Natural landscape

A natural landscape is the original landscape that exists before it is acted upon by human culture. The natural landscape and the cultural landscape are separate parts of the landscape. However, in the twenty-first century landscapes that are totally untouched by human activity no longer exist, so that reference is sometimes now made to degrees of naturalness within a landscape. In Silent Spring (1962) Rachel Carson describes a roadside verge as it used to look: 'Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year' and then how it looks now following the use of herbicides: 'The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire'. Even though the landscape before it is sprayed is biologically degraded, and may well contains alien species, the concept of what might constitute a natural landscape can still be deduced from the context. The phrase 'natural landscape' was first used in connection with landscape painting, and landscape gardening, to contrast a formal style with a more natural one, closer to nature. Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was to further conceptualize this into the idea of a natural landscape separate from the cultural landscape. Then in 1908 geographer Otto Schlüter developed the terms original landscape (Urlandschaft) and its opposite cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) in an attempt to give the science of geography a subject matter that was different from the other sciences. An early use of the actual phrase 'natural landscape' by a geographer can be found in Carl O. Sauer's paper 'The Morphology of Landscape' (1925). The concept of a natural landscape was first developed in connection with landscape painting, though the actual term itself was first used in relation to landscape gardening. In both cases it was used to contrast a formal style with a more natural one, that is closer to nature. Chunglin Kwa suggests, 'that a seventeenth-century or early-eighteenth-century person could experience natural scenery ‘just like on a painting,’ and so, with or without the use of the word itself, designate it as a landscape.' With regard to landscape gardening John Aikin, commented in 1794: 'Whatever, therefore, there be of novelty in the singular scenery of an artificial garden, it is soon exhausted, whereas the infinite diversity of a natural landscape presents an inexhaustible flore of new forms'. Writing in 1844 the prominent American landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing comments: 'straight canals, round or oblong pieces of water, and all the regular forms of the geometric mode ... would evidently be in violent opposition to the whole character and expression of natural landscape'. In his extensive travels in South America, Alexander von Humboldt became the first to conceptualize a natural landscape separate from the cultural landscape, though he does not actually use these terms. Andrew Jackson Downing was aware of, and sympathetic to, Humboldt's ideas, which therefore influenced American landscape gardening. Subsequently, the geographer Otto Schlüter, in 1908, argued that by defining geography as a Landschaftskunde (landscape science) would give geography a logical subject matter shared by no other discipline. He defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft (original landscape) or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape) a landscape created by human culture. Schlüter argued that the major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes. The term natural landscape is sometimes used as a synonym for wilderness, but for geographers natural landscape is a scientific term which refers to the biological, geological, climatological and other aspects of a landscape, not the cultural values that are implied by the word wilderness. Matters are complicated by the fact that the words nature and natural have more than one meaning. On the one hand there is the main dictionary meaning for nature: 'The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations'. On the other hand, there is the growing awareness, especially since Charles Darwin, of humanities biological affinity with nature.