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Living with and looking at landscape

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Landscape Research,
Vol. 32, No. 5, 637 – 659, October 2007

Living With and Looking at Landscape 5

DAVID LOWENTHAL
University College London, UK
10

ABSTRACT Landscape is experienced in countless ways by all human beings, both individually
and as members of communities, nations and humanity as a whole. Concern for rural locales as
the loci of social, economic and domestic existence has, in recent centuries, often been seen in
accord, but more usually in conflict, with attachment to the scenic qualities of landscape couched
in aesthetic terms. Celebrated in art and in history, landscapes connote stability and security, but 15
living with them is regarded as a virtue, looking at them condemned as shallow scenic
appreciation. The stress between these two sets of values is exacerbated by the decline of rural
economies throughout the developed world, the abandonment of agricultural landscapes and the
loss of traditional countryside ties. Shifting landscape attachments reflect the timing, extent and
current pace of rural depopulation. Whether despite or owing to their increasing remoteness from
everyday life, landscapes are heavily freighted with moral and symbolic worth as ecological 20
paradigms and as rightful common inheritances, while spurned as scenically frivolous.

KEY WORDS: Landscape aesthetics, rural attachments, agricultural decline, scenery, tourism

25

Landscape is everyone’s fundamental heritage. It is all embracing and unavoidable.

It inspires and shapes much of what we learn and do. Landscape is where we all
make our homes, do our work, live our lives, dream our dreams. Yet for each of us it
means something different, formed by unique collective and individual experiences. 30
Here I discuss changing western apprehension of landscape, in the first place as loci
of settlement and occupation, subsequently as scenes of spectacle. The taming of
nature, the experience of travel and the development of landscape painting
habituated early-modern Europeans to look at the real world as a series of static,
contrived views. The Claude glass accustomed viewers to consider scenery an object 35
of detached contemplation—to be appreciated like a painted picture. The practice of
judging landscape aesthetically derives from this doubly pictorial inheritance.
‘‘Landscapes are formed by landscape tastes’’, I declared, too sweepingly, 42 years
ago (Lowenthal & Prince, 1965, p. 196). Aesthetic concerns were then all the rage in
England, where the Countryside Act of 1949 had designated dozens of protected 40
Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (Taylor, 2007), and in the US where President
Johnson had just pressed Congress to safeguard ‘The Natural Beauty of Our
Country’ (Tilden, 1977, p. 106). But scenic beauty is now out of vogue, along with

45
Correspondence Address: Email: david.lowenthal@ucl.ac.uk (David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of
Geography, University College London).

ISSN 0142-6397 Print/1469-9710 Online/07/050637-23 Ó 2007 Landscape Research Group Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/01426390701552761
 638 D. Lowenthal

the detached contemplation thought to engender its appreciation. Scenic charms are
derided as superficial, frivolous, even soulless; to dwell on decor is to scant integral
50 landscape values, notably ecological fitness, residential sustainability, community
health and historical authenticity. A leading cultural landscape text refers to
aesthetic objectives only to note the disastrous effects of applying them at Cades
Cove National Park (Alanen & Melnick, 2000). Not one essay in a recent set on
landscape form, process and function discusses appearance or aesthetics, let alone
55 taste or beauty (Crews-Meyer & Young, 2006). Even to mention how a landscape
looks would seem to distract attention from the serious issue of how it functions.
Here I show how ongoing rural change first fuels this and then invalidates this anti-
aesthetic stance.

60
Landscape’s Portmanteau Diversities
How landscapes are valued varies with locale and epoch in ways poorly understood.
We have little notion even about what ties might be common to all, which specific to
given times, places or peoples. Over past centuries, philosophers and planners
65 commonly framed landscape preferences on aesthetic criteria alone, their stance
ideally if not solely scenic. They invoked universal principles to show how and why
some scenes look superior to others. Classical, medieval and Renaissance tenets
assumed that regularity, harmony, smoothness and symmetry were inherently
pleasing. The supposed roundness of the primordial globe, the proportions of the
70 human body, the symbolic perfection of geometric figures like the Golden
Section were enduring exemplars of beauty in nature as well as art—at least until
the advent of Romantic adoration of shaggy, inchoate and fragmented sublimity.
Hogarth’s famed serpentine line of beauty applied by extension to natural features
like river meanders. Broad-crowned trees (Gordon Orians), prospect-and-refuge (Jay
75 Appleton), and ease of legibility (Stephen and Rachel Kaplan) have been advanced as
preferences made universal by human evolution since prehistory (Tveit et al., 2006).
Awareness of landscape involves active participation, however motionless the
beholder. Wind and weather, light and shadow, clouds and sky, seasonal foliage, the
disposition of birds, animals and people make each glimpse a new scene, even when
80 seen repeatedly from the same spot. Moreover, landscapes change as we move
through them: each step, each turn of the head, engages new vistas. So much depends
on our physical interaction that no static scenic consensus can adequately reflect it.1
That beauty is in the eye of the beholder (Hungerford, 1878)—the Victorian
aphorism reflects David Hume’s subjectivist philosophy—forecloses any hope of
85 concurrence. Potentially inherent tastes pale in the light of the time- and culture-
bound predispositions. What might seem innate to all is swamped by what is learned
and recalled at specific times and places.
That landscape attachments vary with locale and language is obvious; how and
why they differ is more a matter of folk wisdom than of scholarly findings. What
90 landscape traits are admired or deplored, what symbols they embody, how novelty
and familiarity, promised enhancement or threatened loss affect our encounters with
them, has received little comparative scrutiny. ‘‘Knowledge of [beauty] is the
knowledge about the Earth which is most worth having’’, declared Sir Francis
Younghusband (1920, pp. 4, 7). He urged geographers to ‘‘compare the beauty of
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 639

one region with the beauty of another so that we may realize the beauty of each with 95
a greater intensity and clearness’’. That project remains unrealized, perhaps
unrealizable.

Cultural Differences
100
Linguistics alone throws up daunting impediments. Landscape, landschaft, land-
schap, landscab, territoire, territorio, paysage, paesàggio imply different emphases on
site and scene, occupance and observation (Scazzosi, 2004). Syntactical phraseology
reveals embedded cultural distinctions. A sign in the Swiss village of Château d’Oex
says in English ‘Please do not pick the flowers’. In German: ‘It is forbidden to pick 105
the flowers’. In French: ‘Those who love the mountains, leave them their flowers’.
These phrases prescribe divergent approaches toward the same aim—English
courteous behaviour, German minatory prohibition, French aesthetic fondness.
Cultural tradition shapes other differences. Fondness for slow accretion in old
England, to give one example, may be said to contrast with creative urgency in new 110
America, and with abrupt disjunction between pre- and post-Islamic features in
Egypt. Cultural cleavage fragments the Egyptian scene, disjoining ancient from
modern. Here stand ‘‘pharaonic temples and concrete apartment houses, [but]
nothing links them’’. The pharaonic past has small appeal to Muslims, except to be
touted to tourists; Egypt’s pagan residues affront Islamic faith. Nilotic antiquity is a 115
rejected cultural heritage, left to the enjoyment (and often the theft) of aliens
(Fedden, 1945, pp. 8 – 9; Geuze, 2007).
The English landscape, in contrast, is quintessentially lauded as a legibly enduring,
ever-accreting palimpsest, ‘‘the closest thing we will ever experience to a time
machine’’ (Oliver, 2007, p. 8). The historian W. G. Hoskins (1963, p. 228), scanning 120
from the standpoint of a Saxon boundary bank, could tell:

which of these farms is recorded in Domesday Book, and which came in the
great 13th century colonisation; to see the Georgian stucco house of some
impoverished squire whose ancestors settled on that hillside in the time of King 125
John and took their name from it; to know that behind one there lies an ancient
estate of St Boniface’s long-vanished abbey, and that in front stretches the
demesne farm of Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings; to be aware . . . that one is
part of an immense unbroken stream that has flowed over this scene for more
than a thousand years. 130

