Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling (review)

Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling. Edited by David E. Nye. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Pp. ix+292. $50/$16.95.

Once David Nye had in his introduction referred to John Brinckerhoff Jackson, I knew I was in friendly territory. Before he even mentioned energy, technology, and landscape, I was sitting comfortably, feet up, reading for pleasure--slowly, rereading, assimilating ideas and insights packed into fewer than three hundred pages. As he has demonstrated in several recent books, Nye has a knack for getting apparently disparate topics to rotate around a technological core. The system he has created here maintains an equilibrium between the centrifugal forces that propel each topic away from that core and the irresistible gravitational force that tugs them toward the center. His aim is to illuminate (and dispel) the natural tension that many feel between technology and landscape, showing us their tandem development, illustrating how these two themes evolved together, all the while showing us a new world of insights about landscapes. This time he does it not in a book he wrote by himself but in a compilation of fifteen elegant essays assembled for our intellectual pleasure.

The collection grew out of a 1997 conference on landscape and technology in Denmark. The contributors come from several disciplines: history, sociology, photography, American studies, English literature, architecture, and economics. Four work in the United States, the others in Europe. The disciplinary and cultural mix resulting from this collaboration lends itself to the theme at hand, and the authors bring their varied training to bear on the changing landscapes of the last century and a half. In less capable hands, the book could have been a useless mishmash. That it coheres is a testament to Nye's skills in organization, selection, and editing.

The principal theme carried through the book is the interplay of technology and landscape, especially the centuries-long process, in different cultural settings, of landscape change because of technological innovation. The essays repeatedly illustrate that landscapes are in no way still "natural," nor have they been that way for a very long time, as geographers have been keen to explain since at least 1925, when Carl Sauer published his seminal essay "The Morphology of Landscape" (reprinted by the University of California Press in 1963 in Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer).

It is perhaps the confusion over the accuracy of the word "wilderness" itself that fuels disputes between those who would dedicate themselves to protecting what is left and those who think we are protecting too much already. Throughout Technologies of Landscape, Nye and the other contributors demonstrate the futility of seeking truly wild landscapes, and also make the point that people view landscapes differently depending upon their backgrounds--and that sometimes a single individual may see different things in a landscape simultaneously, like the surveyor who finds the Grand Canyon both a stunning spectacle and a route for a railroad.

As I read this book I skipped around, impatient to reach individual chapters on the English countryside, industrial pollution in Louisiana and Manchester, the Appalachian Trail, the construction of the Autobahn, and the Grand Canyon. Nye's organization does, however, suggest a sequence that would benefit those reading the essays in order: ephemeral landscapes, inventing landscapes, resisting rural modernity, narrating pollution, landscape as pathway, touring landscapes.

Naturally, I have my favorite chapters and my favorite ideas contained therein. For example, I was attracted to Tadeusz Rachwal's thoughts about writing as technology and James Dickinson's that writing, as an ordered entity, slows entropy. I also warmed to the conflation of art and landscape in the essays by Dickinson, Peter Goin, and Jacob Wamburg. I grew peevish at some of the tortured language: "If Gombrichian perception-cum-schemata thinking seems insufficient today, the method of overcoming it surely isn't to deny--as art historians of the semiotic and deconstructivist bents have...