Living with and looking at landscape: Fid-Bau Portal

Living with and looking at landscape

Lowenthal, David

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 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 paradigms and as rightful common inheritances, while spurned as scenically frivolous.