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J.B. Jackson’s writings on actually existing American landscapes reveal their political and historical qualities, which he sharply contrasted with romantic and post-romantic conceptions of the environmental landscape. This essay examines the implication of Jackson’s work for environmental studies, suggesting that the landscape/anti-landscape binary has broad symbolic and political significance and may be a useful starting point for re-contextualizing questions of environmental governance. Landscape, anti-landscape, the western political imagination, J.B. Jackson, environmentalism
Author:
J.B. Jackson’s writings on actually existing American landscapes reveal their political and historical qualities, which he sharply contrasted with romantic and post-romantic conceptions of the environmental landscape. This essay examines the implication of Jackson’s work for environmental studies, suggesting that the landscape/anti-landscape binary has broad symbolic and political significance and may be a useful starting point for re-contextualizing questions of environmental governance. Landscape, anti-landscape, the western political imagination, J.B. Jackson, environmentalism
Author:
Abstract
In “Thoreau and the Desynchronization of Time,” Mark Luccarelli considers Thoreau’s engagements with various configurations of time. Luccarelli shows how Thoreau early on resisted what he calls a synchronization of time, whereby a “progressive, evolutionary understanding of history and nature” imposed a “temporal subordination of all places and peoples to a larger global pattern.” Giving his first examples from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Luccarelli identifies Thoreau’s essential problem with modernity: it created, to his view, a crisis of national character, bolstered as this was by vaunted means toward unimproved ends. Yet at the same time, Thoreau was not immune to the dominant discourses of the day and allowed that some of the aspects of progress they promoted were worthy (exploration, bravery, diligence). Perhaps above all, Thoreau’s becoming aware of industrial development and other human activities in his beloved Maine wilderness left him ambivalent. In Luccarelli’s provocative telling, Thoreau “was caught among colliding time scales” and can be recognized as our contemporary, as we continue to struggle to understand temporality, as well as ourselves as beings, in the complex continuum that we experience as time.
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Abstract
The medieval city represented in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s town hall frescos in Siena, Tuscany is an example of the city as a space in-between. Analyzed through the categories of Edward Soja’s “Thirdspace,” medieval urbanism reflects paradoxes of the relations of environment to urbanism to space. Historically the unfortunate but also necessary re-territorialization linked to the rise of the capital city and nation-state, meant that the imaginative achievement of medieval third space was not sustained, though related thirdspaces survive in altered form in the guise of landscape and region.
Cultural and Political Perspectives on Environmental Discourse
Spaces in-between goes beyond the emphasis on externalities signalled by the term ‘environment’ to address the isolation of modern technological culture from nature. Solutions require more than an awareness of ‘natural surroundings’ and human destructiveness. We think in terms of the re-conceptualization, re-design and re-negotiation of space. The book is concerned with social practices, belief systems, urban designs, the organization and representation of landscapes and modes of living. These aspects of ‘spatiality’ suggest how to conceive and practice the intermingling of nature and culture and how to develop public commitment to such practices. In the process we show how concern for the environment as an aspect of space helps us to reconceive and reinterpret what it means to be human.
Cultural and Political Perspectives on Environmental Discourse
Spaces in-between goes beyond the emphasis on externalities signalled by the term ‘environment’ to address the isolation of modern technological culture from nature. Solutions require more than an awareness of ‘natural surroundings’ and human destructiveness. We think in terms of the re-conceptualization, re-design and re-negotiation of space. The book is concerned with social practices, belief systems, urban designs, the organization and representation of landscapes and modes of living. These aspects of ‘spatiality’ suggest how to conceive and practice the intermingling of nature and culture and how to develop public commitment to such practices. In the process we show how concern for the environment as an aspect of space helps us to reconceive and reinterpret what it means to be human.
During the past decade, human communities worldwide have witnessed a succession of troubling developments that have intensified an already dire collective sense of global environmental crisis often brought on most poignantly in local or regional tragedies such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the 2010 Pakistan floods, or the Ajka alumina sludge spill in western Hungary. If we accept writer Wendell Berry’s suggestion that the agricultural crisis, one of many perceived faces of ecological decline in the late 20th century, is basically a “crisis of culture,” then what have our experts on culture(s) to say about this situation?
Studies in Environmental Humanities is a series which brings to the forefront the value of the arts and humanities in the formulation of environmental policy. In a spirit of interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary engagement, the series sheds light on the perspectives of literary scholars, historians, human geographers, architects, spatial planners, cultural studies theorists and art historians regarding the environmental turn in contemporary human consciousness.
At its core, the series ponders how writers, artists and other public intellectuals of the humanistic domain can contribute to a better understanding of the state of the planet. To answer this, the series welcomes studies that advance knowledge across a broad disciplinary spectrum both within and beyond the humanities and which engage vital and timely environmental questions.
The series is published in association with the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) but welcomes proposals from scholars who are no members.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals to the publisher at BRILL, Christa Stevens.
Studies in Environmental Humanities is a series which brings to the forefront the value of the arts and humanities in the formulation of environmental policy. In a spirit of interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary engagement, the series sheds light on the perspectives of literary scholars, historians, human geographers, architects, spatial planners, cultural studies theorists and art historians regarding the environmental turn in contemporary human consciousness.
At its core, the series ponders how writers, artists and other public intellectuals of the humanistic domain can contribute to a better understanding of the state of the planet. To answer this, the series welcomes studies that advance knowledge across a broad disciplinary spectrum both within and beyond the humanities and which engage vital and timely environmental questions.
The series is published in association with the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) but welcomes proposals from scholars who are no members.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals to the publisher at BRILL, Christa Stevens.