Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature

INTRODUCTION

Introduction "TO PUT IT BLUNTLY," said my friend, "nature is out of date." He had already enumerated the various forms of impending world disaster, the smoke everywhere of social and political conflagrations, the drift of peoples in frantic search for identity and security, the removal of geographical frontiers to outer space, and the perverted state of leisure which made lackluster the slow rhythms of organisms and landforms. By nature's being out of date he meant that the question of its relationship to man had receded, or was accorded only despair. The sharp joy of the outdoors was blunted against new cynicism. The natural environment had seemed pertinent to the human situation until the present century. Its relevance diminished behind concrete and steel. The confrontation of nature succumbed to a fashion of discounting the possibility of knowing anything about the "real" universe, even to doubt that it exists. Weighted with older cultural anti-nature the current agony of human isolation could be used to free man from determinism or to plunge him into a hopeless fatalism, abandoning either way the idea of happiness in the bosom of nature or reliance on a "natural order." The existentialist division of man and nature is a reaction to the use of science on man's thinking about himself, to its generalizing and abstracting, to depersonalizing, to finding norms and averages and generally "reducing" humanity ( xxxii ) Introduction to statistical traits. The existential judgment is that these abstractions are irrelevant. It holds that therefore only what / experience for myself is real: events unique to me, about which no generalizations are important or any real descriptions possible. Only specific contacts with other individuals are considered significant. Every moment I face the prospect of a choice, which I am actually free to make. I am free only in this. Such is the excruciating sickness of selfconsciousness . The proponents of this fanatic individualism retreat from a hostile and absurd world to an inner life whose only values are personal and subjective. By valuing only the unique and individual they rightly oppose mass man and the treatment of human beings as replacable machines—at the price of ecological nihilism. It is the act of a screaming and demented oyster. The apprehension of human alienation from nature is not new—nor is the isolation of the individual uniquely human —but in this situation it too easily justifies our destruction of the world and each other, ignorance of other life, insistence on the dichotomy of man and animals, and organized narcissism . Because society is a leveling agency it is to be made irrelevant. The attempt to care nothing for nature outside individual experience is a pseudo-separation from nature in a world composed only of objects, a frozen place where there are no significant events other than the flashing lights of one's own mind. As my friend attempted to 'explain how intellectual nature hating had come about I thought of our immediate habitat there in Illinois. I wondered exactly how this intellectual relativity was related to the things we were doing to our world. Adolf Portmann has observed that in the past "man had to defend himself against natural catastrophes, wild animals , outside influences of every sort, and had somehow to survive despite them. Today it is we who uproot and transform , who threaten nature." Not far from us as we conversed, the world's biggest shovel was gouging a forty-foot-deep trench through the prairie soil and underlying rock to get to a Introduction ( xxxiii ) layer of coal. The logic and importance of this activity was periodically explained to the public by the mining company's public-relations officers. Was it part of the imminent tragedy described by Portmann or was it, as the company claimed, a public service? Publicity would not cloak the wound in the earth; indeed the cut uncovered all those rationalizations and passions in the deep layers of the mind which would be twisted into a eulogy of destruction. Some of the coal-company values my humanist friend would have shared, though he might have objected to such thinly veiled cupidity masquerading as service, which would change from time to time in step with "the economy." An economic system is a human fabrication. And so is perception , said my sophisticated friend. Nobody believes in "natural laws" any more. If ocean currents, whole forests, and the gaseous content of the atmosphere are to...