Originally published in 1984 Nature’s Ideological Language examines the common ideological roots of environmental reclamation and nature preservation. In the general context of European, British and American historical experience, the Jutland heaths of Denmark are taken as a concrete example for a general critique of European and American policy concerning the use of landscape. Two sets of contradictions are highlighted: ideological and practical between development and preservati...

Building on the premise that landscapes provide a common ground where different kinds of knowledge may come together, this edited volume draws on a wide range of disciplines, including geology and geography, cultural anthropology and philosophy, architecture and art history. It suggests that the complex social and environmental crises of the 21st century cannot be understood independently of a historically constituted aesthetic approach to landscapes.Boulouki – Itinerant Workshop o...

Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today.This book positions landscape as a concept shap...

Landscape is now on the agenda in a new way. The increasing interest in justice, power and the political landscape expresses a sea change occurring in the meaning of landscape itself, from landscape as scenery to landscape as polity and place. As Lionella Scazzosi argues "The meaning of the term ‘landscape’ has become broader than that of a view or panorama, which characterized many national protection laws and policies until the middle of the 20th century, and that of environment or natur...

David Lowenthal was well known for his historical and geographical contribution to conservation and environmental thinking, his understanding and appreciation of landscape, and his critical public and scholarly contribution to heritage debates as a founder of heritage studies. He was a public intellectual and academic scholar, who worked with scholars and practitioners as well as within public fora. His contribution can only be fully grasped in the light of his research and his practical a...

The idea that the heritage of nature is fundamentally cultural is provocative to many, but it is becoming increasingly accepted in the context of heritage preservation. It is argued here that a person’s perspective on natural vs. cultural heritage as a contested patrimony is, to some extent, governed by one’s intellectual and geographical position. In discourses influenced by the natural sciences culture is a heritage of nature, whereas in those deriving from the humanities and social scie...