Social constructions of nature and landscape

Overview

Natural landscape and a cultural landscape and what is meant by treating landscapes as human systems.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does it mean to say that nature is socially constructed?

   Model answer

   It does not mean that rocks, rivers and species are imaginary. It means that the categories we sort them into, and the values we attach to them, are produced by societies rather than given by the physical world. What counts as wilderness, countryside, wasteland, a weed, a pest, a beauty spot or a natural disaster is a judgement, and those judgements differ between cultures and change over time. The same stretch of moorland can be a wilderness to a walker, a grouse moor to an estate, a carbon store to an ecologist, rough grazing to a farmer and a development site to a wind company. Because those categories decide what is protected, what is exploited and what is cleared, the construction has real physical consequences.

2. 2

   Explain why wilderness is the clearest example of a socially constructed idea of nature.

   Model answer

   Because areas presented and marketed as untouched wild land are almost always managed. Upland moor is maintained by grazing regimes, drainage and rotational burning; forests are planted, thinned and protected from fire; deer and predator numbers are controlled by culling; visitor numbers are managed by car parks, waymarked paths, stone pitching and seasonal closures; and vegetation is often the product of centuries of clearance rather than of nature. In several parts of the world, land designated as wilderness or national park was cleared of its resident population to create the impression of emptiness. Wilderness therefore describes a cultural idea of what nature should look like, maintained by continuous human work.

3. 3

   Give a concrete example of one landscape being read in two different ways.

   Model answer

   Take an upland area given a conservation designation. To visitors and to the tourist board it is heritage and scenery, valued for its wildness and its views, and worth protecting from change. To the hill farmers living in it, it is a working landscape and the designation is a set of restrictions on drainage, buildings, stocking and diversification that limits their income. To a long-resident community it may be ancestral ground carrying place names, burial sites and memory, so the question is not scenery but belonging. To an energy or quarrying company it is a resource with a planning obstacle attached. All four read the same physical space, and the conflict is over whose reading is written into the management plan.

4. 4

   What do geographers mean by landscape?

   Model answer

   Landscape is more than scenery. It is the visible outcome of the interaction between physical processes and human activity over time, together with the meanings people attach to what they see. It can be read like a document: field shapes and boundaries record past farming systems and land division, building materials record local geology and trade, routeways record former economic links, and monuments and place names record who held power and what they wished remembered. Reading a landscape therefore means identifying both the processes that shaped it and the society that shaped it.

5. 5

   Distinguish between a natural landscape and a cultural landscape.

   Model answer

   A natural landscape is one whose form and cover are the product of physical processes with little or no human modification: relief and geology, drainage, soils, climate and natural vegetation. A cultural landscape is that natural base modified by human activity, so that field patterns, hedgerows and walls, drainage ditches, settlements, roads and railways, quarries, reservoirs, plantations and buildings become the dominant visible features. In practice the distinction is one of degree, because in the British Isles almost nothing is untouched: even the open uplands reflect clearance, grazing and burning, so they are best described as semi-natural or near-natural rather than natural.

6. 6

   If you annotated a photograph of a rural landscape to show that it is cultural rather than natural, what would you label?

   Model answer

   Field boundaries, whether hedges, drystone walls or wire fences, and the regularity or irregularity of the field shapes, which distinguishes planned enclosure from older piecemeal clearance; drainage ditches and straightened watercourses; a farmstead with outbuildings, and the building materials used; a metalled road, a track and a line of poles or pylons; a conifer plantation with straight edges contrasting with the broadleaved patch in a stream valley; grazed grassland with a uniform sward and stock; a lime-green improved pasture beside a rougher unimproved one; a quarry face or old lime kiln; a church or ruin; and any absence worth noting, such as the missing woodland the soils and climate would otherwise support. Each label is evidence of a decision by people.

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