Ideas in permaculture…
Understanding the land through landscape aesthetics
YEARS AGO I was with a group of people and permaculture co-originator, David Holmgren. We were discussing different ways to read the landscape. Doing that allows us to discern how terrain, soils and moisture combine to create opportunities for different ecosystems.
Standing there on our high vantage point we could see how moister ecosystems follow the gullies and sheltered streamways and create habitat for moist, taller eucalyptus or rainforest, how the rocky lateral ridgelines with their thin soils and lower soil moisture are home to smaller trees and shrubs, how vegetation changes from taller forest to stunted trees and shrubland on the escarpment. Stop and look over a landscape and you start to see how ecosystems on forested terrain are denoted by vegetation colour — multiple shades of green — and how that tells us of water courses, slope, density of vegetation (a factor in route finding in trackless country), the passage of bushfires and human changes to the landscape.
I noticed this again when traversing the southern shoulder on kunani-Mt Wellington, following the Milles Track to Wellington Falls. The route is high on the mountain but still below the tree line. Looking out on to the forested lower slopes I could see a large intrusion of olive green into the darker green of the eucalyptus forest. It was acacia regrowth, probably following a bushfire in the eucalypts. A temporary forest, the acacias are leguminous, fast growing pioneer species that will give way to eucalyptus regrowth. The dominant forest will return. Colour denotes forest type and modification once again.
If you are a farmer or bushwalker you probably already know how to read the landscape. Farmers know it because they derive their living from the land. Bushwalkers because they have to route-find across the terrain and through the forests. I recall that it was doing that, planning a route across trackless mountain terrain to reach a lake on the other side of a range that led to my being offered a job as assistant field instructor with a TAFE outdoor guiding course. There, I used a knowledge or vegetation type and density and chose to track along the ascending and summit ridges rather than force our way through the scrubby thicket in the gully.
During our conversation that day, David explained that one of the techniques he uses to read landscapes is ‘contemplative awareness’. It is useful in discerning patterns of vegetation, drainage, settlement and other features. All you need is a high vantage point and a still mind. The technique is passive and relies on pattern recognition and defocusing from the detail so as to see the broad sweep of the land. You come to discern patterns of vegetation by colour, and the shape of the land by the patterns that vegetation and light make across it.
Sure, you can use a topographic map and your knowledge of vegetation in a region to make accurate assumptions about what vegetation to expect where — bushwalkers do this all the time in route-planning — but that is a deliberative method whereas contemplative awareness is passive. You just sit and look. I’ve found the technique works because it focuses not on the details of the land but on the whole of the visible landscape.
A different experience of place
We ascend the rough, stony and sometimes muddy track through cool temperate rainforest that is still dripping from the shower that passed through a couple hours ago. We must be getting close to the top, I think as we walk from forest into dense, subalpine shrubland and, finally, scamble over the open, rocky terrain to step onto the boulderfield of the summit. The progression of ecosystems — forest, shrubland, alpine — is typical of these southern ranges.
We sit on the rocks on the summit. No one speaks. We just sit in our own little bubble of existence and gaze out over the way we had come, seeing the dark greens of the forest-clad valleys, the yellow-greens of the open and boggy buttongrass plains and the orange-browns of the exposed dolerite summits.
Summits are quiet places when there is no wind. For a few minutes I silently name the peaks and ranges I recognise and try to work out where the track we followed lay in relation to the features of the landscape. Then my mind falls silent and I experience that exhileration that comes on reaching some peak and looking out over the abyss of land and sky. Why, I wonder, do I have this feeling? I decide to look into it to find out whether it was just my own weird psychology or whether it was something shared. It turns out that this, what I call a ‘psychologically elevated’ or ‘oceanic’ feeling, is a phenomenon experienced by those who look out over vast landscapes, whether they consciously ‘read’ those landscapes of not. It is another type of passive interaction with landscape.
Something more?
But… is there something more that reading patterns in the landscape at work here? I ask this because what I clumsily term ‘landscape perception’ is something we humans have done for a very long time. It has to do with how we derived our resources from the land. It leads us to ask whether the emotional feelings many of us experience on looking over a vast sweep of terrain, and the role of the landscape in cultures both Eastern and Western, might have their origin in human evolution. Does reading the landscape call on something deeper in the human experience? Something… evolutionary?
I discovered that proponents of evolutionary psychology think so. They say that our preferences for particular types of landscape is linked to human survival during the Holocene, the recent geological age during which our kind evolved. It’s about habitat. What kind of habitat? I don’t have references for them, however some studies indicate savannah landscapes to be the preferred type. Is that to do with our species’ evolutionary history? The savannah was humanity’s original home, according to palaeontologists.
