Title:

The Nature of Commons Symbiotic Landscapes vs. Enclosed Individualized Landscapes In the “Anthropocene”. Cases from Jutland & the “Lake District” of England.

Abstract:

The foundations of the idea of the Anthropocene as “a new geologic epoch, defined by unprecedented human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems” might be traceable back to the modernist origins of the “scenic” idea of landscape and nature (as “ecosystem”) that arose in tandem with enclosure.  This is an idea of landscape, nature and ecosystem which sees geology as being foundational to the cultural landscape, and which arguably promoted the transformation of the face of the earth in its own image.  It was, in turn, I will argue, this transformation through enclosure that fostered an unprecedented human disturbance of the earth’s environment.  This scenic idea of landscape, thus, was not a solution to unprecedented human disturbance, but a cause.  The term “Anthropocene,” however, need not refer to geology, since “-cene” simply means “new,” so “Anthropocene” could mean a new age in which Homo sapiens (and not geology) plays a key role in shaping the environment of the earth.  I will argue that while the enclosed landscape has played an important role in the Anthropocenic disturbance of the earth’s environment, the commons landscape was built rather upon a principle of symbiosis that could produce a highly sustainable Anthroposcenic environment.  The “tragedy of the commons” was thus a tragedy brought about by their enclosure.  In this presentation I will use examples from Western Jutland, and its sibling landscape in the “Lake District” of northwest England, to illustrate the differences between the nature of the individualized, enclosed, scenic landscape, with its imagined wild primeval foundations, and the nature of the commons landscape, with its symbiotic foundation.