The Anti-Landscape ed. by David E. Nye and Sarah Elkind (review)

J. B. Jackson defined "landscape" as the "infrastructure or background for our collective existence." By contrast, David Nye explains in the opening essay to this collection, an "anti-landscape" is a space that does not sustain human life in either a biological or sociocultural sense. Nye and co-editor Sarah Elkind suggest that this anti-landscape concept provides a useful extension of Jackson's earlier fusing of the human and non-human. The movement between landscape and anti-landscape might further bring together materialist and constructivist approaches under the capacious banner of the environmental humanities.

It is an ambitious goal, not easily realized with such an eclectic collection of essays. Nye and Elkind provide some useful organizational structure by dividing the volume into three sections. The first, "The Threatened Landscape," most squarely pursues the idea of the anti-landscape as a degradation of the eco-social potentialities of a previously useful landscape. James Fleming's essay perhaps most successfully unites the cultural and material by surveying visual representations of what he terms "skyscapes" and "anti-skyscapes." By its literally transparent nature, Fleming notes that the sky is often both materially and culturally transparent. Yet some artists have developed new ways of making the invisible visible, as with a French duo's use of laser lights to outline the emissions from a power plant in a noxious green. On the more material side, the historian of irrigation technology Maurits Ertsen analyzes the relationship between British colonial irrigation canals in Pakistan, which raised water tables, and subsequent farmer-initiated tube wells, which lowered them. Such complex historical evolutions challenge our tendency to see irrigation systems as leading in any simple way towards either civilizational progress or collapse. Ertsen thus seems to suggest that the line between nurturing landscape and sterile anti-landscape is decidedly fluid.

Section II, "Anti-Landscapes," pursues a more cultural turn rooted mostly in literary studies. Anna Flügge treats the anti-landscape mostly metaphorically in her analysis of two prominent American novels, The Great Gatsby and The Big Sleep. These examples of a "melancholic modernism" suggest that their authors believed that an unproductive anti-landscape gives rise to a largely meaningless and unsustainable modern culture. The characters Nick Carraway and Philip Marlowe both sense the inadequacy of the sterile anti-landscape, yet are equally incapable of escaping it. Treating the landscape somewhat more concretely, Øyunn Hestetun's perceptive analysis of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road suggests an intimate connection between the cultural and material: the non-human landscape has the power to both nurture and destroy what we wrongly think of as a solely human-created identity and culture. McCarthy's evocation of a horrific "landscape of fear," Øyunn argues, reveals an environment that can no longer nurture either biological or moral survival. A degenerate anti-landscape creates a degenerate culture, McCarthy seems to suggest, effectively collapsing the modernist division of the material and the cultural.

In the third section, "Recoveries," the volume returns to more concrete material examples of various attempts to remediate anti-landscapes. Anna Storm's insightful analysis of an abandoned open pit mine and a nuclear power plant, in Sweden and Lithuania respectively, admits that practical remediation of the environmental damage and pollution at such sites is extraordinarily difficult. Nonetheless, even these badly wounded sites might yet be turned to productive social and cultural purposes when used for historical and cultural heritage. Nikolet Jensen's fascinating history of the transformation of an abandoned elevated rail line in New York City into a popular green linear parkway offers perhaps the most optimistic story in the volume, demonstrating how urban and environmental preservation can at times be united.

In her "Afterword," Elkind examines recent efforts to transform a former dump along Denmark's Odense fjord into a recreational area. While the project has been reasonably successful, Elkind raises a hard question. If the remediation of an anti-landscape succeeds only in making it...