In an attempt to summarise the texts I have sought out through the course so far, I would say I have been asking myself What does a Natural View look like in the Anthropocene?
Via OCA’s source text Anthropocene – Human Impact on the Environment I read Chapter 2 of Garrard’s Ecocriticism which outlines competing ecophilosophies – while I strongly disagree with the promethianism of Martin Lewis’s Green Studies I do believe that active management of the natural environment is essential in the Anthropocene. It is interesting to compare the practical and also hauntingly visual example of Peter Beard’s End of the Game with the Wilding approach at Knepp authored by Isabella Tree. Beard (a neighbour of mine when I lived in Kenya) began his book as an eccentric record of the last of the colonial big game hunters but updated it with the experience at Tsavo of a protected game park left to its own devices that experienced an elephant boom followed by bust when drought came and huge numbers of the overpopulation starved to death. The appropriately-named Tree advocates the species approach at Knepp described by Frans Vera (Grazing Ecology and Forest History) as “allowing them to express themselves freely, without human control”. In practice, however, interventions are made – for example the deer population is culled to avoid starvation. A key idea from Garrard, but echoed in The End of the Game, differentiates a flourishing population from a growing one.
Tree does raise a very interesting point regarding shifting baseline syndrome – how alterations in habitat are measured relative to recent situations – usually within the lifetime of the researcher. Williams explores this much further. He starts with comparing unmediated nature with working agriculture “in which much of nature is produced” (Williams, 1975:5). “Nature has meant the ‘countryside’, the ‘unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man. The use is especially current in contrasts between town and country: nature is what man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago – a hedgerow or a desert – it will usually be included as natural” (Williams, 1975:221-2). Of course the natural country scene regretted by visitors to Knepp is exactly this manufactured nature. Williams goes much further, analysing nostalgia in literature to conclude that nature is in fact a idea, an idyll constructed via an iterative process that he traces back to the Golden Age of Hesiod in 900BC. This literary ideal is no doubt enhanced by a kind of data survivorship bias – in many cases decent records of environmental indicators do not go back very far. The very concept at Knepp, which rejects the mainstream idea of closed-canopy forest as the natural state of climax vegetation before human intervention, is challenged by Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees. There is now considerable debate as to the historical nature of our landscape.
A psychogeographical version of this is described by Gregory in his paper Between the Book and the Lamp, recommended to me by my Tutor following my suggestion that our opinion about a landscape if filtered by our expectation of what it should look like. (Yan Wan Preston vs Reinjan Mulder). Yan Wan Preston was surprised at the industrialisation of the Yangtze The Mother River, whereas at his talk at the Reiksmuseum about his project, Mulder describes how many of his random photographs of Holland show no sign of humans or their development. I experienced the same walking the Thames Path for a project in the landscape model, encountering large swathes of countryside briefly interrupted by town and villages, at least until I reached Greater London. Of course whether this countryside is natural or a product of rural development may depend on how you look at it.
The question remains, what does countryside look like? In I to Myself, Henry David Thoreau says “the question is not what you look at, but what you see” (quoted in Tree – find original quote). That which you see is self-processed using language – what does countryside symbolise. This is subjective – Tree found that by far the most complaints about the Wilding project were “a question of aesthetics … destroying the native character of the countryside” but that older visitors (particularly any that could remember the time between the wars) remembered the countryside of their childhood as far more similar to the environment at Knepp. She goes on to observe that “Scotland and Norway, once identical twins, are now poles apart. And each country thinks its own landscape is natural” (Tree, 2019:265).
Fowles eloquently nuances the issue in The Tree “The very act of observation changes what is observed … the catch lies in trying to describe the observation” (Fowles, 1979:?Quoted in Nowhere Far p. 78 by Nicholas Hughes). This is a familiar conundrum for visual artists such as photographers.
William Christenberry made sculptures of the buildings he photographed, which he then (re)photographed. These “building constructions” (as he called them) were not scale models but creations from his memory with his photographs as reference. “I didn’t want it to be exact. I wanted it to have the feeling of what I experienced seeing” (MAPFRE, 2013:20).
Gregory uses the term “making scene” which suggests how the view is critiqued by the viewer as an adjustment of a mind model already in place. These “imaginative geographies” (the subtitle of Gregory’s paper) rather neatly dovetail with Baudrillard’s assertion regarding the “precession of simulacra” . The prototype, designed initially in the brain and most usually now taking form in some sort of digital simulation, comes first and hence becomes indistinguishable from reality – a hyperreality. Baudrillard develops his theme from Borges’s concept of the Map and the Territory in his very short essay On Exactitude in Science, which would in turn appear to be preceded by Lewis Carrol’s book Sylvie and Bruno Concluded – “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well”.
Wyatt delves deeper into the approximation of mapping when considering the work of Mellor (Island) and Power (The Shipping Forecast and 26 Different Endings). Wyatt finds that “geographical precision of method … was not of central importance within Mellor’s work” (Wyatt, 2019:144), rather that the mapping ruse provides a navigational tool for the viewer to move through works intended (speaking of Powell) to provide “an experiential view of the land” (Wyatt, 2019:147).