These ancestral traces merge in England’s famed lowland tapestry, vaunted as the
multi-generational creation of its people and requiring their continuing protection
and improvement. But to understand and appreciate this palimpsest requires
historically informed observation. As Julian Barnes’s (1998, p. 60) fictional theme- 135
park entrepreneur puts it,

The point of the countryside is not to go through it but to be in it . . . I stood on a

hill . . . and looked down on an undulating field past a copse towards a river
and . . . a pheasant stirred beneath my feet . . . A person passing through would 140
no doubt have assumed that Dame Nature was going about her eternal
 640 D. Lowenthal

business. I knew better . . . The hill was an Iron Age burial mound, the
undulating field a vestige of Saxon agriculture, the copse was a copse only
because a thousand other trees had been cut down, the river was a canal and the
145 pheasant had been hand-reared by a gamekeeper.

The English landscape was extolled as a product of sustained and orderly effort by
explicit contrast with untamed America, in terms that married aesthetic with social
and political propriety, in the wake of the American Revolution and in the midst of
150 the French. On ‘‘lawns . . . smoothed by healthful industry’’, Anna Seward deplored
the picturesque ‘‘Jacobinism of taste that would have nature as well as man indulged
in that uncurbed and wild luxuriance, which must soon render our landscape-island
rank, weedy, damp, and unwholesome unwholesome as the incultivate savannas of
America’’.2 Two centuries later the same sentiment persists. ‘‘If you could get
155 through the bogs and jungles and the thickets [that covered] this country one million
years ago’’, declared a recent Tory environment minister, ‘‘you would say, ‘What a
dreadful place’. The valleys were mosquito-ridden swamps; the mountains were
covered in hideous oak thickets and there were just a few shacks, where miserable
people attempted to live. Now this is a country full of beautiful landscape . . ., all
160 built by man, and we are constantly enhancing it’’.3
Pioneer American settlers likewise accounted the wilderness a dangerous and
unsightly impediment. The contrary taste, rapturous adoration of divine nature
unsullied by human impress, emerged later, as wilderness dwindled and noxious
cities spread. Two examples must suffice here. America’s most popular historian,
165 George Bancroft ([1837] 1842 – 1874, 2, pp. 271 – 272), compared the Hudson River
valley previous to European settlement with the scene of his own day. When Henry
Hudson first saw it in 1607,

vegetable life and death were mingled hideously together. The horrors of
170 corruption frowned on the fruitless fertility of uncultivated nature. Reptiles
sported in the stagnant pools, or crawled unharmed over piles of mouldering
trees; masses of decaying vegetation fed the exhalations with the seeds of
pestilence.

175 But now, in 1837, exulted Bancroft,

The earth glows with the colors of civilization; the banks of the streams are
enamelled with the richest grasses; woodlands and cultivated fields are
harmoniously blended . . . The thorn has given way to the rosebush; the
180 cultivated vine clambers over rocks where the brood of serpents used to nestle;
while industry smiles at the changes she has wrought, and inhales the bland air
which now has health on its wings. And man is still in harmony with nature,
which he has subdued, cultivated, and adorned.

185 In Bancroft’s eyes, deforestation, the railroad, mineral extraction, and commerce
spelled aesthetic progress and spiritual regeneration.
Seventy years later John Fox drew the reverse conclusion in his bestseller Trail of
the Lonesome Pine. By then Bancroft’s symbols of triumphant conquest had become
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 641

emblems of horrendous desecration. The logger’s axe and the hewn stump no longer
meant the advance of civilization; they now denoted the rape of innocent nature 190
(Cikovsky, 1971; Cox et al., 1985). Wrecked by soulless loggers, Cumberland Gap’s
once crystal-clear stream was laden with sawdust and ‘black as soot’. The novel’s
protagonist, a mining engineer turned nature lover, vows to restore Lonesome Cove:
‘‘I’ll tear down those mining shacks, . . . stock the river with bass again. And I’ll plant
young poplars to cover the sight of every bit of uptorn earth along the mountain 195
there. I’ll bury every bottle and tin can in the Cove. I’ll take away every sign of
civilization . . . and leave old Mother Nature to cover up the scars’’ (Fox, 1908,
pp. 201 – 202). Landscape beauty and spiritual regeneration required eradicating the
marks of industry and restoring wild nature.
These visual preferences are saturated with moral judgements about untouched 200
and inhabited landscapes. A different Old World slant emerges in John Ruskin’s
double evocation of the Swiss Jura: as he saw it in Switzerland, and as he imagined it
in America. His Seven Lamps of Architecture ([1848] 1961, pp. 167 – 69) limns a
delectable pastoral forest, blessed with ‘‘all the solemnity [yet] none of the
savageness’’ of the Alps, where ‘‘clear green streams wind along their well-known 205
beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by
year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings
of the earth’’. The scene seemed to Ruskin dependent on nothing beyond ‘‘its own
secluded and serious beauty’’. But then he paused, imagining it not in Switzerland,
but rather ‘‘a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent’’: 210

The writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill [thus] cast upon
it . . . The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became
oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed
how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not 215
theirs . . . Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed
by the deep colors of human endurance, valor, and virtue; and the crests of the
sable hills . . . received a deeper worship.

from the ramparts of the Castle of Grandson, that massive structural memory of 220
Swiss medieval valour, at their border.
In short, landscape achieves beauty only when enlivened by hoary human history.
It followed that ‘‘the charm of romantic association—[of] ruins and traditions, the
remains of architecture, the traces of battlefields, the precursorship of eventful
history—can be felt only by the European. The instinct to which it appeals can 225
hardly be felt in America’’ (Ruskin, [1873] 1886, p. 292). American travellers home
from visits to Europe concurred with Ruskin, bemoaning their raw, unfinished land.
The absence of ‘‘a pictured, illuminated Past’’, judged the historian John Lothrop
Motley (1849), left America with ‘‘a naked and impoverished appearance’’. All new
and bare, felt William Cullen Bryant, ‘‘it had merely the beauty of a face without an 230
expression [because] it wants the associations of tradition which are the soul and
interest of scenery’’.4 In short, on the nature and presence (or absence) of cultural
context determined reactions to landscape. Changing preferences for scenes
variously enhanced by or largely devoid of human impress continue to embroil
landscape devotees the world over. 235
 642 D. Lowenthal

