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From landscapes of the future to landscapes of the past

David Lowenthal

Online publication date: 01 September 2001

To cite this Article Lowenthal, David(1999) 'From landscapes of the future to landscapes of the past', Norsk Geografisk
Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 53: 2, 139 — 144
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 Norsk geogr. Tidsskr. Vol. 53, 139–144. Oslo. ISSN 0029-1951

From landscapes of the future to landscapes of the past

DAVID LOWENTHAL

Lowenthal, D. 1999. From landscapes of the future to landscapes of the past. Norsk Geografisk Tids-
skrift—Norwegian Journal of Geography, Vol. 53, 139–144. Oslo. ISSN 0029-1951.
In days gone by, imagined future scenes were largely preferred to those of former times. Ancient tra-
ditions of pastoral taste and picturesque nostalgia notwithstanding, landscape and nature in general
were commonly devalued by comparison with the creations of culture and the scenes of history.
The rural vistas on which many chose to cast their eye were utopian scenes ideally to come, rather than
the depressingly backward lineaments of the old-fashioned past. Nowadays, the future is out of fash-
ion, and scenes recalled from other ages are increasingly admired. Prospect yields to retrospect, tech-
nology to history. Environmentalist morality promotes appreciation not only of wild landscapes but of
past rural scenes, valued as more diversified and less destructive of nature and locale than today’s high-
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tech agricultural landscapes. ‘History’ is becoming an adjunct to, rather then an enemy of, ‘ecology’. I
discuss these trends in term of changing views of art, religion, nature and human nature.
Keywords: ecology, environment, history, nature
David Lowenthal, 56 Crown Street, Harrow on the Hill HA2 0RH, UK, and University College
London, UK. E-mail: d.lowenthal@ucl.ac.uk

