Gentle Decline 1/5: Latitude & Landscape

Beginning

Hi. There's no parcel of doom-and-gloom news this issue, and I'm mostly going to dive into the content of the email, which is a long ramble on the topic of landscape, and how I see landscape as a concept cropping up a lot lately in my reading, and how that feeds into an understanding of change. In that landscape-oriented context, though, I'd like to point you at Zen and the Art of Tracking Trees, a new blog about forest walking.

And in the context of the more usual material of this medium, you could have a look at Generous by Design, another new blog dealing with topics of "Energy, Climate change, Large industry, Books, Politics and Making things", and worth some of your time.

If this kind of ramble isn't your thing, and you were here more for the economic disaster and the stockpiling and the storms, stand by. It'll be back soon, I'm sure. But there's stuff here that underlies that thinking, somewhat literally.

Middle

So there's the actual existence of landscape, and then there's the concept of landscape, and the two are somewhat different at a glance, and not really different when you get into it. "Landscape" itself is not the old word we might think; it comes from the 1600s or so, and was used to describe Dutch paintings. The "-scape" (or "-scap" in the original) is a word that denotes something like "the state of", which we more usually represent in English with "-ness" or "-ship" - as in "deepness", "lordship", etc. So the word really means "a state or existence of land", and it's completely tied up with seeing it, viewing it, in art. There is no landscape without a viewer, there's just land. Interestingly, though, there's an Old English word, landscipe, which means "region". And we think of landscape in cultural terms, too. See, for instance, the (somewhat disturbing) concept of Deep England.

But the meaning which I'm currently chasing down, and which I'm seeing in a lot of contexts around me, is more to do with being in the landscape, with having an awareness of surroundings on a more-than-immediate level. Some of it is to do with the shape of the land, some with the presence or absence of water, of catchment basins for rivers, of flows and where things end up. Some more is to do with weather, particularly with places and situations where you can see weather coming.

Nina and I were at the Hill of Tara today, to give the dog some space in which to gallop around. This is more accurate, I feel, than saying we walked the dog, because we ambled widdershins around Tara, and he ran until he couldn't really run anymore and was relieved to have the leash back on. In so doing, we experienced one of the reasons Tara is significant; you can see for a long way from there. Meath isn't as flat as Kildare, but it's still pretty level, and Tara, while it's not much of a hill, gives you a good view. So when we got there, we could see all the way to the Mournes to the North, and way off to the west and south, and by the time we were going, an hour or so later, a light rain had come in, and you couldn't see far at all - but we could see it coming in, over the time we were there.

This is reminiscent, to me, of my homeplace, which is on the last hill of the Wicklow Mountains (in one direction, at least; there's another ridge north-west that could also be "last"), looking across a valley at the first hill of the Blackstairs. The house faces west-by-southwest, more or less, and that's exactly the direction from which the weather comes in, over Mount Leinster, a good 10km or more away. And the way the landscape is shaped, even if the winds driving weather are southerly or northerly, the actual showers or clearances come in from that one angle. The one exception is north-easterlies, which in winter bring snow, and which sneak in from the back of the house, coming down the hill behind. So snow is almost always a surprise there; even if the forecast has predicted it; the instincts of everyone living there are to glance south-west as they cross the yard to see what's coming, not up the hill. Not that you could see much that way; it's a mere 500m or so to the brow of the hill, and there's no seeing past that.

There are signals of awareness of landscape throughout history. The facing of the house at my homeplace isn't accidental, for a start. The avenue of trees at Castletown House, near here, shelters a walker from the worst of the winds, and also points directly from the big house itself toward the Wonderful Barn, a weird sort-of-shell-shaped spiral building on the outskirts of Leixlip, the next village over. This is only evident on a clear day in winter, though; you can't see it otherwise. Going back further, medieval buildings all have carefully chosen positions to deal with wind and rain - and flooding - and Iron Age forts and structures are all about the landscape and the position within it. Some are aligned to things in the sky; sunrise and sunset and other details, but many more are aligned with other elements of landscape, with hills and mountains and valleys and the directions of prevailing winds and where other structures have been built, those in their turn being integrated into their own visible landscape.

Some of this is stuff we miss, of course, because the landscape has changed. The shape and look and the very nature of the land in the British Isles - and across much of Europe, Scandinavia aside, and the Middle East and Asia, and at least in populated areas of North America - is wholly artificial, wholly manmade, after generations of cutting trees and farming and building walls and bridges and guiding rivers and streams. There's nothing you can see from the front door of my homeplace that doesn't bear the mark of human intervention - even the top of Mount Leinster has a huge communications mast on it, and the slopes down from it have been modified by the placement of tracks to get there, and the grazing of sheep by generations of farmers. The fact that the mountain-top exists in a different climate band, getting snow and sub-zero temperatures when lower levels are temperate, has entertained us for a few winter visits now. I haven't been doing that long enough to know if it's a change.