Landscape’s Daunting Scope

That collective landscape attitudes remain little more than anecdotally known
reflects the huge range of the subject and the paucity of generalists. Most landscape
240 studies stem from specific perspectives, those of farmers or foresters, hikers or
painters, developers or conservationists, seldom from all these purviews taken
together. Intense concern with one of myriad competing and often exclusive
interests—ecological, economic, political, aesthetic, residential, touristic—militates
against any unified vision. Despite landscape’s centrality to our existence,
245 comprehensive insight is lacking.
It is because landscape is everyone’s concern that it is almost no one’s prime
concern. Those for whom it is their primary professional focus are few and infernally
occupied; most landscape architects are too busy reshaping scenes to bother
theorizing about them. And to shape them well, they need to command an awesome
250 sweep of expertise: art, architecture, engineering, botany, psychology, history and
literature, for a start.
Ruskin’s ([1873] 1886, 3, pp. 283 – 284) homily on how those of various special
bents look at trees applies no less to entire landscapes. His imagined engineer

255 is struck by the manner in which the [tree’s] roots hold the ground, and sets
himself to examine their fibres, little more conscious of the beauty of the tree
than if he were a rope-maker untwisting the strands of a cable. Struck by certain
groupings of their colours, [the artist] note[s them] mechanically for future use,
with as little feeling as a cook setting down the constituents of a newly
260 discovered dish. [To the nostalgic traveller] the sight of the trees calls up some
happy association, and presently he forgets them, and pursues the memories
they summoned; [the poet-fantasist] impressed by the wild coiling of the boughs
and roots, changes them in his fancy into dragons and monsters.

265 But comprehensive awareness of the trees requires ‘‘all these perceptions and trains
of thought’’ to be combined. ‘‘The power of fully perceiving any natural object
depends on grouping and fastening all our fancies about it as a centre.’’5 And to
Ruskin’s several perspectives should be added those of resident and visitor,
developer and naturalist, ecologist and conservationist, and nowadays tour guide
270 and advertising copywriter.6

The Growing Cult of Landscape

If landscape professionals shy away from landscape discourse, others are
275 increasingly obsessed by it. Today’s successors to 18th-century pundits who prated
of the Sublime and the Picturesque are not landscape gardeners or city planners; they
are cultural theorists and social scientists, historians and anthropologists, who seize
on ‘landscape’ as a trendy catch-all term, not least because the word suggests a
down-to-earth reality absent from their appropriations of it. Like ‘signifier’,
280 ‘landscape’ is an academic open sesame, a rallying cry among the cognoscenti, an
avant-garde denotation in fiction and music, food and folklore. It so serves because
the word itself has come to imply what is nowadays held to be dear and good—the
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 643

local, the particular, the authentic, the natural. As ‘natural’ (not contrived),
landscape reflects what is trusted. As the locus of everyday life, landscape offers
readily visible linkages. As typical and commonplace, landscape expresses popular 285
will at every scale from neighbourhood to nation.

Views of Landscape Traditionally Disparaged

Landscape beauty was until recently very much a minority taste. Up to the early 19th 290
century nature was widely derogated, seen as fearsome and horrid in the wild,
visually commonplace in domesticated arenas. Earlier devotees of Virgilian pastoral
had been poets and painters and their elite patrons, seldom rural denizens, who
supposedly lived in but did not consciously look at their surroundings. Only ‘the
‘‘best of men’’ were permitted to perambulate the Arcadian settings of Palladian 295
country houses. The actual shepherds . . . had no ‘‘natural’’ place in these . . . enclosed
landscape scenes’ (Olwig, 2002, p. 121). In deploring the contrived beautification of
land from which peasants were evicted by England’s Enclosure Acts, pre-empting
arable fields and villages for manorial parks and gardens, Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The
Deserted Village’ (1770) idealized a homespun prospect that was bucolic instead of 300
‘scenic’:

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn

Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn . . .
The land adorned for pleasure all 305
In barren splendour feebly waits the fall . . .
. . . where scattered hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose.
Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed,
In nature’s simplest charms at first arrayed. 310

By turning fields and meadows into ‘landscape’, landlords sacrificed living com-
munities to gardenesque greed. Innocent virtue and rustic simplicity were expunged
by ruthless and immoral power, to satisfy an inhumane perverted aesthetic.
Beyond the landscape gardener’s aesthetic, landscape painting was long held the 315
lowest of the arts. Devotees of the picturesque and the sublime repudiated workaday
rural scenes as vulgar, urging artists to stick to picturesque ruins. But even the finest
landscape in and of itself was inferior to delineations of humans and their creations
(Hewison, 1976; Payne, 1993). Nature, thought incoherent because unintentional,
lacked ideal forms toward which painters might strive. Hence landscape depiction 320
could not be morally uplifting. ‘‘No landscape is a whole, or even a complete part of
an organic whole’’, explained a 19th-century authority:

Every landscape is merely the fragmentary contingent resultant of unrelated

forces successive in time, discordant in action, and tending to no common 325
aim . . . Landscape painting, then, is but the portraiture of inanimate nature, and
as a moral teacher it can but repeat her lessons . . . This falls short of the dignity
of historical painting, [just as] unconscious Nature is beneath the rank of
divinely endowed man. (Marsh, 1860, pp. 52 – 53)
 644 D. Lowenthal

330 The cognoscenti scorned popular admiration of wild scenery. A Harvard

philosopher termed nature’s overrated beauties tarnished by ‘‘rank, unchaste
profusion [and] unintelligible selection and composition’’ (Prall, 1929, p. 66). His
reproach echoed Oscar Wilde’s revulsion against nature as not only uncomforta-
ble—‘‘hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects’’—but unsightly.
335 ‘‘The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is
Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her
absolutely unfinished condition.’’7
Proper landscape appreciation was the privileged domain of the cultivated; ‘‘the
1 optic was that of the outsider’’ (Samuel, 1998, pp. 143 – 146). ‘‘The average layman’’,
340 Kenneth Clark (1956, p. 18) summed up elite British assumptions about humble
rural denizens, ‘‘would simply have said that nature was not enjoyable. The fields
meant nothing but hard work.’’ Agricultural depression from the 1880s through the
1940s had left landscapes attractive only to devotees of decay; neither fields nor
farming seemed picturesque; rural cottages were slums, surrounded by dilapidated
345 barns, dark and dirty cowsheds, muck and mire. Farm labourers were ‘‘quite
unmoved by the beauty around them, whether on the land or in the village. ‘What do
you think about when you are sitting on your tractor, all day?’ a [Second World
War] land-girl asked an expert tractor-driver. ‘I looks at the bloody earth’, he
2 replied, ‘and I says, ‘‘blast it!’’’’’ (Orwin, 1945, pp. 8, 88, 105 – 106).
350 Had there been anything to admire, ordinary folk were deemed incapable of scenic
appreciation, owing to their innate defects or to their degrading milieux. ‘‘Rude or
vulgar people are indifferent to their natural surroundings’’, held George Santayana
(1896, p. 133). ‘‘The beautiful daily aspects of their environment escape them
altogether’’. An English traveller concluded that mass ‘‘aesthetic spirit has been
355 broken on the wheel of circumstance. . . . Bound to live among the architectural
vomit of a soulless age, [they] are compelled to regard their surroundings with
unseeing eyes.’’8
Those unable to see became threats to the now nationally treasured survival of the
very scenery Goldsmith had assailed as the pompous reserve of an elite few. Securing
360 Brockhampton estate in Herefordshire for the National Trust in the 1940s, James
Lees-Milne mourned that ‘‘this small seat in the heart of our secluded country is now
deprived of its last squire. A whole social system has broken down. What will replace
it beyond government by the masses, uncultivated, rancorous, savage, philistine,
enemies of all things beautiful.’’9 England’s noble parklands, endangered by the hoi
365 polloi, were for countryside columnist William Beach Thomas ‘‘integral to the
landscape as to civilisation’’.10

