Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
TECHNOLOGY and landscape have long been understood as inherently antagonistic concepts, reflective of the encroachments of civilization on the natural world. Yet as the essays in this volume make clear, the tension between culture and nature is more apparent than real. Even in preindustrial societies, where the dominant technologies are agricultural, it would be impossible to envision a landscape unshaped by human contact.
Drawing on evidence from Europe and America, from the Renaissance to the present day, the contributors to this volume reconceive the relationship between technology and landscape as a product of cultural interactions. Rather than view landscape only statically as space, they also see it as a process embedded in narrative, or time. Whether one is concerned with the English countryside, the Nazi autobahn, a naturalist's description of the New World, or chemical pollution in contemporary Louisiana, the question of who gives a place its meaning is just as important as who constructs the physical landscape. Is the Grand Canyon a profitless locality, a sublime wonder, or a potential mining site? Is the smoke of an industrial city construed as pollution or as a heartening sign of prosperity? Is the Appalachian Trail a means to revivify the rural economy or a way to escape into a rugged wilderness experience? These are some of the questions addressed in this interdisciplinary collection of original essays.
Table of Contents
Agricultural technology and the ephemeral landscape / Paul Brassley -- Journey into space: interpretations of landscape in contemporary art / James Dickinson -- Abandoning paradise: the western pictorial paradigm shift around 1420 / Jacob Wamberg -- The employment of the word: writing, topography, and colonial landscapes / Tadeusz Rachwal -- Remaking a "natural menace": engineering the Colorado River / David E. Nye -- Begrudging aesthetics for a new south: the Farm Security Administration Photographic Project and southern modernization, 1935 to 1943 / Stuart Kidd -- Making and meaning in the English countryside / Christopher Bailey -- Public perceptions of smoke pollution in victorian Manchester / Stephen Mosley -- Narrating the toxic landscape in "cancer alley", Louisiana / Barbara Allen -- Benton MacKaye's Appalachian Trail: imagining and engineering a landscape / Mark Luccarelli -- "The landscape's crown": landscape, perceptions, and modernizing effects of the German autobahn system, 1934 to 1941 / Thomas Zeller -- The improvement of Arthur Young: agricultural technology and the production of landscape in eighteenth-century England / Stephen Bending -- The road to industrial heterotopia: landscape, technology, and George Orwell's travelogue the Road to Wigan Pier / Pia Maria Ahlbèack -- Recycled landscapes: mining's legacies in the Mesabi Iron Range / Peter Goin and Elizabeth Raymond.
Tech Q&A
Read the Tech Q&A with David E. Nye