Landscapes have long embodied mankind’s en-
during hopes and fears. From ancient times,
features of the environment mirrored humanity’s
strongest feelings and transcendent aims. Aspects
of landscape were seen as exemplars of divine
purpose, whether benign or malign.
In the Western world, monotheism and above all
the rise of a personified Christianity came to
supersede nature as the chief focus of spiritual
concern. Sacred sites still held a potent imagina-
tive sway as locales of holy relics, of pilgrimages,
and of Crusades. But natural features lost much of
their earlier capacity to evoke wonder and rever-
ence. The environment became valued primarily
for its material resources, as the locus of mundane
practical affairs, rather than as a source of aesthetic
delight or spiritual awe.
Renaissance humanism further relegated land-
scape to subordinate rank. Mankind became the
centre of the cosmos, the human form venerated as
the measure of all things. To be sure, global
exploration revealed a vast panoply of novel
scenes to the European gaze, and mastery over
wild nature promoted landscape as an aesthetic
genre. But the favoured scenes were those im-
proved by human agency, products not of rude
nature but of man’s refinement. It was the common
credo that God had fashioned mankind to perfect
and fructify His unfinished creation. Progress
divinely ordained assured the superiority of future
scenes. The depicted past was largely a sad
pastoral realm, where languid shepherds contem-
plated decayed mementoes of long-gone splen-
dors.
Nowhere was progress more professed than in
newly settled lands. Pioneer entrepreneurs ar-
dently domesticated wild nature. Contrasting the
Hudson River valley seen by Henrik Hudson in
1607 with three centuries later, George Bancroft,
America’s premier 19th century historian, vividly
endorsed to the cult of improvement. In the 1607
wilderness, traversed only by tribal Indians,
sombre forests shed a melancholy grandeur
over the useless magnificence of nature, and hid
in their deep shades the rich soil, which no sun
had ever warmed. . . . Trees might everywhere
be seen breaking from their root in the marshy
soil, and threatening to fall with the first rude
gust; while the ground was strown with the
ruins of former forests, over which a profusion
of wildflowers wasted their freshness in mock-
ery of the gloom. Reptiles sported in the
stagnant pools, or crawled unharmed over piles
 140 D. Lowenthal
of mouldering logs. There were none but wild
animals to crop the uncut herbiage of the
prairies. Silence reigned, . . . rendered more
dismal by the howl of beasts of prey. The
smaller brooks spread out into sedgy swamps,
that were overhung by clouds of mosquitoes;
masses of decaying vegetation fed the exhala-
tions with the seeds of pestilence. . . . Life and
death were hideously mingled. The horrors of
corruption frowned on the fruitless fertility of
uncultivated nature. And man, the occupant of
the soil, was untamed by the savage scene, . . .
his knowledge in architecture surpassed both in
strength and durability by the skill of the beaver
. . . his religion the adoration of nature; . . .
disputing with the wolves and bears the lordship
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of the soil, and dividing with the squirrel the
wild fruits.
So much for nature; now see what civilised man
had achieved:
The earth glows with the colors of civilization;
the banks of the stream are enamelled with
choicest grasses; woodlands and cultivated
fields are harmoniously blended; the birds of
spring find their delight in orchards and trim
gardens, variegated with selected plants from
every temperate zone . . . The thorn has given
way to the rosebush; the cultivated vine
clambers over rocks where the brood of
serpents used to nestle; while industry smiles
at the changes she has wrought. . . . And man is
still in harmony with nature, which he has
subdued, developed, and adorned. For him . . .
science spreads iron pathways to the recent
wilderness; for him the hills yield up the shining
marble and the enduring granite; for him
immense rafts bring down the forests of the
interior – the marts of the city gather the
produce of every clime; and libraries gather
the works of genius of every language and age
(Bancroft 1837, 270–272).
Landscapes were lauded when tamed and fructi-
fied by industry, bejewelled by mines and mills,
interlaced by roads and railways.
Yet not even such wondrous scenes were
aesthetically top rank. Paintings of landscape were
felt inferior to historical scenes and to depictions
of human forms. History and portraiture limned
ideals of human beauty and morality; landscapes
were by contrast unplanned, inchoate, imperfect.
‘No landscape is a whole, or even a complete part
NORSK GEOGRAFISK TIDSSKRIFT 53 (1999)
of an organic whole’, was the common 19th-
century position.
Every landscape is merely the fragmentary
contingent resultant of unrelated forces succes-
sive in time, discordant in action, and tending to
no common aim. . . . Landscape painting, then,
is but the portraiture of inanimate nature, and as
a moral teacher it can but repeat her lessons. . . .
This falls short of the dignity of historical
painting, [just as] unconscious Nature is be-
neath the rank of divinely endowed man (Marsh
1860, 52–53).
The aesthetics of the time mainly extolled scenes
imbued with human agency. A pastoral spot in the
Jura struck Ruskin as delectable only because
richly permeated with culture. Were it ‘a scene in
some aboriginal forest of the New Continent, the
hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in
the boughs of the darkened forest showed how
much of their former power had been dependent on
. . . the deep colors of human endurance, valor, and
virtue,’ how much of their interest they owed to the
historic monuments that graced their borders
(Ruskin 1848, 167–169; see Stein 1967, 164). It
was widely felt that ‘the works of nature are
admirable only as the poor life of man has
illustrated them, and consequently that the face
of [New World] creation is an unworthy blank; . . .
