Taking Turns: Landscape and Environmental History at the Crossroads

Abstract

Dealing with the relationship between humankind and the more or less ‘natural’ environment, landscape and environmental history have interests and objects of study in common. This paper explores the similarities and differences of the two fields and the current challenges and opportunities they face. It suggests that the two fields have much to offer each other—especially when dealing with the ‘urban realm’—without running the risk of losing their individual identities. It argues that the reasons for the lack of contact between the fields have been the small size, relative obscurity and ‘youth’ of landscape history on the one hand and the declensionist and broad narratives in environmental history on the other hand. Distrust of the declensionist viewpoint and of the effects that the environmental movement had on landscape and garden design might have led landscape historians in the past to distance themselves from environmental history altogether.

Key Words:

• Landscape history
• landscape theory
• environmental history
• declensionist narrative

Notes

 1. The ASEH currently (June 2010) has 1100, and the SAH landscape chapter has 134 individual members.

 2. Cosgrove, Kenneth R. Olwig and others have shown that ‘landscape’ is a term with cultural and political connotations that is socially constructed and changes with time. See for example, Cosgrove (2004) and Olwig (1996).

 3. Donald Worster and Arthur McEvoy have both offered slightly different versions of these three strands of environmental history. In their eyes they are based on the workings of nature, on the economy, and on human ideas and images of nature. See McEvoy (1988) and Worster (1988).

 4. There were conferences dealing with ‘Italian’ (1971), ‘French’ (1973), ‘Islamic’ (1974), ‘Ancient Roman’ (1979) and ‘Dutch Gardens’ (1988), as well as with single men and women like John Claudius Loudon (1978), Beatrix Ferrand (1980) and Andrew Jackson Downing (1987).

 5. Modelled on Rosalind Krauss's 1978 diagram that offered new categories for three-dimensional artwork that could not anymore be happily described by the term ‘sculpture’, Meyer's theoretical model complemented and expanded the reduced conception of landscape architecture as “landscape for architecture”—a “neutral open horizontal ground” or “discrete […] object”—by new descriptive categories like “articulated space”—a “striated, layered, constructed, substantial space”—by “figured ground”—“an ambiguous figural space”—and by the “minimal garden”—a “discrete, objectified field, taut surface” (Meyer, 1997, pp. 52–70). Also see Krauss (1985).

 6. For more titles and a more detailed historiography, see Harris (1999).

 7. In 2001 Vera Norwood noted that “Environmental history is just beginning to integrate gender analysis into mainstream work” (see Norwood, 2001, pp. 84–85 on class and race; also p. 86).

 8. This is what many environmental historians likewise have demanded in these recent years. See for example, Sörlin and Warde (2007, p. 125). On the lack of social theory, see McNeill (2003, p. 37).

 9. The literary scholar Fredric Jameson explained in 1991, that whereas the modern age had privileged time, postmodernity stood for the ‘spatialisation of the temporal’. See Jameson (1991, pp. 154, 156).

10. For an overview over topics dealing with technology and the environment, see Stine and Tarr (1998). Also see Closmann (2009), Mauch and Zeller (2008) and Melosi (2000).

11. See, for example, on gardens and war Helphand (2006); on landscape architecture and war Dümpelmann (2010); on the automobile and postwar landscape architecture Carr (2007); on public health and nineteenth-century landscape architecture Hawkins (1991); and for postcolonial perspectives Drayton (2000); Herbert (2005); McCracken (1997); Roberts (1998).

12. For transnational and comparative approaches in planning and environmental history, see Cohen (1995); Collins (2005); Nasr and Volait (2003); Rodgers (1998); Sutcliffe (1981); Ward (2000). With regards to landscape history, see for example, Duempelmann (2007, 2009); Karson (1994); Ruggles (2008).

13. The books by geographers he quotes include Colten (2005) and Gandy (2002).

14. Due to environmental history's roots in the environmental movement it is perhaps not surprising that the landscape authors most often quoted by environmental historians were active participants, or even shapers in this movement, and their students (Ian McHarg, Anne W. Spirn).

15. The Center for Garden and Landscape Studies dedicated an annual symposium to issues of environmentalism only once before, in 1998.