The landscape out there of the “real” world of dirt and stones and roads and trees etc is a manifestation of the landscape in here of the shared collective idea of how the world we move and operate in is structured, organized, and changes.
JB Jackson: “…a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the lands, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community – for the collective character of the landscape is one things that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon…” (“The Word Itself” in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 1984)
John Stilgoe: Landscape “…means shaped land…” (Common Landscape of America 1982)
Pierre Dansereau was a professor of ecology at the Universite de Quebec a Montreal. He gave the CBC Massey lectures broadcast in the fall of 1972. When the text of the lectures was published a year later by the CBC the book was entitled Inscape and Landscape. Most of the lectures examine ecological systems as if humans are an integral part of ecosystems, which is an idea somewhat revolutionary for that time. He also grappled with understanding how to describe the spatial dimension of ecological systems – well before the invention of the discipline known today as “Landscape Ecology”. He wrote in his introduction to the publication:
“My concern, therefore, is as much with the inscape as it is with the landscape, as much with the human perception of environment as with man’s impact on nature. Indeed I view the inscape / landscape process as a cycle. Man, from Magdalenian to modern times, has had a selective perception of the world about him and in turn a highly discriminating way of modeling the landscape to match his inner vision.
“Inscape” may be an unfamiliar word in this context. It was coined by a poet, not an ecologist or a geographer. Gerard Manley Hopkins recorded his contemplations of nature in diaries, letters, poems, drawings, and even in music. This filtering inward from nature to man, upward from the subconscious to the conscious, and from perception to design and implementation, is indeed what happens to the agriculturalist, the forester, the engineer, the town planner. The pathway of sensorial impression to material interference is strewn with an imagery that makes the inscape a template for the reshaping of the landscape.”
Unfortunately Dansereau does not go much further with this discussion in the text of his lectures, but uses this as a basic starting premise for the entire later discussion.