wanting ancient memories, American landscape
can have no present beauty’ (Marsh 1860, 47; see
Lowenthal 1976, 101–104).
Nature gained 19th-century admirers, but few
painters or poets preferred wild to humanised
scenes. Aldous Huxley’s ‘Wordsworth in the
Tropics’ doubts that the English Lakeland poet’s
worship of wilderness would have survived a face-
to-face encounter with an Amazonian jungle.
Many famed backers of wild nature were more
ambivalent than is commonly realised. The same
Thoreau who declared ‘in Wildness is the pre-
servation of the World’ felt nature devoid of
human imprint repellent and fearsome, Maine’s
Mt. Katahdin ‘savage and awful, . . . vast and drear
and inhuman . . . made out of Chaos and Old
Night’ (Thoreau 1862, 613; Blair & Trowbridge
1960, 508–517; Walls 1995, 112). Walden apart,
Thoreau was no devotee of primitive simplicity; he
praised the farmer who ‘replaces the Indian even
because he redeems the meadow’. Despite avow-
ing that ‘man’s improvements . . . deform the
landscape’, Thoreau usually lauded not virgin but
quasi-vacated scenes, ‘some retired meadow
 NORSK GEOGRAFISK TIDSSKRIFT 53 (1999) From landscapes of the future to landscapes of the past
[where] the rising ground gleamed like the
boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs
seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at
evening’ (1862, 602, 617–618, 631–632). The
vision is not pristine but pastoral.
Like vintage wines, wilderness tastes seldom
travel well. East-coast Yankees long viewed
Western scenic splendours with some reserve. A
brief Yosemite visit in 1871 impressed the
transcendentalist sage Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But Sierras’ crusader John Muir vainly besought
Emerson to linger longer. Back in Massachusetts,
Emerson reproved Muir’s devotion to Yosemite as
obsessive. Wilderness solitude, wrote Emerson,
made ‘a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife’
(Lowenthal 1990b).
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In the wake of Herder and Napoleon, rural folk
life became an icon of authentic national identity
in 19th-century Europe. But rural scenes were
lauded only when seen as improvements. Else-
where they were reminders of rural idiocy, haunts
of peasant backwardness – even though rural life
was simultaneously extolled as virtuous and
healthful. The opposing images were conflated in
1922 by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
Mythologizing his backwater roots, Baldwin
termed himself not ‘the man in the street even,
but . . . a man in a field-path, a much simpler
person steeped in tradition and impervious to new
ideas’ (Baldwin 1926, 101).
As late as 1945, notes Raphael Samuel (1998,
132–146), rural English landscapes attracted few
apart from devotees of pleasing decay. Neither
fields nor farming were seen as picturesque,
cottages were rural slums with rising damp,
leaking roofs, tiny windows, and interior squalor.
Appalled by the dreadful present, the planner C. S.
Orwin (1945, 105–109) envisaged an ideal future
countryside when ‘the many awkward little fields,
the pastures too often full of thistles and some-
times of thorns, the overgrown hedgerows and
choked ditches’, would yield to the ordered
efficient emptiness of what landscape lovers today
revile as prairie planning.
Nurturing such bias was the notion of nature as
enemy. It was mankind’s duty and glory to
extirpate wilderness, to tame all creation. Only a
century ago the received view was T. H. Huxley’s
and Herbert Spencer’s, who termed nature ruth-
less, cruel, savage, wasteful. ‘Visible nature is all
plasticity and indifference’, held the philosopher
William James; ‘to such a harlot we owe no
allegiance’. To uproot the wild was moral as well
141
as environmental betterment. To enable men to
‘tread the earth more proudly’ he proposed in ‘The
Moral Equivalent of War’ (James 1910, 280–281)
an army ‘enlisted against Nature’. As late as 1929,
Sigmund Freud (1929, 53–54) thus commended
the conquest of nature:
We recognize that a country has attained a high
state of civilization when we find . . . everything
in it that can be helpful in exploiting the earth
for man’s benefit and in protecting him against
nature. . . . The course of rivers . . . is regulated
. . . mineral wealth is brought up assiduously
from the depths . . . wild and dangerous animals
have been exterminated.
That this now strikes many as anthropocentric
arrogance shows how sharply views of nature and
human nature have changed within a single life
span.
Changes in landscape taste are no less striking.
Once aesthetically subordinate, scenic views have
come to occupy premier rank. Conforming with
today’s environmentalism, admiration has shifted
from intensely humanised prospects to ‘natural’
vistas, landscapes least altered by human agency.
Yesterday’s improvement is today’s degradation.
Nature at its best is nature untouched by man.
The prime mystique behind this vision is
generally termed ecological – a word the biologist
Ernst Haeckel coined in 1866 to denote the
ramified interactions of animate and inanimate
nature. But a more inclusive ecological insight
already informed George Perkins Marsh’s Man
and Nature (1864), an environmental history
showing how human in addition to other agencies
impacted nature. Marsh was the first to survey the
manifold effects of human technology on soils and
watercourses, plants and animals, the first to warn
that often unintended alterations did more harm
than good, the first to inveigh against the far-
reaching and perhaps irreversible losses thus
engendered, and the first to propose practical
measures to repair existing and curtail future
damage.
Mounting technological damage did not, how-
ever, mean that men must stop meddling with
nature. On the contrary, environmental interfer-
ence was essential and unavoidable. But it must be
made more rational, aimed at long-term steward-
ship rather than short-term exploitation. The ever-
unfolding ramifications of human impact could
never be wholly foreseen. But their benefits could