Modern Acclamation
370 Yet it was precisely these ‘‘enemies of all things beautiful’’ who were now landscape’s
most avid admirers. By the mid-20th century, thought Clark (1956, p. 142), ‘‘almost
every Englishman [presumably excepting his ‘average layman’], if asked what he
meant by ‘beauty’, would begin to describe a landscape—perhaps a lake and
mountain, perhaps a cottage garden, perhaps a wood with bluebells and silver
375 birches . . . ; but, at all events, a landscape’’. Half a century before, scenic
representations of every kind had become far and away the most popular artistic
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 645

adornments in American homes (Zalesch, 1996). Increasingly, scenic glories became

emblems of patriotic virtue on everything from postage stamps to license plates to
table mats.
In continental Europe, landscapes were first popularized as objects of collective 380
visual affection towards the end of the 18th century. Along with other aspects of folk
culture—architecture, folklore, language—national landscape attachments reso-
nated with populist feeling. They spelled rural liberation and peasant emancipation,
a release from ancient provincial and parochial bondage. Two centuries on,
landscapes remain compelling icons of national identity. Countries still commonly 385
depict themselves in landscape terms, hallowing what they fancy uniquely theirs. In
Denmark the entire landscape is historicized as a metaphor for the nation and its
history (Stig Sørensen, 1996). ‘‘English national consciousness’’, writes Adam
Nicolson (1992, p. 27), ‘‘is not the consciousness of a flag, of a language or even
really a race, but of a landscape.’’ Every national anthem praises special natural 390
splendours, unique scenic bounties.11
Today not merely exceptional but representative landscapes become collective
legacies. Spectacular features, gardens and parks have long been cherished. But
recent decades have vastly extended the patrimonial mainstream. Consider the
estates of the National Trust for England and Wales. Forty years back, the Trust’s 395
great houses and grounds alone were prized; few gave a thought to the look of the
arable land ruthlessly milked to feed these showpieces. Today, Trust members, up
ten-fold, esteem estate arable lands as treasures of no less worth. UNESCO has
increasingly designated Cultural Landscapes of Universal Value not for features that
are unique but for qualities that are felt characteristic. ‘‘Landscape is everywhere’’, in 400
an English conservator’s reading of the European Landscape Convention, and ‘‘an
‘ordinary’ area of landscape is as much party of our heritage as any palace or
church’’ (Fairclough, 2007).
From idealizing nations, landscapes nowadays turn to idealizing nature. Land-
scape’s current salience stems, in substantial measure, from nostalgia for bygone wild 405
or rural virtues, in an urbanized world smudged by the sameness of global enterprise
and communications. It stands for what seems traditional, natural, innate.
Attachment grows with tending it. Deracinated denizens of anonymous, ephemeral
places mourn what once seemed durably distinctive. Some seek links with ancestral
locales or childhood milieus. Others cherish or contrive scenery and social fabric that 410
made rural locales our place rather than just any place. ‘‘It’s our land’’, insisted John
Steinbeck’s tenant farmers. ‘‘We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it,
and we got killed on it, died on it . . . That’s what makes it ours—being born on it,
working it, dying on it’’ (1939, p. 37). Today what makes it ‘ours’ is less and
less being born on it and working it, let alone dying on it. It is the absence of work 415
that attracts the new resident, the very fact of being distanced from the soil, of
‘‘becoming unearthly, . . . freed from the imperatives of nature’’ (Mabey, 2005, p. 13).
As a mid-century New York writer put it, ‘‘many of us love the country precisely
because we are not really part of it’’.12 Landscape is increasingly valued as a foreign
country. 420
Yet rural areas simultaneously feature in Green ideals for quite dissimilar traits:
diversity, complexity, fragile yet unbroken chains of being, humility about what
cannot be known or controlled, frugality and parsimony in stewardship. Unlike our
 646 D. Lowenthal

forebears throughout most of history, we now see nature as a common legacy

425 needing collaborative care. Fears of global warming, species loss, ecocide routinely
relayed by the media magnify landscape awareness and attachment.
Nature worship, classical pastoralism, Romantic and post-industrial urban
misgivings are not new. But their convergence in the modern cult of rurality reflects
two recent developments: heightened concern for a balance that equates nature with
430 virtue, and distress at the growing gulf between traditional rural pursuits and
residual rural landscapes. Landscape and rural life now seem ominously disjoined.
Rural habitation dwindles; crops need ever less human input. Cultivated lands feel
divorced from social reality—less visibly distinctive where tillage is intensive, less
economically viable elsewhere. Time-honoured rustic and pastoral practices collapse.
435 Bereft of social context, landscape becomes vacant, vacuous, void of experienced
meaning—just scenery.
Rural scenes were once the time-honoured domain of farmers and herders,
resident guardians of landscape health. Technology has progressively weakened that
linkage; its virtual severance is now widely apparent. Most of us are city dwellers;
440 ever less landscape is under traditional rural care. Farmers are still pre-eminent
stewards, but ecologically sanctified rural landscape now needs all our care. It is also
the right place to live. Rural scenes promise a spacious plenitude and companionable
seclusion denied in cities.
Such notions are not new, of course; Arcadian yearning dates back to ancient
445 Rome. What is new is the widespread urge to reify the myth. Before, landscape
longings were largely vicarious, indulged briefly now and then, on holiday, in
weekend retreats or in retirement. Fleeting episodic visits are still the norm. But more
and more townies think the countryside theirs by right. Three out of four Britons
claim to opt for rural life (Bennett, 1993; Ellman, 1993; Halfacree, 2006).
450 Remoteness no longer impedes such prospects. Car and phone, personal computer
and fax put country dwelling within urban reach.
A century or two back, rural life was routinely reviled as villainous idiocy. It was
one thing to love landscape; quite another to accept the folk who lived there, let
alone to share that life. Later, the dim-witted peasant became the rural salt of the
455 earth, a fount of native wisdom and virtue. Both figures are now passé: farmers
today are neither demons nor angels. Many are not even rural, but town dwellers
who just work in the country. And as the rural landscape is stripped of its social
carapace, any townsman may equally make his mark there.
An English countryside connoisseur a century ago complained that ‘‘the radiant
460 beauty of still unsullied expanses of corn land and wind-swept moor and heather and
quiet down standing white and clean’’ was for most urbanites no more than a ‘‘toy
and a plaything for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms they care not at all’’
(Masterman, 1909, pp. 204 – 208). Now many urbanites care more intensely than
many locals. They are often damned for knowing nothing of the rural milieus they
465 crave—prizing the scenery while spurning the slurry. But the few old-time denizens
left may know little more. No longer need the rural incomer feel shame because he
milks no cow, sows no seed, reaps no corn. Often no one else does either, or only
remote and rootless hirelings. Of the rural economy little may be left but chopping
wood and picking apples. The countryside becomes solely a place for living, not for
470 making a living.
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 647

The farmer-cum-ecologist vision dies hard; those still on the land are still apt to be
so adulated. But awareness of intensive exploitation—hedges uprooted, mass use of
commercial fertilizer, vast tracts converted to prairies and conifer forest—erodes this
image. The demigod farmer faithful to conserved tradition gets deposed; stewardship
passes from born countryman to anxious urbanite. Many of UNESCO’s newly 475
designated cultural landscapes ‘of universal value’ are precious conjunctions of
nature and culture too fragile to survive without international protection (Rössler,
2006).

