LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 66

first is most closely associated with the American cultural geographer Carl Sauer
(1963), who sought to describe the tangible morphology of landscapes as a product
of the active role of people in shaping the world. The second has been built from
the more recent work of British cultural geographers, focusing on the cultural
politics of landscape. It is a body of work that aims to understand how landscapes
are shaped in ways that privilege 'distanced, objective and penetrating' ways of
seeing (Pickles, 2004: 83). Third, the diverse approaches to landscape as dwelling
seek to reclaim both its materiality, as well as to pay attention to the ongoing
association of labour and land - or the work of landscaping - that is discounted by
the Sauerian tradition of treating landscape as 'a tangible externality' (Wylie, 2011:
303). Hence Ingold (2000: 191) argues that landscape is neither 'a picture in the
imagination' nor 'an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human
order'. Rather it signifies the temporary and dynamic result of a dialectical
relationship between human agency and the lived-in world.
Kenneth Cumberland and Andrew Hill Clark, both with close links to Sauer,
provided the first academic expositions of New Zealand landscape change in the
colonial period that fostered the Anthropocene conditions of today. Cumberland
highlighted the condensed time scale applying in New Zealand in an article arguing
that 'What in Europe took twenty centuries, and in North America four, has been
accomplished in New Zealand within a single century - in little more than one full
lifetime' (1941: 529). Clark published a well-known study of the South Island, the
central concern of which Elton was subsequently to echo, entitled The Invasion of
New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals (1949). More recently, writing on the
theme of landscapes of empire, W. J. T. Mitchell has suggested that 'Landscape
might be seen . . . as something like the “dream-work of imperialism”' disclosing
'both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of
unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance' (Mitchell, 1994: 10).
Materially, this 'dream-work' was mobilized by three practices of landscape pro-
duction: enclosure, improvement and biotic exchange. They are each deeply
implicated in the historical geography of industrial capitalism through what David
Harvey has called 'accumulation by dispossession' (Harvey, 2003).
Classical liberal thinking fashioned a basic restructuring of social relations with
nature. It was John Locke who laid the ideological and discursive foundations for
what is in effect the political philosophy of the capitalist social order in the
Anthropocene. For Locke, a just and efficient order was one based on individual
property rights over land, guaranteed by the state, as opposed to traditional
conservatism, hereditary privilege and absolutist government. He ascribed value in
nature as being conferred through the application of labour, and conversely
denigrated 'unimproved' nature as valueless, or lying 'waste'. His was both an
instrumental approach to nature and a characterization of society as based on the
control of land by those individuals who both own and arrange for it to be worked
(Barry, 1999; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). To attain this, it was necessary to
enclose resources held in common, including those for grazing, hunting and fishing.
This freed nature from complex customary restraints, at the same time as enabling