Student: Gabby Henrie
Graduation date: May 2015
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: November 2012
Summary
Scholars have said that it’s nearly impossible to overestimate the influence humankind has had on the physical appearance of the Earth (Wallach 2005). Fittingly, our current geological epoch has been dubbed the Anthropocene, a reflection of the fact that there is virtually no biophysical region on the planet which remains untouched by human influence (Steffen 2011). In this sense, all landscapes can be seen as “cultural landscapes” (Nassauer 1995). This is a term that can connote a number of different meanings to different people, but Carl O. Sauer’s classic and influential definition is that “the cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result” (Sauer 1925). It follows then that a landscape is by no means a static entity, but rather is constantly evolving as a result of ongoing cultural and biophysical changes. In the United States, where romanticizations of the frontier and the wild west are so deeply embedded in our cultural mythos, perceptions of nature and ideas about the role of humans within nature have played a particularly interesting role in shaping our current environment. For example, urban sprawl can be explained at least in part by a cultural desire to “return to nature” (Relph 1992); a notion of the value of “wilderness” has underpinned the creation of many national parks systems; and the development of urban green spaces reflects the idea that spending time in nature is beneficial to human well-being (Chiesura 2004). Edenic ideals, the development of ecology as a scientific discipline, charismatic environmental leaders, and federal regulations and incentives have all contributed to the cultivation of these specific perceptions of nature.
Exploring the ways in which particular conceptions of nature have become embodied in the physical structure of the American landscape is important for understanding both our nation’s environmental history, as well as the future implications of current environmental discourses. Within contemporary environmentalism there exist a wide variety of distinct discourses, each with specific conceptions of nature, and specific visions of what America’s “sustainable” future should look like. However the cultural landscapes idealized by these respective discourses are often disparate, and even antithetical to one another. Ecological modernization, for example, proposes hypertechnological, ultra-efficient cityscapes as the solution to our environmental woes (Robbins 2007), while in stark contrast, radical ecology approaches often dictate the need for a return to localized, low-tech, agrarian landscapes (Zimmerman 2007). Both of these options require the intentional alteration of our current landscapes to adapt them to a certain set of environmental values, however each also pushes the future American landscape in completely opposing (and perhaps irreconcilable) directions. This way of analyzing environmental discourses not only helps one understand their theoretical bases, but can also elucidate how effective, practical and/or desirable they may be once actualized in the physical world—an important step in evaluating how viable the solutions they prescribe may be.
References
Chiesura, Anna. 2004. “The Role of Urban Parks for the Sustainable City.” Landscape and Urban Planning 68 (1) (May 15): 129–138.
Nassauer, Joan. 1995. “Culture and Changing Landscape Structure.” Landscape Ecology 10 (4): 229–237.
Relph, Edward. 1992. “Making a Middle Landscape.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (4) (December 1): 730–732.
Robbins, Paul, ed. 2007. “Ecological Modernization.” In Encyclopedia of Environment and Society, 2:513–516. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Sauer, C. O. 1925. “The Morphology of Landscape”. University of California Publications in Geography 2 (2):19-53.
Wallach, Bret. 2005. Understanding the Cultural Landscape. Guilford Press.
Zimmerman, Michael E. 1997. Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. University of California Press.
Questions
- How have American attitudes toward nonhuman nature shifted over time and what forces have driven these changes?
- How have these historical environmental attitudes and perceptions altered the cultural landscape in different regions of the U.S.?
- What changes do different environmental discourses propose we make to the structure of the current American landscape in order to remediate various environmental problems?
- How do environmental attitudes and perceptions within these discourses shape their respective visions of a sustainable American landscape? What are the implications of these different visions for human and nonhuman communities?
Concentration courses
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4 credits), spring 2013. This course fits perfectly with my concentration, as it addresses how the current American landscape has come to be.
- ENVS 490 (Digital Field Scholarship, 4 credits), spring 2013. This course will help me acquire the skills I need to effectively analyze spatial data.
- SOAN 498 (Critical Studies of Green Capitalism, 4 credits), fall 2014. This course deals with the political economic economic framework that underpins many popular visions of sustainability.
- ECON 232 (Development economics, 4 credits), fall 2014. This course helped ground my interest in political ecology, by developing the theoretical and historical background needed to understand the political-economic side of environmental change.
Arts and humanities courses
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- HIST 298 (Environmental Histories of Science and Technology, 4 credits), spring 2013. This course would help me understand how specific historical conceptions of nature came to be in America; it may also help me understand the theoretical basis of pro-technology environmental discourses like ecological modernization.