480
Depopulating Countrysides: European Comparisons
Up to a century ago, the mass of mankind almost everywhere lived by agriculture. In
Europe, at least, time has reversed this. And rural exodus forfeits intimacy with land
as the seat of livelihood and everyday life. No longer the fount of home and family,
métier or livelihood, rural scenes become loci of vacation and avocation. European 485
landscapes are progressively emptied of traditional habitants. But as these emptying
landscapes suffer scenic and social transformation—pollution, ecological degrada-
tion, agricultural intensification—they elicit pleas for protection by national and
international agencies. Laments of rural decay, dating back two centuries or more in
parts of northern Europe, peaked during the post-war decades in much of the west 490
and centre, and are heard more and more today in southern and eastern countries.

Where Rural Life is Long Gone

Rural folkways are remote memories in lands long urban and industrial. Britain is 495
the main exemplar; but relatively few today in the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany
have had first-hand farm experience. By 1960 the rural labour force in Britain and
the Low Countries was less than one-tenth the total in employment; since then it has
more than halved again. Elderly city folk hark back not to rural but to urban and
industrial roots. Not farms but factories and urban streets frame personal recall. 500
Industrial archaeology, urban heritage centres and tenement museums in Britain,
France, Scandinavia engage those whose sense of past purpose came from mill, mine
and shipyard, not meadow, field and pasture.
Of field and pasture urban children know virtually nothing. The British
government aimed to send every school child on a farm visit in 2007, to counter 505
shocking ignorance of where food comes from: fewer than one in 20 8-to-15-year-
olds know that beef burgers are from cows; many think cows lay eggs (The Times,
2007b). Landscape legacies shore up national identity and sustain tourism. But those
legacies are shorn of traditional obligations and rewards, link less and less with
everyday experience and embody few long-term memories. Countryside values have 510
become mainly ecological and scenic, catering for concerns with birds and wildlife,
hiking and rambling, often more at odds with than supportive of farming. The
Glastonbury rock festival (born 1970) needs ever more land; more is ever available.
‘‘The farmers love it. It’s not worth growing anything these days, it is? You get a
better return from parked cars for three days than rapeseed oil.’’13 515
Rapeseed is less endearing than rabbits, though, and lambs are more sexy still.
Earlier distaste for farm holidays as mucky and smelly gives way to an embrace of
 648 D. Lowenthal

agritourism for its ‘natural’ balance and simplicity, notably in the presence of
livestock (Chesshire, 2007). Many pastoral landscapes survive largely through
520 tourism. ‘‘In 20 years’ time all Lakeland farmers will have given up farming’’,
forecast a local in 1991. ‘‘They’ll be called field wardens. They’ll build up dry stone
walls, then knock them down again to amuse the tourists . . . Sheep will become pets,
never sold or killed.’’14
Cattle instead of sheep have been Dutch rural icons since van Ruysdael’s 17th-
525 century paintings: ‘‘a dappled hide against a green landscape is more a logo of the
Netherlands than the tulip’’. With half the Netherlands’ remaining farms are too
small to be sustainable without agritourism, viewing cows outdoors cows becomes
essential; ‘‘to keep our landscape beautiful and colorful’’, Dutch authorities exhort
farmers, ‘‘keep the cows in sight’’ (Metz, 2002, pp. 186 – 188). (The American cows
530 eastern Long Island pastures, frozen in rumination at the old farm fence where
actual cows once grazed, are plastic [Clines, 2007].) Nostalgia for domestic animals
reflects yearning for rural scenes endowed with active life—landscapes vitalized by
moving creatures. Horses, long gone as part of the workaday round, let alone as
denizens of the Elysian fields (Olwig, 2002), become pets emblematic of healthy
535 outdoor life (Metz, 2002).
But it is above all the lack of people that makes the current countryside feel
moribund; essay after essay in Granta’s 2005 ‘Country Life’ issue (subtitled
‘Dispatches from what’s left of it’) notes the eerie absence of human beings. To be
sure, emptiness for many is the scenic ideal; ‘‘‘beauty spots’ were by definition
540 uninhabited’’, recalled Raphael Samuel (1998, p. 143) of his war-time childhood,
‘‘and ideally places where there was not a soul to be seen’’. Coffee-table and
cinematic English landscapes are still depopulated. ‘‘Photographed England now
looks as if a neutron bomb has hit it: no damage to buildings or landscapes but
people have been utterly removed’’ (Nicolson, 1992, p. 28). In the lush timeless
545 landscape of the typical Merchant-Ivory film, hills, trees and sheep are eternal, the
human presence ephemeral and intrusive (Cardwell, 2002).
‘‘If the countryside is going to provide anything other than rural theme parks for
the urban middle classes and wide expanses of chemical monoculture’’, writes rural
activist Simon Fairlie (Halfacree, 2006, p. 329), ‘‘then more people are needed to live
550 and work there.’’ The more probable rural future is theme-park contrivance.
Anticipating his retirement 30 years on, Britain’s Nature Conservancy Council’s
director-general envisaged an outing in 2020 to ‘Center Parc’,

a wonderful, enormous dome, under which private enterprise conserves rare and
555 representative re-created countrysides and stunning holographs of romantic
landscapes now lost. On the way back, I visit the small thatched mock Tudor
cottage . . . with blown up photographs of some striking buildings the National
Trust used to run before they were either inundated or made way for the
wonderful motorway. I sail over to a splendidly landscaped golf course for the
560 senior Japanese businessmen whose microchip factories stretch to the horizon.
(Hornsby, 1989)

With that stage-set now just a decade off we need only replace Japanese with
Chinese entrepreneurs, and ‘Center Parc’ with Julian Barnes’s Isle of Wight theme
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 649

park—straw-chewing yokels, men in smocks with scythes winnowing chaff (Barnes, 565
1998).