This idea is taken further by Rebecca Solnit in her essay for Yosemite in Time, a rephotography project, in which she describes how Yosemite is postmodern, is simulacral … ecologists are altering the place to resemble its own nineteenth-century image” (Klett,Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:19). In this National Park the experience of place offered aims to do nearly as well as the map on which it is based. Note hear that this memory (or baseline) is provided by photographs, although they largely depict how it looked at the end of a time when Native American Indians inhabited the land, co-existing sustainably with it but still actively managing it, for example creating small meadows with controlled burns that prevented larger conflagrations wiping out huge swathes of trees and also providing a much more biodiverse habitat. This is a practical case of the more philosophical point made by Baudrillard “critiquing the nature/culture binary opposition through which such sublime landscapes are usually interpreted. In his account, nature is already cultured, and culture has to take into account other alien signifying systems” (Lane, 2009:116).
The Rye Harbour Nature Reserve Management Plan 2012-2021 states that “Little of the LNR is natural” (Yates, 2021:40). In the Shaping of the Sussex Landscape I encountered the idea of the landscape as a palimpsest – from the Greek referring to a manuscript that has been partly erased to make way for new ideas. This quite neatly summarises what has happened with areas such as Rye Harbour which referring back to the management plan is a “result of natural features modified by a range of land management including agriculture, flood defence work and shingle extraction” (Yates, 2021:40).
Furthermore the text of Dr. Barry Yates’ talk to the Friends of Rye Harbour AGM reveals his conviction that “there is no doubt that the nature reserve will be washed away one day” (check quoting from a talk…) due to rising tide levels caused by climate change. This raises the interesting prospect that all the changes to the landscape will eventually be scraped away to reveal the original view underneath, as if recovering an old master.
Interestingly, this ultimate reality could be expressed now in a photograph of the sea at Rye Harbour by simply changing the context – i.e. the date. Yet in a digital world, simulations can go much further.
Benjamin states “that which withers in the age of mechanical production is the aura of the work of art” (Benjamin, 1935:3) yet with the benefit of hindsight we see that the aura has only been burnished by the interest drummed up by reproduction.
Bladerunner (1982, 0:54:20) is set in the futuristic landscape of LA in 2019 (four years ago):
Deckard: Is this a real snake?
Zhora: Of course it’s not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?
Victor Burgin, Returning to Benjamin nearly 90 years on, believes that “digital technology has dissolved the very category of ‘medium’ itself” (Burgin, 2022:27). In other words, the digital landscape is one which supports Baudrillard’s theorem regarding simulacra since everything within it is a replication. In the age of deep fake and AI it is getting more and more difficult to distinguish reality.
This is, it must be remembered, a visual philosophy. How many of us would exchange our real life for a digital one? Perhaps the argument collapses if we attempt to calculate the use value for our real planet, the one that we actually have to live on, at least for now. Importantly, how does this vary with sustainability and hence the discount rate used in the utility equation? However Fowles, in the Tree, would argue that an obsession with usefulness is where we have gone wrong: “This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives – and become effectively synonymous with pleasure … the modern version of hell is purposelessness.” (Fowles, 1979:?quoted in a review in the Guardian).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Barnes, M. (2019) Into the Woods: Trees in Photography. London: Thames & Hudson
- Beard, P. (1988). The End of the Game. (Revised and updated edition). San Francisco: Chronicle Books
- Beech, P. (2017). John Fowles’s The Tree is a humble revolt against ‘usefulness’. The Guardian. At: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jan/10/john-fowless-the-tree-is-a-humble-revolt-against-usefulness (Accessed 5.2.2023)
- Benjamin, W. (1935) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. UK: Penguin
- Bladerunner, dir. Ridley Scott, Warner Bros., US, 1982, 117 mins
- Brandon, B. (2009). The Shaping of the Sussex Landscape. Sussex: Snake River Press
- Burgin, V. (2022) Returning to Benjamin. UK: Mack
- Carroll, L. (1895) Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan
- Cramer, S. (2007) I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Connecticut: Yale University Press
- Fowles, J (1979) The Tree
- Garrard, G. (2012) Ecocriticism. London:Routledge
- Gregory, D. (1994) Between the Book and the Lamp: Imaginative Geographies of Egypt, 1849-50
- Hughes, N (2017) Nowhere Far. London: Gost
- Hurley, A.(1999) Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions
- Klett, Solnit & Wolfe. (2005) Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers. Texas: Trinity University Press
- Lane, R. (2009) Jean Baudrillard. Oxon: Routledge
- MAPFRE. (2013) William Christenberry. New York: D.A.P.
- Mellor, K. (1997) Island: The Sea Front. England: Dewi Lewis Publishing
- Poster, M. (1988) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Oxford: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers
- Preston, Y. (2018) Yangtze The Mother River – Photography, Myth and Deep Mapping. University of Plymouth
- Tree, I. (2019) Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. UK: Picador
- Wohlleben, P. (2015). The Hidden Life of Trees. London: Collins
- Wyatt, D. (2019) Landscape of Legislation: A Photographic Investigation of the Mendip Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. University of Plymouth
- Yates, B. (2021). Rye Harbour Nature Reserve Management Plan 2012-2021. At: https://dnu7gk7p9afoo.cloudfront.net/Files/management-plan-2012-2021-1.pdf (Accessed 13.12.2022)
Level 3.1 Learning Log 