meanings and constructions as the people who
have interacted with it. A modern industrialized landscape, let's call it a
monoscape, has few meanings. By contrast, a diverscape has many. Thus, a
single story of the land is not the only story, though many would have
us believe it to be true. When the Europeans first brought their visions
to the Pacific and Australasia, they saw the landscape and met the people.
But they did not give them great value - that is, beyond curiosity and
museum value. They sought to save them, convert them, enslave them.
They imposed their stories on the landscape - even though Aboriginal
peoples in Australia had walked the land for at least 1500 generations,
and had accumulated extraordinary knowledge, understanding and
compelling stories over time scales beyond any persisting European
culture. 50 As Paul Carter describes, Captain Cook and the 'first arrivers'
and narrators saw an empty space that could be settled and civilized. 51 The
Australian landscape was awaiting history, and new stories could be created
and imposed upon others. They named all that they saw - in four months
over 100 bays, capes and isles. Carter says 'for Cook, knowing and naming were
identical' . Once these discovered places had been named for the first time,
so they were known. The landscape begins its process of being reshaped.
Cook sees, on deep black soils, 'as fine a meadow as ever was seen' . Such
meadows were rather like those of home, and echoed John Muir's observ-
ation of 'wild' meadows in Yosemite that were actually created by controlled
fires set by Native Americans.