 142 D. Lowenthal
be heightened, their damage reduced, by judicious
caution and care for the future.
Marsh’s cautious scientific optimism (though
not his jeremiads against misuse) dominated
conservation thought for a century. But it ran
counter to emerging ecological and landscape
paradigms. Early 20th-century park managers in
America and then in Europe began to promote
ideals of untouched nature; wilderness became an
ecological, aesthetic, and moral canon. Ecologists
led by Frederic Clements judged nature most
fruitful when left alone. Ecosystems undisturbed
by human agency gradually attained maximum
diversity and stability, whereas extractive spolia-
tion impeded or abbreviated this beneficent cli-
max. Technology did not enhance but perverted
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nature’s natural fruition (Worster 1977, 209–242;
Lowenthal 1990a, 123–125).
Such evils emanated only from so-called ad-
vanced cultures, however. Exempt from blame
were indigenes whose nurturant tribal ways,
integrative communitarian values, and rich inter-
play with nature respected environmental balance.
Heeding primitive ecological wisdom might help
technological cultures to regain ‘natural’ environ-
ments fit to live in and to hand on.
This ecological mystique became a religious
tenet. Aldo Leopold’s famous ‘Land Ethic’ of
1949 – ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic
community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ –
for many still remains conservation gospel (Leo-
pold 1949, 224–226; Flader 1978, 34–35, 270–
271), and it reinforced preferences for supposedly
untouched landscapes.
Yet ecological science had long since disowned
much of the Clementian paradigm. It was well
known that no landscapes were entirely ‘natural’
or unaltered by human impact; nature’s ‘stability’
was also a fiction. By the 1950s it was mainly non-
ecologists who extolled equilibrium, stability, and
non-interference. Yet environmental reformers
continue to deploy the long outdated succession-
to-climax model, casting nature as normative
good, technological man as evil destroyer.
In this view, ‘ecology’ (stable and eternal) is
good, ‘history’ (erratic and unstable) bad. Even in
a UNESCO volume devoted to cultural land-
scapes, nature is the ne plus ultra from which
culture always falls short. One essay condemns
‘spoilt’ landscapes (urban squalor, open-cast
mines, nuclear-accident and oil-spill sites) as
anti-ecological; another terms ‘harmony with
NORSK GEOGRAFISK TIDSSKRIFT 53 (1999)
nature’ a prime criterion for cultural landscapes
of World Heritage stature (von Droste et al. 1995).
What of future landscape awareness and appre-
ciation? Some signs point to a convergence
between ecology and history. Traditional disjunc-
tions of nature from culture, prehistory from
history, stability from change seem more and
more unreal, barriers to seeing how landscapes
actually function. All natural processes are af-
fected by history; all history is implicated in the
dynamics of nature, every landscape partly con-
stituted by history (Walls 1995, 252).
The more we learn about natural and human
histories, the more we see how they resemble and
interpenetrate one another. Every locale requires
not segregated but integrated chronicles of their
rocks and soils, plants and animals, early tribal and
later national peoples – histories narrated not in
separate segments but in commingled syntheses.
Awareness of landscapes as simultaneously old
and new, embodying many pasts and manifold
presents, informs the growing integrative mood.
New World academics who once divorced Amer-
indian from historical American archaeology no
longer do so; they now find that division both
artificial and impracticable, most landscapes hav-
ing been occupied and altered by indigenes and
settlers in tandem, however conflictual the con-
junction. The new awareness of a shared time-
depth is popular as well as academic, so that
Americans cease to bemoan the shallowness of
their historical horizon. A Midwesterner walking
the streets of his town now feels his local roots are
as ancient as Rome or Athens. So too in Australia:
white Australians increasingly embrace, however
imperfectly they understand, Aboriginal ‘Dream-
time’ linkages of landscape pathways and ances-
tral memories. A multicultural palimpsest of tribal
and settler history lends the Australian continent
new depth and density.
The collapse of old ecological certitudes like-
wise begins to seem more liberating than alarming.
The unknown is no longer shunned but accepted.
In the past, it was commonly assumed that if things
went badly they could be reversed. Conservation
dogma enjoined doing nothing that could not be
undone. The principle applied alike to nature, to
buildings, and to works of art. But awareness is
now dawning that reversibility is a chimera, that
nothing can ever be wholly undone, that culture
and nature alike run in the irrecoverable stream of
time. It is wiser to come to terms with irreversi-
bility than to yearn for untenable reversion. Land-
 NORSK GEOGRAFISK TIDSSKRIFT 53 (1999) From landscapes of the future to landscapes of the past
scapes like works of art are not diminished, but
enhanced, when we become conscious of their
ephemerality. We savour landscapes as dynamic
journeys through life, rather than as sterile
dioramas fixed in amber.
As process gains ground over product, we re-
evaluate the nature and purpose of conservation.
Knowing that nothing endures for ever, that
artifacts like ecosystems are fluid and mortal,
releases us from obsessive concern with material
preservation. It is better to bequeath our successors
institutions in good working order, memories of
skills and processes, the flexible habits of mind
needed to negotiate the ever-changing, unknow-
able flux of nature and culture. The future lies
more with such mental vistas than with canonical
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scenes of relics and traces.
Manuscript accepted 1 June 1999
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