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July 19, 2010
Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory, examines the relationship between Western culture and nature and the way that our cultural framing shapes the land or wilderness as a landscape.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Boomer Beach, Port Elliot, South Australia 2010
Schama argues that:
So while we acknowledge (as we must) that the impact of humanity of the earth's ecology has not been an unmixed blessing, neither has the long relationship between nature and culture been an unrelieved and predetermined calamity. At the very least, it seems right to acknowledge that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape. (p.9)
Well we know that wilderness is culturally constructed or framed in terms of the picturesque or the sublime. Schama adds to this by saying that the entire landscape tradition is the product of a shared culture, a tradition built from a rich deposit of myths, memories and obsessions.
Schama goes on to say that some environmental historians have lamented the annexation of nature by culture. Whilst not denying that the landscape my be a text on which generations write their recurring obsessions they--eg., Stephen Pyne, William Cronon, Donald Worster--- have made:
an inanimate topography into historical agents in their own right. Restoring to the land and climate the kind of creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors, these writers have created histories in which man is not the be-all and end-all of the story
Their story, however, is a dismal tale:--of a land taken, exploited and of traditional cultures said to have lived in relation of sacred reverence with the soil being displaced by an aggressive settler capitalism.
Schama contest the dismal narrative by a different way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have but which eludes our recognition and appreciation.
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