The roots of environmental aesthetics reach back to the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers who found nature an ideal source of aesthetic experience. Today, having blossomed into a significant subfield of aesthetics, environmental aesthetics studies and encourages the appreciation of not just natural environments but also human-made and human-modified landscapes. Nature and Landscape is an important introduction to this rapidly growing area of aesthetic understanding and appreciation. Allen Carlson begins by tracing the development of the field's historical background, and then surveys contemporary positions on the aesthetics of nature, such as scientific cognitivism, which holds that certain kinds of scientific knowledge are necessary for a full appreciation of natural environments. Carlson next turns to environments that have been created or changed by humans and the dilemmas that are posed by the appreciation of such landscapes. He examines how to aesthetically appreciate a variety of urban and rural landscapes and concludes with a discussion of whether there is, in general, a correct way to aesthetically experience the environment.
A new way of looking at the relationship between man and nature is necessary as conventional approaches to nature conservation are failing. Maltzahn shows alternative ways of understanding drawing on evidence from philosophy and the history of science (phenomenology, visual thinking, Gestalt psychology)
Originally published in 1984 Nature’s Ideological Language examines the common ideological roots of environmental reclamation and nature preservation. In the general context of European, British and American historical experience, the Jutland heaths of Denmark are taken as a concrete example for a general critique of European and American policy concerning the use of landscape. Two sets of contradictions are highlighted: ideological and practical between development and preservation; and those between scientific, historical aesthetic and recreational motivation for preservation. The book is based on a study of the Jutland heath from 1750 to the present, focusing on the Danish perception of the area as expressed in literary art and in economic journals, topographies and government reports. Against this background, the development of the modern conception of nature is traced and its ideological implications and planning consequences discussed. As a study of humanistic geography, this book will be of interest to geographers, conservationists and planners.
Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig’s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies. Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.
The book focuses on the relationship between nature conservation policies and landscape policies. This is a relevant subject due to the current need of reviving nature conservation policies, which are today affected by a general effectiveness deficiency. To this end, landscape policies can play a crucial role, bridging nature and culture, fostering more integrated approaches to nature conservation and stimulating the active participation of local communities. The book gathers reflections, researches and experiences developed on an international level on this subject by experts coming from different international contexts (Europe, U.S.A.), various disciplinary backgrounds (geographers, planners, biologists, historians, jurists, economists, etc.) and several institutional bodies (Universities, administrative bodies, international organizations such as IUCN, EUROPARC Federation, UNESCO, etc.). The overall reflections gathered in the book - which is divided in three main sections: regulations and institutional frameworks, policies, actions and tools - combine to suggest innovative visions about the relationships between nature policies and landscape policies.
The complexity and scale of the environmental problems confronting humanity today provoke a wide range of responses, from indifference to anger to creativity. Among a growing number of architects, landscape architects, and planners, however, these problems have inspired a new vision-sustainability-to guide their practices. In Nature, Landscape, and Building for Sustainability, a diverse group of contributors considers the concept of sustainability, both philosophically and practically. Some take a broad view of the divisions between nature and humanity, exploring the incomprehensible scale of human intervention in the natural world, the relationship between how we feel about nature and what we do about it, and the commodification of the natural world. Other essays focus on sustainable design practices: sustainability's roots in the American conservation tradition, its utility as a framework for future design practice, and the necessity of moving beyond demonstration projects into the mainstream. Together, these essays suggest that the gap between the promise and reality of sustainable design, although significant, can be bridged through diligence and practice. Contributors: D. Michelle Addington, Yale U; John Beardsley, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Albert Borgmann, U of Montana, Missoula; Peter Buchanan; Peter Del Tredici, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Robert France, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Susannah Hagan, U of East London; Kristina Hill, U of Virginia; Catherine Howett, U of Georgia; Niall Kirkwood, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Lucy R. Lippard; Bill McKibbin; Michael Pollan; Rossana Vaccarino, Vaccarino Associates, St. Thomas. William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is editor of five previous Harvard Design Magazine Readers published by the University of Minnesota Press. Robert L. Thayer Jr. is emeritus professor of landscape architecture and founder of the landscape architecture program at the University of California, Davis.
This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.
Neighbourhood landscapes are the quintessential forms of urban landscapes in most cities worldwide. They are pervasive, and hence experienced by the large majority of urban dwellers in their everyday life. More than parks, nature reserves or nature areas which are visited as destinations, neighbourhood landscapes provide the most immediate, frequent and convenient form of nature experienced by urban dwellers on a daily basis. They are also valuable as social spaces to bring residents together, foster social ties, and strengthen communities. Despite their importance, surprisingly little has been written to guide the planning and design of neighbourhood landscapes.This book is written for a specific purpose, to illustrate how the design of neighbourhood landscapes helps to deliver more benefits for urban dwellers and, at the same time, protect ecosystems that facilitate human well-being. This is in turn important as the synergistic relationships between human well-being, quality of biophysical urban environment, and health of human-environment interactions fundamentally underpin urban sustainability. The authors emphasize the role neighbourhood landscapes play in forging connections between people and nature, people and people, and people and place. Most of all, the book highlights the role of focusing on people in this endeavour, as it is only when landscapes are appropriately designed, and when people recognize these benefits, that they become valued and protected as a community resource.This book is organized into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the conceptual foundations that underpin the neighbourhood landscape design guidelines being developed. In this section, the authors describe the key concepts relating functions of neighbourhood landscapes to the key urban development goals of sustainability, liveability and reliance; how they can be represented in a framework; and how a synthesis of current knowledge of cities as socio-ecological systems helps to identify principles that can guide the designing of neighbourhood landscapes. Part 2 is more application focused, and is centred on neighbourhood landscape design guidelines inspired by the concept of ecosystem services. The guidelines consist of design approaches, practical strategies, design targets and performance monitoring indicators for tracking the performance of neighbourhood landscapes. The book is written for readers in academia and design practice, and anyone who has a role in shaping neighbourhood landscapes for the benefit of urban dwellers.
Nature is as much an idea as a physical reality. By 'placing' nature within Byzantine culture and within the discourse of Orthodox Christian thought and practice, Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium explores attitudes towards creation that are utterly and fascinatingly different from the modern. Drawing on Patristic writing and on Byzantine literature and art, the book develops a fresh conceptual framework for approaching Byzantine perceptions of space and the environment. It takes readers on an imaginary flight over the Earth and its varied topographies of gardens and wilderness, mountains and caves, rivers and seas, and invites them to shift from the linear time of history to the cyclical time and spaces of the sacred - the time and spaces of eternal returns and revelations.
One of the main problems and aims of nature conservation in Europe is to protect semi-open landscapes. The development during the past decades is characterized by an ongoing intensivation of land use on the one hand, and an increasing number of former meadows and pastures lying fallow caused by changing economic conditions on the other hand. In several countries the estabishment of larger "pasture landscapes" with a mixed character of open grassland combined with shrubs and forests has been recognized as one solution to this problem. The book gives an overview of the European projects concerning to this topic - nature conservation policy and strategies, scientific results and practical experiences creating large scale grazing systems.
