Landscape & Minds Excerpted from
Kim Sorvig’s book, To Heal Kent State:
A Memorial Meditation The landscape of a place is a record of the forces that have shaped it, a history that can be read from maps and from the site itself, with practice. Cowboy-and-Indian trackers have made this skill nearly a cliché. To ensure the success of their designs on the earth, landscape architects also need to be trackers, but over a much longer time-frame. The processes of the past forecast the land’s future. Looking at the landscape in this way is like looking up at what we calmly think of as ‘a star,’ and realizing that the light we see left its source before humans existed. When the convenient labels that protect us from the strangeness of the world are shunted aside for a moment, the direct experience of our scale in the universe is almost overwhelming. With practice, it is possible to become comfortable with this ill-defined yet eerily real perception, and to notice geologically ancient forces still reflected in the transient affairs of human life. Many of our habitual conceptions
about the face of the earth depict it as static, but it
is in fact as constantly changing
as a living body, only too slowly for human observation.
Landscapes, like
societies, may be stable enough to seem static, but are
better described as a dynamic balance, shaped by forces
in conflict. Continental places
moving in opposition to one another, water wearing away
at
land, landforms diverting water, ice bulldozing the very
bedrock – it is the
briefness of the human lifespan that stops these processes,
the way a camera’s quick shutter stops the movement of
a bird in flight or a wave as it breaks. As a result, often only
some half-noticed oddity,
seen out of the corner of the eye, gives the first insight
into a landscape’s
long history, the way a few oddly-bent blades of grass
lead the tracker to the first clear footprint and onto the trail.
|