Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Human geographers, for their part, are no longer concerned only
with those aspects of landscapes refl ected in material culture, but
are now more interested in the underlying social, cultural, and
political processes that produce landscape and with the meanings
and values attached to it.
Human geographers still acknowledge their debt to Carl Sauer
and his cultural ecology approach to landscape but now adopt a
variety of interpretations. Landscape as palimpsest, for example,
encourages the evolutionary interpretation of landscape.
Landscape as taste and value focuses upon the alteration of
landscape to refl ect current vogues. Humanistic geographers seek
to view interpretations of landscape by painters and writers as
their ways of seeing. Descriptions of landscape as social process,
as text, or as identity, refl ect attempts to read into landscape the
human forces that formed it. Landscape has become a concept
that remains central to human geography. This is evident in the
American geographer Denis Cosgrove's description of the concept
as providing a focus on visible parts of the world, of suggesting
unity and order in environment, and as a record of human
interventions. Although some of the geographical interpretations
of landscape can accommodate this diversity, the key challenge
of integrating the physical and human qualities of landscape
remains.
One of the most promising approaches for landscape
geography is to build on the foundations of landscape ecology
by investigating the complexities of landscapes as coupled
natural and human systems. The integrated study of such
systems can reveal patterns, processes, and surprises not evident
when they are studied by physical or human geographers
separately. This is exemplifi ed well by interdisciplinary
investigations in the Wolong Nature Reserve for endangered
giant pandas in China. These studies measured variables that
link the natural and human systems, such as fuelwood collection,
