The Tension Between Distance and Identity

What’s alluring about landscape?

Unlike Nature, which was ideally thought of as an independent “thing-in-itself” (to Hegel it was “otherness” par excellence), landscape is an enormously multi-faceted system of references, a bewildering sphere of relationships. The shift from a Nature-like “thing-in-itself” to landscape as a form of relationship presupposes a sensual, emotional, and cognitive encounter.

We smell landscapes, listen for their sound, feel their temperature and the wind flowing through them, their moisture on our skin, we see the atmosphere of their light and the interplay of their shapes and forms. And we become aware of this concentrated, dense sensuality in a culturally formed, unmistakable way. Nature as a thing-in-itself, or the abstract notion of it, transforms into the experience of landscape only when there is an aesthetic encounter.

What importance does landscape have today?

Far out and difficult to see through the relentless advance of urban agglomeration, landscape is surreptitiously moving to center stage. For the first time in history, all landscapes on Earth are exposed to human influence and civilization. We’re no longer confronted by the alien, the natural, in landscapes; instead, we encounter ourselves, our own human imprint, our self-made mess, our own advancing specters. Each of us is party to the landscape in which we live and through which we move, we’re all complicit.

Where does this human imprint of ours lead?

Uninhabited or sparsely inhabited landscapes account for ninety-seven percent of the Earth’s land surface, with half the world’s population concentrated on just one percent of the land. Yet humans now cast a shadow over every land-scape on the planet, even the most remote.

This is increasingly evident as landscapes are visibly and ever more seriously impacted by fire, drought, and flooding. Indeed, the media now bombards us daily with images of devastating typhoons, clear-cut rainforests, dwindling polar ice and melting glaciers, encroaching deserts, and vast inland lakes silting up.

Signs of a coming disaster?

The economic systems of disaster have become a lucrative and global demonstration of our time. But media presentations mislead us when they suggest that we can expect the apocalypse at some more or less distant point in the future. The apocalypse isn’t some sudden event, it’s a period of time. It’s not something that’s going to happen, it’s something that is

And our reaction to it?

Our lifestyles are characterized by a late-modern inconsistency. Even in our mobile environments with their urban nomadism, where every day we’re out and about in the city, moving through countless metropolises year after year, we feel a growing desire to immerse ourselves in natural landscapes when we go on vacation, to gently sink back into something we deeply desire. When we can, we travel to idyllic Caribbean beaches, go hiking in the Andes, rafting on Nepalese rivers.

At the same time, on our mobile screens, we’re witnessing the Arctic cryosphere melting away as we await the impending, apocalyptic demise of huge swaths of the planet

But isn’t that schizophrenic?

It seems that most of us have grown used to compartmentalizing landscape into two sections: one that offers an experience, a sort of wellness space, a green area where we can kick back, replenish our stressed-out psyches, and experience Nature when we get sick of civilization; and the other a space that we use, that we exploit, to make as much money as possible. While one space–the romanticized idyll–is to be protected and preserved, the other is ruthlessly exploited, ravaged and plundered.

The schizophrenia is obvious. It’s comparable to the almost insatiable desire for powerful off-road vehicles, now that transport infrastructure has finally removed all obstacles and paved every back road. The loss of wild landscape is obscured by this symbolic pretension and transformed into technical consumption, into simulation.

Is landscape consumption increasing in all directions?

Since industrialization first began in the 1700s, we have expanded arable land fivefold, and pastureland has increased from two percent to one quarter of the earth’s surface today. Not to mention our increasingly congested urban areas and road systems. Furthermore, land consumption and soil sealing continue to attack landscapes, devouring a landscape area approximately the size of Frankfurt every year in Germany alone.

We now know that the cultivation of natural areas and the urbanization of cultural landscapes generally destroys ninety percent of the original organisms living there.

So what do we do?

Since we can’t just deny responsibility for the collapse of more and more landscape habitats, the unavoidable conclusion is that a universal landscape policy must be developed. Because the threats and increasing risks to landscapes are politicizing even lands that until recently were considered beyond politics: glacier lakes, grasslands, shifting sand dunes, frog ponds.

Climate change, environmental degradation, and continued world population growth have transformed the once promising future into a fear-filled vision. Melancholy, once an expression of sadness for past loss, has now shifted direction: we now mourn the future.