The Landscape at the Time of the Coronavirus
How has the Coronavirus changed the landscape? What information can landscape give us to prevent the next epidemic?
Deserted cities are perhaps the most eloquent sign of the landscape at the time of the Coronavirus. Not even during the hottest summers or the most exciting finals of the soccer world championships, has such desolation been seen, which moreover is not limited to a few hours but has persisted, incessantly, for weeks.
If we want to make a comparison, the one with the urban landscape of Chernobyl or Fukushima shortly after the related nuclear disasters seems the most appropriate. In fact, in its dramatic simplicity, the current landscape of our cities reveals all the incongruity between the large avenues designed for hundreds of cars, the squares conceived for the aggregation of thousands of people, and the almost absolute absence of human beings.
An incongruity that is easy to perceive as an anomaly, understandable only if you are living in the midst of a pandemic. That’s how the Coronavirus makes us discover the semiotic value of the landscape, where everything observed in a territory has a precise meaning whose perception is necessarily a function of the observer’s knowledge. And this is not a mere rhetorical exercise.
Rather, it is an extraordinary opportunity to understand the meaning of what was stated twenty years ago by the European Landscape Convention, according to which the landscape:
“is part of a territory as it is perceived by the populations, whose character derives from the action of natural factors and /or humans and their interrelationships.” — European Landscape Convention
A definition that marked a historical turning point in the concept of landscape, hitherto confined to the elitist dualism between humanists and scientists/technicians of the territory. By shifting the landscape from academic knowledge to the perception of the individual, the definition of the ELC extends the concept of landscape to the interpretation that each of us is able to give according to our own knowledge/culture. A great example of democracy that offers everyone a tool to understand the territory we are observing while respecting the local culture and net of influences more or less aimed at the interest of a few.
In addition, interpreting the signs of the territory according to one’s knowledge, allowing us to detect any anomalies in the relationships between the features of the landscape, leads us to foresee the potential dangers inherent in them. A condition that also applies to the four main factors identified by scientists at the origin and spread of the Coronavirus pandemic: large concentrations of people in metropolitan areas, globalization, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.
Each of these factors has left its mark on the planet’s landscape in an extremely marked way, so much so that it assumes an iconic value of our time. Just think of congested metropolises, large hubs for the transport of goods and people, intensive farming, especially at the expense of the equatorial rainforest, and finally the melting glaciers.
Although these changes to the territory were known, even before the appearance of the Coronavirus, to have devastating effects not only for humans but for the entire planet, they are deemed less important than GDP growth. A condition that leads large sections of the population to consider them as the lesser evil for maintaining our current lifestyle.
Now we know that the landscapes which were the prerequisites for the emergence and spread of the virus that is presently afflicting us are the same landscapes that will surely be the prerequisites for the future epidemic. An awareness that removes all alibis for convenient interpretations by those in the control rooms and for the indifference of those who passively suffer the (un)decisions.
