6: Literature review second draft

I love to lie and lie to love
I’m hangin’ on they push and shove
Possession is the motivation
That is hangin’ up the goddamn nation
Looks like we always end up in a rut
(Everybody now)
Tryin’ to make it real compared to what

(McDaniels, 1967) (CHECK HOW TO REFERENCE A SONG)

In summarising the texts I have read so far, I would say the research issue I have been orbiting is the reality of nature.

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 by 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. Wyatt discusses Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) that contain ancient monuments. Rye Harbour Local Nature Reserve’s most iconic element is in fact the man-made Red Hut. Williams analyses 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 was surprised at the industrialisation of the Yangtze The Mother River, whereas at his talk at the Reiksmuseum about his project Objective Netherlands, Mulder describes how many of his random photographs of Holland show no sign of humans or their developments. I experienced the same walking the Thames Path for a project in the landscape module, 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, 1979:36-7). 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” (Poster, 1988:166). 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 experiential element is important, and controversial. Compare “the very idea of landscape implies separation and observation” Williams (p.120??? FIND QUOTE THIS IS A DIFFERENT EDITION) quoted by Cosgrove and Daniels ((Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988:7) with “‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as it were … a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant … I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb” (Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways, p. 255). Berleant suggests that an aesthetic engagement with nature involves more than a disinterested regard for a two-dimensional flat object. It is an encounter through space and time (third and fourth dimensions), which involves all the senses. Installation art, as well of course as land art or environmental art, seeks to provide some or even all of this experience to the viewer. Whether this is landscape, art, nature, or simply life, may remain a question. Breaking down the barriers between such definitions may be some of the point.

This idea is developed 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). But here we have an interesting point of divergence. For Greider & Garkovich “meanings are not inherent in the nature of things” (Greider & Garkovich, 1994:2) and I would tend to agree with nature as a cultural construction. To answer my research question, nature – at least as the “developed” world sees it now – is not real. Yet there is a twist to this. The authors discuss different cultural belief systems that give power to the elemental in nature – remnants of which exist as social fragments today in, for example, the Green Man culture in the UK. Such creeds, although without scientific basis, may have behavioural implications that are far more sustainable than the scientific land management developed from Victorian times. Hence the nature/culture binary can be collapsed onto an inclusive landscape if culture places nature in the foreground. This can be compared to the current situation where we have, relatively recently in terms of the history of the world, created the idea of monotheism, a supreme God responsible for the creation of everything, and then gradually killed off that God with science. We now sit in the Anthropocene as masters of a universe we won’t take responsibility for.

The culture of land ownership is much discussed in the literature. The indigenous approach to Yosemite was one of stewardship, violently dispossessed by the East to West land grab in Northern America. In Great Britain ownership of the land is longer standing but much contested. For Williams the development of agrarian capitalism began a more transactional attitude to land that had once been considered an inheritance to be passed on to the next generation. The “improvement of nature” (William, 1975:84) led to intensified land use. Developments such as drainage and soil fertility, and was used to justify the second wave of enclosures of common land (CHECK), are summed up by Fowles as “an unhappy legacy from Victorian science” (Fowles, 1979:34). Hence things may be more complicated than McDaniels lyric proclaims – possession may be part of the story but it is productivity that is the nub of the problem, particularly when land can be traded as a commodity. 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, 1979:56-7)

A culture that celebrates short-term yield increases may not have a long-term future in an environment that evolves over millions of years. There is irony in the phrase “buy land, they’re not making any more of it” – attributed to Mark Twain it is focused on investment – a shortage of the tradable commodity means its price will go up. It may, however, contain a different truth as we revalue the natural resources of a planet we continue to inhabit. The discount models used to value assets contain no terms for the Kantian “mathematically sublime, where the magnitude of natural things surpasses our aesthetic imagination” (Carlson & Berleant, 2004:81-2).

Carlson’s approach differs from Berleant’s, in that his key point is that “common sense/scientific knowledge seems the only viable candidate for playing the role concerning the appreciation of nature that our knowledge of art, artistic traditions and the like play concerning the appreciation of art” (Carlson & Berleant, 2004:71). Carlson feels that “for our experience to be aesthetic, this unobtrusive background must be experienced as an obtrusive foreground … The resulting confusion must be tempered by common sense or scientific knowledge” (Carlson & Berleant, 2004:72). But is what Carlson describes really an aesthetic experience. Perhaps it is a question of what is meant by “foregrounding the background”. This is relevant to discussions of Ginsburg’s hunter and in particular my strong sense that to survive in a natural environment a hunter must be familiar with the ground (background), not looking for specific things in it but open to exceptions that occur. I would suggest the appropriate attitude is best described as turning down the personal foreground to be receptive to the background – almost a meditative state, relaxed but perceptive. This small but important difference leads me to conclude that Carlson actually misses the point, addressed brilliantly by Macfarlane by advocating a “middle voice” (Macfarlane, 2016:34), “Precision as a form of lyricism, attention as devotion” (Macfarlane, 2016:61). This can perhaps be extended to photography – the ability to describe in great detail fused with the aesthetic, which (for me at least) are both important qualities that when combined make great photographic art. Work that can celebrate the land in an enlightened approach (appropriate word for photography).

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). I believe Rye Harbour can be seen as a third order simulation, a hyperrealistic construction of nature. In the critical review for the Landscape module I argued that National Parks can be seen as a form of environmental art. Cosgrove and Daniels take a similar line: A landscape park is more palpable but no more real, nor less imaginary, than a landscape painting or poem” (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988:1). However for Mitchell this means that landscape has come no further than its representation as an illuminated text in the Middle Ages: “The quintessential modern experience of this new ‘book of nature’ is the stroll through the scenic wonders of a national park with a plastic earphone that responds to electronic triggers embedded at strategic locations along the path” (Mitchell, 1980).

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. In fact a more convincing truth may be found, not in the words of a critic of film art, but in the dialogue of an actual movie:

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. Furthermore by making a virtual exploration of Rye Harbour (a place I have described above as a third order simulation) using 3D modelling we can create a fourth order simulations –  a difficult concept only encountered “as an avatar in the postmodern world’s second life”(Lane, 2009:133). In this case the viewer becomes the avatar in a virtual re-make of the constructed landscape.

“Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world. … Human meanings are no longer understood as world-producing but as being, in their turn, products of the ‘nature of things'” (Berger & Luckmann, 1967:89). Greider and Garkovich go some way to proving this concept by examining how different groups – for example the Native American Indians vs the Prospectors – see the environment. For my purposes it is interesting that reification, within the World of Computer Science, refers to the creation of a data model. In this case we construct a model of Rye Harbour in an attempt to reveal the reification of the LNR to the viewer.

Thus we answer our question of the reality of nature by decoding it, to reveal a cultural construct. We then rebuild it virtually in the eyes of the future as a visual model. Our fourth order simulation is hopefully a stimulating experience for the visitor but its use value may extend beyond the fourth wall since hyperreality “isn’t a fake existence …. it is another type of reality, and that is how the subject experiences it” (Lane, 2009:98). Again a greater truth may be found in the plot of a science fiction film: there is no Tree of Souls on planet Earth that will allow the Jakes of this World to permanently transfer to their Avatar (Avatar, check timestamp). We must come to terms with a sustainable reality, since it is the only one we’ve got.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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31. 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)