Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
mously important branch of geography in North America. Though some have
suggested that political ecology has lost sight of the material world, the so-called
'new' or 'non-equilibrium ecology' has been one impetus for some political ecolo-
gists to rediscover how local ecologies are integral to human practices at a range
of scales (see Walker, 2005; Head, 2007). Second, in the USA there is post-
Sauerian, post-Cosgrovian tradition of landscape research associated with Marxist
Don Mitchell and students at Syracuse University. Mitchell sees landscape very
much as a physical and material thing - not only a product the social processes
of whose construction must be deciphered, but also something that can reinforce
or alter human practices. So, for Mitchell, the materiality of landscapes is not
immaterial to the practices giving rise to their construction, maintenance and
decomposition over time (see Mitchell, 1996; 2007; Kirsch and Mitchell, 2004).
Finally, where neither of these two kinds of work especially accents the human
body, a third new area of research does: so-called 'non-representational geogra-
phy', which is very much a British phenomenon. This corpus of work, inspired
greatly by Nigel Thrift's writings, aims to 'reembody' human actors. For too long,
so non-representational geographers argue, we have analysed people as seeing and
speaking beings - that, as re-presenters of worlds - rather than as fl eshy, multi-
sensual, practical ones. Their aim has been to disclose the range of not-only-visual,
not-only-oral encounters we have with landscape with a view to depicting a more
fully 'human' human geography, as well as a more environmentally-embedded one
(see, for instance: Lorimer, 2005; Wylie, 2007).
There are important intellectual differences between these new 'joined-up'
approaches to landscape. For instance, the muscular conception of power and social
structure one fi nds in much of Mitchell's writing is apparently absent from the
'radical empiricism' so characteristic of studies by non-representational geogra-
phers. Even so, there is a family resemblance in all three cases, based on a commit-
ment to see landscape as very much about process, practice and action.
Conclusion
It is impossible for one person, with a particular disciplinary approach, to explicate
the many different ways landscape, region, culture and environment are linked in
fi elds as far ranging as cultural ecology, bioregional studies, physical geography,
landscape ecology etc., especially in an essay of limited length. The approach pre-
sented here sheds light on a modern world-picture that continues to frame, and
bifurcate, differing approaches to landscape, culture, region and the environment.
Readers coming from differing backgrounds should be able to apply this approach
to their own discipline, and discover for themselves how it may shape their disci-
plinary world-picture. Perhaps this can help them to think outside the box of a
modernism that has divided nature from culture and, thereby, physical from human
geography. Geography
-
insofar as landscape, region, and culture are concerned -
has entered a new intellectual phase wherein environment/nature are no longer seen
as things existing 'out there' waiting to be represented or else worked upon by
humans like a tabula rasa.