Where Rural Life is a Recent Memory

Century-long decline presaged the precipitous abandonment of much of rural 570
Europe after the Second World War. Ireland, France, Denmark, Finland, Greece,
Iberia, Italy’s Mezzogiorno, Switzerland lost most of their farm workers in just a few
decades, dropping from half to less than a quarter of the labour force. Intensive
agriculture remains an economic mainstay, but few workers—in many lands less
than one in 20—are still farm-based. 575
Whether exodus to the city is remote or recent, however, many keep rural ties.
And rural scenes join personal with collective heritage. Recurrent visits, long
vacations, childhood memories, and myths of national identity sacralize countrysides
sustained by huge subsidies. ‘‘Those who left the land grew ever more sentimental
about the world they had lost’’, writes Declan Kiberd (1995, p. 495) about rural 580
Ireland’s exodus to Dublin. As a consequence, government subventions have made
rural areas previously abandoned to terminal decline affluent enough to enjoy a more
sophisticated urban lifestyle than many Dubliners can afford.
In France, farmers are extolled as ecological and social paragons and cosseted as
an endangered breed whose survival is essential to national culinary identity. Rural 585
subventions aim at saving France’s soul via its stomach, in what is termed
‘‘gastronomial sovereignty’’ (International Herald Tribune, 2005). Yet every decade
distances the Parisian incomer further from Breton and Norman, Auvergnat and
Provençal roots; the compote and calvados cease coming, the uncles retire, the farm
is sold. Travel ads urging visitors to ‘See France while it is still there’ hype fears of 590
imminent rural extinction.
The French countryside visitors see may soon resemble the post-exodus scene
foreseen by a famed Breton folklorist:

After the peasants abandoned the countryside, all fell into ruins. But the new 595
masters began living there. The richest acquired entire farms and villages. But
no one was around to keep up their estates or to serve them. They themselves
were forced to cut their own lawns, prune their own trees, care for their animals,
and fight against wild vegetation. And of course they began to love the land.
They took pride in picking, harvesting, and eating what they themselves had 600
grown. They rediscovered the taste of fruit and even bread.15 Their country
homes became their only homes, protected from the common people now
locked up in the cities . . . So the former bourgeoisie became professional
peasants, while [urbanized] descendants of the former peasants consoled
themselves with electronic toys. (Hélias, 1978, pp. 335 – 336) 605

Where Dwindling Rural Life Persists

Farm dominance, increasingly rare in Western Europe, is now challenged in Eastern 610
Europe as well. Ukraine, Byelorussia, Bulgaria and Poland still look largely rural,
 650 D. Lowenthal

and labourers remain on arable land; but many folk, though not yet most, are
industrial or urban. The two-thirds of Romania’s economy that is urban and
industrial flourishes; the rural remainder is languishing, its demise sped by European
615 Union membership as of 2007. Not even Albania or Kosovo are any longer
overwhelmingly rural. Free enterprise since 1991 combined with EU incentives leave
once Sovietized lands bereft of youth, who are no longer compelled to labour locally
and now seize chances to emigrate west (Brunwasser, 2006).
Rapidly changing economic priorities run counter to EU environmental directives,
620 notably Natura 2000, which mandates the protection of natural habitat and
biodiversity by setting aside substantial areas against development. Bulgaria has
some of Europe’s most untouched nature—indeed, initial set-aside proposals
included 40% of Bulgaria’s territory, almost three times the European average.
But EU pleas to respect nature conservation’s long-term benefits are fiercely resisted
625 by Bulgarians eager to shed impoverished isolation for the immediate profits of
package tourism (Brunwasser, 2007).
Agricultural attitudes persist, to be sure. Rural dwellers take proprietary pride in
landscape as hearth and livelihood. More than their West European counterparts,
farmers and herders often remain intolerant of holiday-makers, folklife tourists, and
630 eco-cultists. Yet they can hardly resist their lures. In villages like Romania’s Matau,
bulldozers are churning up the meadows to create a ski run and holiday resort, while
wealthy outsiders buy up land for holiday villas. In Matau, nonetheless, a western
visitor pens a contrasting scene of ‘Paradise Lost’ with a moral flavour reminiscent of
Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’:
635
I have discovered Heaven . . . a peasant village high in the hills of Romania, the
newest and poorest member of the European Union . . . Its homes of carved
wood and patterned plaster are topped by hay lofts, encircled by orchards,
enclosed by picket fences. They have views across a deep valley to the forests
640 and snowy peaks of the Carpathian mountains . . . the winter air is scented by
woodsmoke and dung. The silence is broken only by cowbells, the bleating of
sheep and, at dawn, cocks crowing . . . The big-handed, leather-faced, pungent-
smelling subsistence farmers of Matau still live much as their ancestors have for
generations. They keep a few cows, pigs and chickens in their yards. . . . They cut
645 grass with scythes and make haystacks . . . [At church on] the ‘Saturday of the
Dead’, when the villagers remember departed family, [they] crossed themselves
as one, knelt as one and sang in sweet harmony. They were at peace with the
past, with themselves and with nature. For how much longer? (Fletcher, 2007)

650 That the ‘departed family’ now includes not just the dead but almost every villager
under 30 gives the answer to ‘how much longer’.

Permanence and Evanescence

655 We need to sense landscape as abiding; our essential well-being depends on finding
our surroundings more durable than ourselves. ‘‘Our mental equilibrium is due first
and foremost to the fact that the physical objects with which we are in daily contact
change little or not at all, so providing us with an image of permanence and
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 651

stability.’’16 Over the past century, planned obsolescence has made most man-made
things less durable than us mortals. But rural nature, we like to suppose, remains 660
dependably constant. ‘‘The countryside reassures us that not everything is
superficial and transitory’’, concludes the English rural sociologist Howard Newby
(1990); ‘‘that some things remain stable, permanent and enduring’’. Rurality
sanctions the status quo. Invoking rural roots, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
(1926, p. 101) termed himself not ‘‘the man in the street even, but a man in a field- 665
path, a much simpler person steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas’’.
More changeless still seem rural animals. ‘‘People come—they stay for a while, they
flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way’’, says Badger in Kenneth
Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908 [2005], p. 48). ‘‘But we remain . . . We are
an enduring lot’’. It is a truth as well as a truism that nouveaux-riches, whose 670
industrial energy spearheads rural change, now flock to live in the countryside
because they like it as it is, ‘‘with its traditions and seclusion, its hedge-laying and its
bluebell woods’’ (The Times, 2007a).
Yet it is readily apparent that landscapes are in continual flux (Rackham, 1991).
We know full well that they are malleable, altered for better or worse by each 675
generation. Each successive tenancy transforms what is tilled or left fallow with new
crops, fertilizers, machinery, pests and pesticides. We shape landscapes to suit
ourselves and to leave our own mark on them; we describe and depict them in
idealizing images; and we reshape them after those images, as with Arcadian parks
modelled on Claude and Poussin, gardens after Capability Brown and Humphrey 680
Repton, Constable-like suburbs in Surrey, or American Civil War battlefields
restored to resemble photographs artfully composed by Matthew Brady. Most such
changes are lauded not as alterations but as reversions to how things once were, were
meant to have been, ought to have been.
685
Scenery and Morality
Reactions to landscape change differ with their pace and recency, as shown for rural
Europe, as well as with culture and Zeitgeist. Some praise what are felt to be
improvements; others reprove deterioration. Some wax nostalgic over a seemlier 690
past, others anticipate a fairer future. Wild, pastoral, agricultural and gardenesque
scenes each have their advocates and detractors. Common to almost all observers,
however, is the inseparability of social and civic values from scenic ones. Every
morally desirable landscape is accorded visual harmonies; every scene felt deficient in
virtue is depicted as ugly or disgusting. And what is viewed as good or bad is almost 695
always contrasted with some former, some future, or some foreign condition.
Thus ‘‘a son of Vermont . . . whose eye has been trained to appreciate the charms of
rural beauty’’, wrote a 19th-century native, found ‘‘little to please in the slovenly
husbandry, the rickety dwellings and the wasteful economy of the Southern planter’’.
And at home he was distressed by the deforestation and erosion that within a 700
single generation had converted ‘‘smiling meadows into broad wastes of shingle and
gravel and pebbles, deserts in summer, and seas in autumn and winter’’, while the
denuded hillsides became ‘‘barren and unsightly blots . . . yielding no crop but a
harvest of noxious weeds’’ (Marsh, 1848, pp. 20 – 21). Every descriptive term is
judgemental. 705
 652 D. Lowenthal

