Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Interest in landscape and nature in the Nineteenth century is of two types: on one
hand, there is a romantic zeal for untouched wilderness, in which the countryside
is a place to escape society, while on the other hand, townspeople show a growing
interest in the countryside as a place for relaxation after their daily work activities.
The first tourist guides emerge, and the idea of protecting remarkable, historic or
untouched places gains ground with the development of industry and the natural
sciences. The first tourist clubs are founded and people begin to build what is known
today as tourist infrastructure. On the other hand, the processes of industrialisation
and urbanisation, spreading from Saxon cities, are unfolding.
With the onset of Communism after World War II, the Czech landscape entered
a breakthrough period - one of major landscape changes. The collectivisation and
nationalisation of agricultural businesses and the introduction of socialist (i.e. col-
lective) land ownership left permanent scars on the landscape that have still not
healed. Following the Soviet model, individual fields were consolidated into a huge
expanse of farmland. Balks were ploughed over and large land reclamation canals
were built, accelerating the outflow of water from the natural landscape to trained,
straight-line watercourses with paved-over concrete beds. Eighty percent of agri-
cultural land was in the hands of farming cooperatives (called Standard Farming
Cooperatives) in the period from 1955 to 1958. According to a 1958 central gov-
ernment directive on land consolidation, fields were to be optimised for the use
of mechanised equipment, i.e. fields were required to have as few shape irregular-
ities as possible. The directive also emphasised that crops were to be unified so
that continuous blocks of fields were not disrupted by small forests, meadows or
pastures.
This centrally controlled process had a much more profound impact on the
Sudetenland. The reason was that some 3 million Germans were displaced from
there after World War II. Some remote areas remained unsettled by the Czech inland
population. Many settlements perished and almost one third of the agricultural land
was left fallow. In the north-eastern Sudetenland, these negative trends were further
exacerbated in the 1970s by an environmental crisis caused by heavily concentrated
industrial enterprises. There were power plants burning brown coal extracted from
large open-cast mines in the area, as well as intensive chemical production. The
result was an overall deterioration of all the elements of the landscape (signifi-
cant air pollution, degradation of soils, impaired vitality of the river systems and
deterioration in the health of the forest stands).
8.2 The Concept of Landscape Memory
Before we can show the characteristics of landscape memory through actual
examples and its interpretation for the purpose of landscape planning or for the
development of options for landscape development scenarios, we need - as out-
lined in the previous section - to think more deeply about the concept of landscape
memory and its former applications and we need to define it as a term.
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