When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to understand events that are momentous and unprecedented, we humans must devise new language. We invent new words, recast old ones, and arrange them into new constellations. New language enables new ideas and concepts, which continue to evolve along with the historical phenomena they purport to describe.
This reflexive process is taking place as we confront a new phase of history, in which human and natural history are converging as never before. In this new phase, human beings are not just changing the face of the earth but are changing the fate of the earth and therefore the human fate.
By the late nineteenth century, it was already evident that traditional terms such as industry and mechanics—even in souped-up versions like the industrial revolution or mechanical age—were inadequate to describe what was happening. In the 20th century the word technology outgrew its earlier, circumscribed meaning as the study of the practical arts, becoming redefined as the prime determinant of history: the agent of general, unspecified, irresistible change. More or less simultaneously, the word environment displaced nature as a collective term for the life of the planet.
Of all the revolutions of the 20th century, none is more astounding than this one: the sudden collapse of history and nature as fundamental descriptors of human experience. History and nature bite the dust. History is reduced to technological change; nature, to the human surround.
As technology and environment emerged as key terms, they were often clustered with two other young words, urbanization and infrastructure. The first refers to the built world of settlements, the latter to the built world of connections. This cluster of language becomes tight-knit and self-reinforcing. Urbanization and infrastructure converge as city life extends beyond city boundaries. Technology and environment converge into the technological environment. As the building of the world has accelerated, this linguistic knot has become tighter and tighter.
Then Pierre Bélanger steps in, suggesting that we bring landscape into the discussion…This is the pivotal moment, when the artist, designer, or viewer picks up an image of the world, any image, and decides to look at it not from a portrait orientation (taller than it is wide) but from a landscape orientation (wider than it is high).
The horizontal perspective changes everything. It is not just that the word landscape is centuries older than technology, environment, urbanization, and infrastructure, and therefore brings with it a much deeper well of human experience. It is not just that the word relates to both the art of landscaping and that of painting, and therefore evokes far more complex and powerful ways of knowing the world than utilitarian problem-solving. It is above all that the landscape orientation looks at the world as a human being looks at it: an individual with a point of view, taking it all in at once, part of the life of the place and time, part of the landscape, not its imperial overlord.
Landscape is also a verb. To landscape is to work with the planet; to improve, enhance, and adorn it; to liberate its potential, as opposed to imposing structures of conquest. Landscaping brings with it an acceptance of the passage of time as something to be appreciated rather than battled. The typical verbs associated with infrastructure are age and decay. The typical verb of landscape is cultivate: through longterm commitment of human labor and other resources, it is renewed and reworked. From the landscape orientation, maintenance is not a chore to be resisted but the core of what it means to create a human world.
This reorientation is not just an abstract intellectual turn. It also implies a professional claim about whose turf this is, as it were. This book is, among much else, a manifesto for a wider range of professional engagements with cultivating our common world. It addresses especially engineers and landscape architects, but most of all it encourages collaborations of these and other professions and non-professions Does our world need to be built, purified, beautified, or maintained? The answer is—all the above, and to accomplish this we need a mix of professions, just as we need a range of terminologies beyond the rhetorical monoculture of technology and environment.
As professions are currently organized, landscaping infrastructure sounds like an oxymoron. Bélanger often springs such surprises. He shuffles the card deck of language to deal out words in new ways. He sorts through picture cards as well as word ones, using graphics and images to illustrate evolving practices. Given the ceaseless reciprocity between words and deeds in human affairs, experiments in practice will lead to further refinement of language and thought. This book re-enacts the recursive process by which we come to understand the momentous, unprecedented event of a new human condition.
—Rosalind Williams
Rosalind Williams is Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology (STS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first three books (Dream Worlds, Notes from the Underground, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change) address the question of what are the implications for human life, both individual and collective, when we live in a predominantly self-constructed world. Her latest book, titled The Triumph of Human Empire (The University of Chicago Press, 2013) surveys the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, defined by the dominance of human presence on the planet.