The thing I'm slowly coming around to here, though, is awareness of change on a human scale. It is evident to anyone who spends time in landscapes that there are changes in the weather. You can't avoid it; you see the floods and evidence of floods, the trees that came down in the storm, and also where some local authority trimmed back or cut down every sizable tree so that no more of them could dump branches into the roads during future storms. You can literally see the weather coming in, and you know that the default Irish (or British) state of 6 days of mostly grey not-very-much in any given 10 has been replaced with random turns of storm or cold or heat which are then sustained for weeks. You know that there are new words (or old words, per Robert McFarlane et al) coming into use for conditions that didn't need use before. Graupel. Storm train. Thundersnow. You see where there've been landslides because the ground was saturated and some local authority had cut down the trees that were holding that particular slope stable.

The people who deny climate change are, almost universally, the people who do not spend time in the landscape. They pass through it. They look at it. Sometimes they even step out into it for a few minutes, or go for a walk in it. They rarely actually hike or camp or spend more than an hour or two there, and when they do, it's under controlled circumstances, in parks or estates or other closely managed places. In the cases of politicians, they may go to look at the aftermath of something, where there was a forest fire, or a bridge was swept away (see Tadcaster in Yorkshire, where a bridge was lost in December 2015, and not replaced until February 2017, and where some of the politicians coming to view the fallen bridge and press the flesh got stuck on the wrong side of the bridge, and had to drive 30 miles around to a place they could see across the river). But mostly, they live in urban areas, or in rural houses that aren't actually in the landscape, with central heating and even air conditioning, and they don't really understand that difference.

So when we're looking at someone in the news who is saying that climate change isn't a real thing, and that the recent report by the EPA is inaccurate, or biased, or whatever, we're almost certainly seeing someone who doesn't have any direct experience of the landscape, the context in which that change is happening. They are not people who have stood in one place every day for a decade or more and seen the rain coming in. They are not people who know for a fact that they're getting blown around by storms in lambing season far more now than they were twenty years ago.

In counter to this, though, there is - I think - starting to be a greater cultural understanding of landscape. I see three streams leading into this, and two of them are what you might think, and the third is... not.

First and foremost, there is television. Television shows us landscapes in all kinds of contexts; in nature documentaries, as setting-establishing long shots in dramas, in news coverage of forest fires and floods, and there's much more of that now than there used to be. The modern imagination lives in the screen image much more than anywhere else, and that's slowly re-establishing a sense of scale that was absent through the later 20th century.

Second, there is the upswell in recent times of literature that is in some way about landscape. The aforementioned Robert McFarlane is in the lead on this, of course, but there are plenty of other writers providing accounts of walking, boating, mountaineering, and other activities, and those have a consciousness of the wider feeling of place and change than they did in the past. I suspect, given the content of Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations newsletter over the past couple of years that he's working on something landscape-y too. This isn't a thing that has an impact on the average person in the street, who doesn't read much, but it's an expression of something that's starting to be there again in the Western consciousness.

And third, the odd one; there's drone photography and GoPro-style cameras. This is part of what drives the television bit, of course, the greater availability of aerial shots, but there's the appearance on YouTube and other video sites of big sweeping views of landscape, and an awareness of the tiny shapes of humans within that. And it's kind of hard not to comprehend the shape of landscape when your view of it is the jerking bouncing sometimes inverted point of view on the helmet of a mountain biker coming down some mad narrow mostly vertical track. And as drones and GoPro-style cameras become more ubiquitous, along with dashcams and lapel cameras and whatever else, this will only increase.

There's a slight problem in the short term in this too - the people who make decisions, the politicians and business people, they're as insulated from the documentaries and literature and extreme sport videos as they are from the landscape itself. This won't be the case forever; the people growing up with YouTube as background will have some of that understanding again, but the people in control now have this weird isolated money-focused culture, and they never see outside that. So they can't understand climate change because they've never seen climate, and they can't understand the changes in the landscape, because they don't see the landscape either.

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This issue brought to you by some of Ireland's most significant places, some books about walking, good lapsang souchong, and three cats who are very interested in being inside this winter. If you have news, links, plans, or other stuff you think I might be interested in, send them my way. I won't promise to include them here, but they'll all be read and thought about.