Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 46

process of bringing together different elements to create a whole more
significant than the sum of its parts.
The simplicity of the Japanese tea-room tells us something important
about how we might design on a landscape scale. The first thing to note
is that tea-rooms are not designed, they emerge, 'built through a process of natural
accretion' . Tea masters used only locally available material and had an ability
to discover beauty and harmony in commonplace objects, such as trees,
fallen branches or decayed boards. The important point here is that these
items have multiple meanings. Simple rough thatch, for example, is there
to remind you of the splendour of cherry blossom in spring, as well as
of the luminous red maple leaves in autumn. This is the ambiguous code
for Edo, with simplicity and harmony producing a living and changing
series of landscape symbols, in which diversity grows over time as the
system responds to incremental changes that people make.
Japanese landscape painters were more willing than Western landscape
painters of the time to adopt a variety of formats, such as very wide
screens or tall parchments. Their landscapes were always diverse -
harmonious green hills covered with clumps of pink flowering cherries,
set against a golden mist. These hills are the satoyama of myth and mystery,
deeply embedded in Japanese culture and part of a rural vision called
satochi . These satochi are areas that are marked by great diversity in the
relationships between humans and nature, and embody the ideas of a path
to mutual compatibility for both nature and people. They contain furusato
- old settlements, places of community which give a special feeling to
people. Many, too, were commons, known as iriaichi , which persisted
without ecological destruction until the mid 20th century. Overall they
are culturally important diverscapes of paddy rice, orchard trees, groves, hills,
rivers and high mountains. Today, though, satochi are under threat because
of modern patterns of economic development. 46
This is the problem: modernism creates monoscapes. It is a kind of
fundamentalism because it suggests that there is only one way, and no
others can be correct. Monoscapes are dysfunctional systems. They are
good at one thing, but people do not much care for them. In truth, a
monoscape is less valuable than it appears, largely because value is captured
and claimed by a small number of stakeholders . Poverty persists in the
monocultural ideal, though it is clearly present in many societies that we
may wish to call traditional. There is also social injustice at the core of
wilderness monocultures. In order to make them 'wild' and 'untouched',
the people who live there have to be removed. They are then replaced by
tourists, who visit to experience the natural and real landscape upon which
a new order has been imposed. By contrast, a polycultural approach accepts
differences and the value of the whole.