Buildings evoke similar conjunctions of aesthetics and morality. Architects and

architectural historians from Pugin to Pevsner have equated beauty with higher
ethical and social imperatives (Watkin, 1977). Disparaging Renaissance neoclassi-
cism, Ruskin ([1853] 1886, 3, pp. 34 – 35) claimed he detested not so much ‘‘the form
710 of this architecture [as] the moral nature of which it is corrupt’’. We continue to
moralize. ‘‘The buildings we admire’’, concludes Alain de Botton, ‘‘extol values we
think worthwhile’’, their materials, shapes and colours suggesting ‘‘such legendarily
positive qualities as friendship, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence’’. We are
especially drawn to qualities felt generally lacking today. Those in the ‘‘rule-
715 bound and materially abundant, punctilious and routine’’ developed world hanker
after ‘‘the natural and unfussy, the rough and authentic’’, a taste embodied in the
so-called ‘para-aesthetic’ chaotic richness of faulty, irregular and disordered
landscapes.17
Judgements about landscapes are especially charged with moral conviction, for at
720 least two reasons. The making and unmaking of landscapes, unlike buildings, is seen
to transcend human contrivance, partaking of nature as well as artifice. And we
accord virtue to those who live in landscape as opposed to those who ‘merely’ look at
it. At least since Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’, poets and critics have commonly
dismissed the visitor’s viewpoint as shallow and superficial while extolling that of the
725 native, steeped in landscape’s social and economic fabric, as deep and meaningful.
The former is devoid of context; the latter apprehends its true worth.
The anti-aesthetic view pervaded newly settled America. ‘‘Immediate necessity
made a mockery of mere contemplation. To wrest a living from the soil, to secure
frontiers against hostile forces, seemed to demand full attention. Appreciation of the
730 landscape itself, apart from its practical uses, was disdained as pointless and effete’’,
I wrote 40 years ago. Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1875) stressed the
irrelevance of scenery to real life: Twain’s tourist enjoyed the view of the river only
because he was an outsider and didn’t understand it.

735 Perception of scenery is open only to those who play no real part in the
landscape. Those who know it and work in it have to concentrate on
the humdrum realities; ‘the choice is between the mawkish sentiments of the
passengers and the bleak matter-of-factness of the pilot’ (Marx, 1964, p. 364).
Asked to be pilot or passenger, what red-blooded American would hesitate? We
740 are all pilots, happy only when steering some ship . . . We disdain the mere
onlooker and dismiss his opinion of the landscape. What right has a passive
spectator to impose his judgment . . . We do not prettify the rugged face of
workaday America in order to enjoy its looks. In short, the landscape is worthy
of its hire. (Lowenthal, 1968, p. 72)
745
That a landscape’s rightful critics are its earth-bound occupiers, not its visitors, is
an insight famously attributed to William James ([1899] 1958, pp. 150 – 152). James
contrasted his own reaction to that of inhabitants of a newly cleared and planted
North Carolina cove:
750
The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler
had . . . cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 653

standing . . . and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was
hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up 755
for the loss of Nature’s beauty.

But when a settler remarked that ‘‘we ain’t happy here, unless we are getting one of
these coves under cultivation’’, James realized that he had missed the scene’s ‘‘whole
inward significance . . . To me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation . . . But, 760
when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory.
The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent
toil and final reward.’’ What was for James ‘‘a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to
them a symbol redolent with moral memories’’. Scenic beauty was not just disjoined
from, but incompatible with, inherent landscape virtue. 765
Similar incongruities suffuse writings on lived-in landscapes. At a ‘slum’ in
Sunderland, Scotland, a 1970s planner saw ‘‘a collection of shabby, mean and dreary
houses, derelict back lanes, shoddy-fronted shops and broken pavements, the whole
unsightly mess mercifully ill-lit’’. But the resident saw:
770
the best butcher’s shop in town; George McKeith’s wet-fish shop and Peary’s
fried-fish shop . . . Maw’s hot pies and peas prepared on the premises; the Willow
Pond public house, in which her favourite nephew organizes the darts and
dominoes team; . . . the spacious cottage in which she was born and brought
up . . . (but which has some damp patches which make it classifiable as a ‘slum 775
dwelling’); the short road to the cemetery where she cares for the graves of her
mother, father and brother.18

This is not ‘scenery’ but a social scene. Likewise, the writer Helen Hooven Santmyer
(1962, p. 307) wrote of her childhood Ohio town as ‘‘shabby, worn, and 780
unpicturesque . . . In winter, with grey skies, soot-streaked pavements, and lumps
of black snow in the gutters, one could hardly help remarking how ugly the town
was, and how drab and dull’’. Yet, she added, ‘‘that scene, so unconsciously
accepted, had its values for us’’:
785
the unfastidious heart makes up its magpie hoard, heedless of the protesting
intelligence. Valentines in a drugstore window, the smell of roasting coffee,
sawdust on the butcher’s floor . . . these are as good to have known and
remembered, associated as they are with friendliness between man and man,
between man and child, as fair streets and singing towers and classic arcades. 790
(Santmyer, 1962, p. 50)

Such attachments persist past physical occupance. The Vermont farmer who sold
his farm to a summer resident was appalled on a visit back home to find that the new
owner had torn down ‘his’ barn. ‘‘What did you do that for?’’ he inquired, 795
incredulous. ‘‘Well, the barn spoiled the view’’. ‘‘View? View? Why, there was
nothing behind that barn but some mountains’’.
Long-time residents are not alone in championing social utility against scenery.
They are seconded by ecological purists, anti-elitist reformers, and self-appointed
 654 D. Lowenthal