Savannah is a landscape of open forest, grassland and streams. Its openness facilitates hunting because game animals can be seen at a distance. Openess facilitates cross-country movement. Distant sight lines facilitate defence from predators of the wildlife and human kind. I recall how Australian Aboriginals used low-intensity fire to keep their movement routes and hunting landscapes clear of dense surubland. They created landscapes of open forest and, perhaps, grasslands that were savannah-like in apprerance. In Tasmania, the existence of the extensive button grass plains is sometimes attributed to Aboriginal burning over the millennia although the plains grow in moist, peaty soils that could also offer an explanation. It is the same with other grasslands in the state.
More evidence of Aboriginal landscape engineering through the use of low-intensity fire comes from Rob Parsons, a Tasmanian adventurer with a YouTube channel. He specialises in video of Tasmania’s wild places and in visiting its historic sites now engulfed by the forest. In his videos of arduous walks into trackless wild country following routes taken by the Franklin expedition of the 1830s, he speculates that those early explorers found the going much easier than we do today because where he encountered tough, thick scrub difficult to push through, he speculates that they encountered open country the result of Aboriginal burning. Some of what is presently regarded as wilderness may, in fact, be the remnant landscapes of past-human landuse. They are not the savannah that was the habitat of early humans, but they have its characteristics of openess and long sight lines.
The evidence of art
Does the Western tradition of landscape art also supply evidence for what the evolutionary pychologists say about our preferences stemming from the Holocene? To this we can add landscape photography, one of photography’s most enduring genres.
Both art forms show distant views with leading lines formed by streams and trees, and open country sometimes backed by hills or mountains. If they really are evidence for the centrality of landscape in human psychology, is this why people stand before landscape photos and just look? Is it why they use words like ‘beautiful’ for those works? Is our sense of beauty also conditioned by evolution?
This makes sense to me, however doubts linger. Although the preference might be for sweeping, open landscapes with waterways, trees and, perhaps, animals, what about how we find beauty in desert and mountain landscapes? Humans might have evolved on the African savannah, however they colonised these other, sparser landscapes and made their home there. Would a person indigenous to the desert not find that environment beautiful and other landscapes alien? Many people find all landscapes to be beautiful. And why is wilderness photography popular when it shows rugged landscapes, many of them marginal human habitats or places entirely unsuited to habitation?
In answering this question we should keep in mind that in recent times wilderness photography was appropriated by the political campaigns to save wild places from development. Wilderness photography predates those campaigns, however is our appreciation of it in modern times politically motivated to some extent rather than being only an evolutionarily motivated aesthetic?
The home
How does choosing where to build a home fit into the idea of the role of landscape in evolutionary psychology?
Once again, I don’t have a reference to the study that showed the preference is for an elevated site affording oversight of the land below and with those landscape features that support human settlement — streams, wooded country, open grassland. Elevated, but not so high that the climate is too cold. Elevation offers the oversight that gives warning of game animals and the approach of strangers. We are talking about elevated sites, hills, not high and steep mountains.
Are there examples of this? The traditional Italian hill village might be one. Situated on a high point in the terrain, dwellings are closely packed on the higher ground while agricultural fields spread out below. Up there, the landscape is revealed but the village is not so high that the surrounding terrain is difficult of access.
Other patterns of human settlement
If what evolutionary psychologists say about the role of landscape in human history is true, then we should recognise how humans have changed it.
Settlements along human movement corridors, for instance. Whether they were towns and oasis strung along the ancient Silk Road, the towns along railway lines, the hamlets and villages where horses were changed along stagecoach routes or the port towns of maritime civilisations, these are linear points linked in the landscape by transport corridors, some of which may become visible when we sit on our hypothetical high point and contemplate the land. Seen in the context of transport systems these linear towns and villages are nodes in large scale networks.
These are places for people on their way to somewhere else. Their economic subsistence comes from the service businesses that cater to travellers — fuel, food, accomodation. Think Cann River in East Gippsland on the intersection of the Princes Highway and the Monaro Highway, population 194. It’s a convenient overnight stop for travellers heading north or south to or from Sydney and a turnoff for those taking the 285km-long Monaro Highway to the ACT. Think Sorell in south-east Tasmania, population 1546, at the junction of the Tasman Highway where travellers turn northwards along the East Coast or onto the Arthur Highway that runs southwards to the Tasman Peninsula.
Reading the landscape—a use in landscape design
An ability to read the landscape helps us plan how we would use the land for farm or settlement and where we would best leave it forested or to nature. This becomes more important as move into regenerative landscape design—the restoration of existing ecosystems and the creation of new. It is common knowledge that the less-steep lower slopes are the favoured location for housing, farmhouse and field while the ridges and hilltops are best left or restored to their natural condition. Additional to this is locating dwellings where they have that long view over lower country that is suggested by historical landscape psychology. Here, in a time when we do not have to be so wary of the approach of wild animals or humans, we can sit back at the end of day and let our minds join with the landscape in that contemplative awareness that allows us to discern patterns across the land that are the result of both nature and people.
Commerce, trade, farming, empire building and now tourism have changed what might have been the pattern of human settlement of past times into landscapes that we see around us today. While we might have an evolutionary link to savannah and other landscapes, trade and commerce with its need for movement imposes a different kind of settlement pattern.
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