Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
limit human use of the area. The dikes, however, are often maintained through
human use as part of the moral economy that holds together the fabric of their
community, but this is little appreciated by environmentalists. The result is a some-
times nasty clash between environmentalists, who seek to maintain a sharp divide
between society and nature, and the farmers, who think of themselves as part and
parcel of the land they have made, as shown by the anthropologist Werner Krauss
(Krauss, 2006).
The 'non-modern' sense of landscape as used to apply to places or regions that
express the habitus of a polity/community may be subaltern to the modern scenic
sense, but it is by no means dead, neither in the Wadden Sea nor, for example, in
New Orleans. In an article in the
New York Times
we thus fi nd issues of law,
custom, culture, region and environment linked in a reference to the 'social land-
scape' of New Orleans where we are told that: 'The 'second line' clubs of New
Orleans, which lead the distinctive black tradition of Sunday parading, say they feel
threatened by new police fees, the latest sign of confl ict between old customs here
and the altered social landscape left by Hurricane Katrina' (Nossiter, 2006). The
landscape described in the
Times
is not an extent of scenic pictorial space, with the
various objects in it, but a complex of social, political and natural practices and
processes, that the police wish to control. But if the term landscape were to be
interpreted in scenic terms, with a foundational natural landscape that
determines
,
the social landscape upon it, then the
Times'
statement could provide a problematic
legitimisation for police suppression. It is possible that much of the antipathy often
expressed towards American landscape geography by British scholars (Jackson,
1989; Duncan, 1990) may owe to the fact that British scholars have tended to focus
upon landscape as scenic space, and thus may not appreciate the broad and complex
meaning of landscape as used, for example, by the Berkeley school. The term 'Anglo-
American' is often applied to both British and American geography, as if a common
language created a scholarly unity, but the fact is that American geography, like the
American people, derives from many different national sources, and it is clear, when
reading the work of Carl Sauer, that his understanding of landscape has been
informed by a broad personal and intellectual continental European background
which contrasts markedly with the narrow British understanding of landscape taken
by his critics.
The Present-Day Situation
Today, there would seem to be something of a revival of the idea of landscape as
region and place - a revival not in the simple sense of an unreconstructed resur-
rection of the old but in the sense of a new way of examining older concerns.
This revival is far from uniform, in terms of its intellectual details or its relative
strength, but it is real nonetheless. As Lesley Head (2007, p. 837) puts it, many
geographers interested in region and place have 'entered a post-humanist moment
and want to talk about the agency of [things like] wolves and trees'. This, she
continues, is generative of 'the idea of landscape as a bioculturally collaborative
product . . .' (p. 840). To give a fl avor of this new work, I want to list three
developments within British and North American geography that are proving espe-
cially infl uential at the present time. First, as Matthew Turner's chapter shows,
there is a rediscovery of the agency of nature within 'political ecology', an enor-
