Landscape: Ecology and Semiosis

Abstract

A principal purpose of this collection of essays is to bring together two approaches to landscape whose divergence has in some ways been exaggerated by trends within recent scholarship. For the sake of simplicity we might call one of these ecological, the other semiotic. I am conscious that my use here of these highly technical terms is loose, but I employ them to signify discourses rather than scientific and technical concepts and methods. An ecological landscape discourse focuses on the complex interactions of natural processes (geomorphological, climatic, biological, vegetational, etc.) shaping characteristic land areas, and extending its concerns to the ways that human activities interact with these natural processes. Frequently, but not invariably, there is an implicit (sometimes explicit) declensionist tone to ecological landscape study: human interactions — at least in the modern world — are seen as detrimental to balanced or stable systems and the landscapes that emerge from these. A semiotic approach to landscape is skeptical of scientific claims to represent mimetically real processes shaping the world around us. It lays scholarly emphasis more on the context and processes through which cultural meanings are invested into and shape a world whose ‘nature’ is known only through human cognition and representation, and is thus always symbolically mediated.