Landscape and the condition of being.

One of the most resonant and multilayered terms in our English language is the word landscape. Landscape cuts down beyond the level of vocabulary into concept, beyond concept into perception, and beyond perception into philosophy. So based on this premise, the premise that individual words are not trivial, I want to explore landscape before I attach it to ecology.

Like many English words, this one seems to have multiple and simultaneous origins. The suffix "scape" derives from an old Germanic verb meaning "to create." That original old German term also morphed into another suffix, "-ship," which means a condition of being or a position, such as membership, friendship or township. At some point in scape's existence, it morphed into an Anglo Saxon version, which was "scipe," and also into an Old Dutch term "Schap." So we are going to follow "schap" in its peregrinations, as it combines to form the Dutch word landschap, which first appeared in the late 1500's, and which referred to a tract of land. As far as I can tell, landschap immediately took on some cultural baggage, as it evolved to refer to a group of local people banding together in common purpose, which in this case, was to reclaim land from the sea. So right away, you can understand how this ambiguity, this vagueness about where people end and land begins, bundled itself into the very earliest uses of the word landscape. Equally early on, in 1603 as a matter of fact, the word landscape was pre-empted by artists and turned into an adjective to describe an artistic genre. "Landscape painting," which the Dutch pioneered and excelled at, came to mean "painting representing natural scenery." Interestingly, it is this painterly definition of the term landscape that migrated into the English language, and morphed into the term we use today. So our language first appropriated the term in its aesthetic identity. It was only later that we came to use the word to define its contemporary and conventional meaning, that is, "a tract of land together with its distinguishing characteristics." Thus we were first introduced to landscapes through painting, and only afterwards did we recognize them in real life. Still later yet, all the way into the 1930's, landscape saw its first use as "landscaping," i.e., the laying out of lawns, gardens and trees for the purpose of beautification.

A couple of side notes on the word before I leave it. Interestingly, the word "escape" has a totally different origin than the word "landscape." And of course, our modern appropriations of scape, in the form of "seascape," "viewscape," "netscape" and so on, are totally wrongheaded. But in the crazy world of words, once there is a general and common understanding of a word's meaning, rightness and wrongness play absolutely no part.

As an example of this, I used to take umbrage when I heard individuals use the incorrect phrase "mute point," when they should have said "moot point," which is the correct phrase. But then when I realized I was hearing the incorrect version more often than the correct one, I knew it was time go mute on moot. In language, what is used is what is correct. But I will make one exception. One does hear the phrase "administrative landscape" occasionally, particularly in government circles. I find this totally offensive and a gross misappropriation of a lovely word into mindless bureaucratese.

So the fact that English-speaking people were first introduced to the word--and the concept--of landscape through the medium of painting, and only later applied it to real life, is a nice introduction to the conceit of this paper, which is that wild nature and human society are hopelessly and dynamically tangled, that our perceptions of nature change over time and space and culture, and that in the end, in spite of our western scientific habit of mind which steadfastly rejects any role for culture-based subjectivity, that this is a good tangle, a meaningful one, and the discipline of landscape ecology, which places that culturally loaded term, that icon of perception, right in its very title, might as well take ownership of the tangle.

Landscape painting itself is a good way to demonstrate the culture-bound subjectivity of landscape perception. The earliest European landscape painters did not even dream of painting natural landscapes--these were not considered objects of beauty--in fact just the opposite. So they painted gardens. And the earliest gardens were those highly formal, geometric affairs of clipped hedges and symmetrical beds of roses, all enclosed by high walls. But, just like landscape painting, gardens evolved too, from closed and formal, to open and formal, and then to open and informal, where you might say we are now. And currently, the gardening and landscaping sector is taking small steps in the direction of open and wild, of emulating nature with native plantings and xeriscaping. So if you take the garden (and here I'm using the term in the broadest sense) as the most common expression of "outdoors" as opposed to "indoors," or "outside" as opposed to "inside," you can see how its historical evolution is directional; wild nature steadily gains aesthetic legitimacy over time. The same evolution can be seen in landscape painting. I think it is probably fruitless to ask whether the garden designers or the painters were driving this evolutionary process. Chances are they fed off each other.

It is an instructive exercise to look at historical paintings of one's home area--in my case the BC Interior--to remind oneself how mutable our visions of landscape are. There is a delightful painting of the Upper Columbia River north of Invermere, with the Rockies in the background, done by the Englishman Sir Henry James Warre, in the 1840's. Along the wild banks of the Columbia he has depicted what looks very suspiciously like an English oak tree.

In the 1860's, Milton and Cheadle, two more English adventurers, passed through the Thompson River Valley near present day Kamloops. They were struck by the parallel glacial terraces along the hillsides, so one of them did an elaborate sketch depicting these. The result looks like a drug-induced science fiction landscape, of barren, perfectly conical hills arising at random from the valley floor, with level terraces sculpted into them.

In 1692, the young Irish explorer Henry Kelsey stumbled out of the forests around present-day Nipawin, Saskatchewan, and saw the grasslands that extended to the southern horizon and beyond. Kelsey, the first European to see the magnificent Canadian prairies, was distinctly unimpressed, and his journal entry was dismissive. He wrote, "over this plain in three days we passed, and saw nothing but beast and grass." Henry Kelsey avoided the prairies and couldn't wait to get back into the bush, because his cultural framework--in fact his whole life--revolved around the beaver, and he saw the prairies as one vast beaver-less wasteland.

Moving beyond these examples, there is another manifestation of this cultural subjectivity about nature and landscapes, one that has gotten us into a fair bit of trouble. And that is our conception of the western wilderness.

The common understanding of wilderness as a concept originates largely from American writers, artists and explorers of the early 1800's, as they described, painted and photographed the West. These observers saw a severely depopulated region, as a result of the smallpox pandemics of a century before. They experienced landscapes where the normally active land and resource management activities of the aboriginal people had been stilled for a hundred years. Burning activity had nearly ceased. Agriculture had ceased. And big game populations had skyrocketed, as the normally very heavy hunting pressure on them had been removed.

Imagine the state of mind of these same Western observers. They were full of Manifest Destiny, eager to shuck off the tired religions and philosophies of Europe. The North American West was truly the New World, and its magnificent mountains and valleys and forests and plains became their new cathedrals. Together, they took a collective cultural photograph of the looming Rockies, the ramparts of Yellowstone and the giant sequoias, and said, "this is virgin nature, unspoiled by the hand of man, in perfect balance and frozen in time: this is Wilderness." Soon after that native peoples were further decimated, herded onto Reserves, and then another, equally incorrect but more self-serving national myth was created, the myth of the noble savage, living in perfect harmony with nature, floating passively across the landscape but never manipulating it.

Thus these first explorers and writers totally misread the Western landscape, failed to recognize the anthropogenic influences on it, and failed to realize how dynamic it actually was.

Canadians more or less adopted this romantic American version of wilderness as grandiose, spiritually uplifting, untouched by humans, overrun by elk, and frozen in time. Fire, which is an essential part of these dry western ecosystems, came to be seen as the devil's spawn. The most successful marketing campaign in the entire history of advertising, which is Smokey the Bear, is a direct outgrowth of that flawed understanding of wilderness.