Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“nature” is largely a human invention and that it will continue to evolve in
response to changing physical, social, and cultural conditions.
The protean quality of this idealized nature is evident in the multitude
of ways in which Washingtonians have attempted to alter their environ-
ment. Washington's “natural” environment has been shaped by Native
American cultural practices; by the Enlightenment rationalism of Wash-
ington, Jefferson, and L'Enfant; by the picturesque aesthetics and romantic
ideologies of Downing and other nineteenth-century park advocates; by
the pragmatic concerns of businessmen and public works purveyors; by the
grandiose ambitions of the Senate Park Commission; the social theories of
Progressive reformers and postwar urban planners; by the ecological doc-
trines and recreational motives underlying the late-twentieth-century envi-
ronmental movement; and by the multitudes of people who have shaped,
experienced, and conceptualized it in their own daily lives.
While new “natural” environments and new modes of experience will
undoubtedly arise, many of the beliefs and practices outlined above have
shown remarkable resilience, as have the physical landscapes they helped
produce. Some invented natures and landscape ideologies have faded away,
but others have taken root and flourished. So much so, in fact that their
constructed natures have often been forgotten and they are assumed to be
fortuitous survivals of Washington's primeval landscape. Few visitors to
Washington's “natural” areas realize the degree to which the environments
they encounter reflect complex legacies of social, political, and technolog-
ical developments. Even overtly artificial spaces such as the Mall and the
cherry-tree-bedecked Tidal Basin have become so deeply ingrained in the
cultural consciousness of Washington that they now play important roles in
shaping perceptions of the nature of nature in Washington. From a biolog-
ical perspective, moreover, many of Washington's artificially produced envi-
ronments are so thoroughly ensconced and intricately intertwined with
more putatively “natural” systems that it is difficult if not impossible to say
where “artifice” ends and “nature” takes over. Given the shifting contours
of our cultural definitions of nature, mapping the borderline between “real
nature” and “artificial nature” would appear to be a fruitless endeavor.What
is clear, however, is that Washingtonians will continue to debate the appro-
priate form and function of the region's “natural” environment, building on
past beliefs and practices to invent new landscapes and new ways of think-
ing about them that will inevitably be supplanted by even newer concep-
tions of the nature of nature in Washington.
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