800 stewards of antiquity. Some for whom environmental abuse is of overriding concern,
contend that aesthetic and ecological values are irreconcilable. Others, aghast at the
decay of rural community, ‘‘charge that picturesque planning is inimical to local
democracy and . . . even serve[s] the interests of virulent nationalisms’’ (Thompson,
2006, p. 184).
805 Censuring the degradation of Stonehenge, archaeologists persuaded its custo-
dians, English Heritage and the National Trust, to rescue Britain’s premier ancient
site from physical erosion and visual pollution, by restricting access to those
prepared to appreciate Salisbury Plain prehistory. To ‘‘reunite this symbolic site with
the landscape that gave birth to it and allow the stones to be approached in the way
810 they would have been 5,000 years ago’’, highways skirting Stonehenge were to be
undergrounded. That millions entranced by Stonehenge as they drove past would
thus be deprived of those views played no part in the collapse of this scheme, which
foundered on the excessive cost of tunnelling (Johnston, 2006; National Trust
Magazine, 2002; The Times, 2005).
815 Archaeologists value site context above all, dismissing beauty as a frivolous
concern of little inherent worth. At sites of antiquity they, the professionals, are the
rightful stewardly occupiers; tourists are meddlesome nuisances to be kept at arm’s
length and out of harm’s way. The cancerous growth of tourism, with ever more
millions overwhelming ever-less sustainable scenes, helps justify such charges. The
820 ‘tourist gaze’, deprecated by analysts from Dean MacCannell (1976) to John Urry
(1990), has come to stand for what is inauthentic, artificial, indiscriminate and
corrosive of true value.
Deeply distressed by early 20th-century American subordination of all other land
values to monetary profit, and acquiescence in the resultant tawdry landscapes all
825 around them as normal, inescapable, even fitting, a young law professor depicted an
alternative world where occupance, utility and beauty were inseparable. Islandia,
published two decades after Austin Tappan Wright’s untimely death, became a cult
classic anticipating rural gurus ranging from Aldo Leopold to Louis Bromfield, Scott
Nearing and Carl Sandburg. Visiting an Islandian farm, Wright’s American
830 protagonist is stunned by:

the beauty of the place, a suave serene beauty in the massing of simple elements,
a grove, a house, a field. Nowhere in the whole farm was there a place without
charm . . . They asked where I had been, and . . . suggested other places to which I
835 must be taken. ‘But we crossed that field’, I said. ‘Yes, on the west side, but you
ought to go to the other side and look back’. [Discussing whether to cut down
some birch trees,] what interested them was the effect upon a certain view, rather
than the value of the wood . . . They looked upon their whole farm as a great
living canvas, whose picture changed from moment to moment and hour to
840 hour, and to which they as artists made only little changes from time to time; for
the larger picture was painted mostly by nature and by generations . . . before
them . . . No farmer merely farms but is an artist in landscape architecture
as well.

845 In planting they considered not only where things grew best, but ‘‘how the field will
look when they first come up through the earth, and when they are full grown, and
 Living With and Looking at Landscape 655

when they are dead and when they are stubble . . . The art . . . was neither agriculture
nor architecture but a combination of both . . .’’ (Wright, 1942, pp. 297 – 298).
The Islandian ethos is realized in the agricultural art of Laura Parker and on David
Mas Masumoto’s central California farm: ‘‘my fields have become a crazy quilt of 850
cover crops, a wild blend of patterns, some intended, some a product of nature’s
whims. The different plants grow to different heights and in different patterns,
creating a living appliqué . . . I weave the texture of life into my farm’’.19 The farmer
cum artist flatly contradicts Théophile Gautier’s dictum that ‘‘nothing is truly
beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly 855
because it is the expression of some need, and those of men are ignoble and
disgusting’’.20
Few would differ with J. B. Jackson’s dictum that ‘‘We should never tinker with
the landscape without thinking of those who live in the midst of it’’. But what if those
who live in it, today as in Wright’s day, ‘‘ruined lovely views by unsightly structures. 860
It never occurred to anyone that an ordinary view was worth saving when put into
competition with a commercial interest’’ (Wright, 1942). Like so many moralists,
Jackson asserts that ‘‘what the spectator wants or does not want is of small
account . . . We are not spectators; the human landscape is not a work of art. It is the
temporary product of much sweat and hardship and earnest thought’’ (Jackson, 865
1963 – 1964). Yet the accelerating demise of traditional rural life, the growth of
tourism and of part-time or permanent rural retreats nowadays make us all
spectators. At home as well as on holiday, en route as well as at rest, we savour
landscapes seen, felt, imagined and yearned for. Old distinctions between native and
outsider, between the purely pictorial gaze of the passer-by and contextual depth of 870
the long-time denizen, become ever less relevant. We are all now travelling viewers,
‘‘the commuter, the temporary inhabitant of a trailer court, the migrant farm laborer
and the man on a five months’ luxury cruise’’, as Jackson (1962) elsewhere allowed.
‘‘We are all of us tourists . . . Indeed it is one of the very few traits which we recognize
ourselves as having in common’’. 875
British landowners scorn ‘‘rural policy being dictated from the car window’’.21 Yet
it is from the car window, ‘‘moving along in the automobile’’ (Dixon Hunt, 2004,
pp. 173 – 190) that millions enjoy the landscape, validating Emerson’s (1836) adage
that one ‘‘need only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street
into a puppet-show, [for] the least change in our point of view gives the whole world 880
a pictorial air’’. Emerson privileged the stranger over the sojourner in nature. ‘‘Beds
of flowers send up a most grateful scent to the passenger who hastens by them, but
let him pitch his tent among them and he will find himself grown insensible to their
fragrance.’’22 The gaze of the long-distance traveller, like that of hiker and painter,
weekender and day-outing pensioner, replaces the peasant grind of millennia past. 885
The Beholder in whose eye beauty lies is Everyman.

Notes
1 I expand on this in Lowenthal (1978). 890
2 To J. Johnson, 20 September 1794, in Seward (1811, 4, pp. 10 – 11).
3 Nicholas Ridley, in ‘The Future of the Public Heritage’, Cubitt Trust Panel conference, 15 October
1986 (London: Royal Society of Arts, 1987), p. 92. This section is elaborated in Lowenthal (2000).
4 ‘On poetry in its relation to our age and country’, Prose 1:24, quoted in Bryant (1970, p. 875).
 656 D. Lowenthal

5 I have renamed Ruskin’s ‘idealist’ a fantasist.

6 Advertisers are currently denounced for their illusionary pseudo-images of landscape (TOPIA
895
[International Organization for the Protection of Landscapes in Advertising]).
7 ‘The decay of lying’ [1889], in Wilde (1954, pp. 57, 67, 79).
8 G. C. Hines, ‘Cathedral pilgrimages’, in Williams-Ellis (1938, pp. 160 – 161).
9 Lees-Milne (1983, diary entry 16 June 1947, p. 172).
10 William Beach Thomas, The English Landscape (1938), quoted in Chase (1989, p. 138).
900 11 This is elaborated in Lowenthal (1994) and Olwig (2002).
12 Lewis Gannett and Ruth Gannett, Cream Hill: Discourses of a Week-End Countryman (1949), quoted
in Simo (2005, p. 23).
13 Simon Riser, quoted in Toop (1993, p. 37).
14 Quoted in Davies (1991).
15 Twenty years after Hélias, the French did rediscover good bread (Kaplan, 2006).
905 16 My notes give the sociologist August Comte as the source of this quotation, which I cannot find.
17 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (2006), quoted in Gallent and Andersson (2007, p. 18);
Lurie (2007).
18 Norman Dennis, quoted in Taylor (1973, p. 226).
19 Parker’s ‘Landscape: The Farmer as Artist’ was exhibited at the Jewett Gallery of the San Francisco
Public Library in 2001; Masumoto describes his landscaping in Epitaph for a Peach; she is cited and he
is quoted in Cohn (2004, pp. 73, 70).
910
20 Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), quoted in Atwood (2002, p. 59).
21 British Rail advertisement for a first-class seat from London to Bristol; John Hopkinson, director,
British Field Sports Society, quoted in Young (1990).
22 Emerson, Journals, 2: 232, quoted in Porte (1964, p. 471).

915
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