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Nature, Environment, Landscape: European Attitudes (1920-1970) Author(s): Barbara Roscoe Source: Area, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 162-163 Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003548 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 20:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Area. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:36:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Nature, Environment, Landscape: European Attitudes (1920-1970)

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Nature, Environment, Landscape: European Attitudes (1920-1970)Author(s): Barbara RoscoeSource: Area, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 162-163Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003548 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 20:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Area.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:36:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Nature, Environment, Landscape: European Attitudes (1920-1970)

162 IBG Annual Conference

The final stages of the forum focused on how best to use the assessment exercise to spread good practice. HEFCE will produce a Geography review document summarising its overall conclusions but this will be written in a form appropriate to a wide audience (including sixth formers and their parents) rather than for the professional community of Higher Education

Geographers. There is a need for a more detailed and specialist review which builds on the experience of the assessors and identifies and disseminates aspects of good practice and innovative delivery. This is a matter to which the RGS-IBG will be asked to give careful consideration.

Brian Chalkley University of Plymouth

Nature, environment, landscape: European attitudes (1920-1970)

This four module session was something of a departure for IBG audiences in seeking to disseminate the results of a funded research project under the SEER programme (Contract No. EV5V-CT92/0151). At the same time it provided a forum for invited discussants to comment upon both the spoken papers and the full reports submitted to the European Commission. Papers were given by members of each of the four research teams: Denmark, Italy, Sweden and the UK, in English, providing a challenge to both speakers and listeners!

The responses from those attending, and the lively plenary discussions, left members of the project team feeling that what Frank Peck called a ' useful new dimension to the IBG profile' had been a definite success.

The session, spread over two days, was jointly sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Study Group, the Historical Geography Research Group and the Environment Research Group. Thursday afternoon's modules were gathered together under the title Discourses of Environment in European Nations, and sought to examine the broad discursive and attitudinal networks, at European and national levels, which underpin links between national identity and environmental meanings-often expressed in the twentieth century through the project of Modernism. Ken Olwig (Odense, Denmark) explained the contrasting semiotics of the term 'landscape' in Latin and Germanic languages using the metaphor of aqua vitae: an ancient concept combining both material/physical and cultural/spiritual dimensions which, he maintained, helps us to understand the nature of our current ' environmental crisis '

through its capacity to represent contraindications inherent in the changing also providing evidence of cross-European concepts, explored the influence of Modernist architects, such as Geoffrey Jellicoe, on the planning and mapping of 'new landscape' in the mid-twentieth century. At the roots of such Modernist design, identifiable elemental components-natural phenomena from atoms to solar systems-were often viewed as templates for architectural form.

Ulrik Lohm's (Linkoping, Sweden) paper, taking a national rather than a trans-European focus, traced the evolution of environmental representations in twentieth century Sweden. He stressed the shifts in environmental spokesmanship (in Swedish, ' Ombudsmen of nature') in the control of land and water from the individual to the state, over the course of the twentieth century. Francesco Vallerani (Feltre, Italy) further examined national discourses in a paper detailing the cultural and social relations between the fascist rhetoric and Italian concepts of nature, where emphasis on physical scientific meanings has been counterbalanced by a traditionally strong poetic and aesthetic view of nature. Rapid industrial development since

World War Two has exacerbated environmental degradation in Italy, although demand (particularly via the Club Alpino Italiano) for the preservation of ' natural beauties ' and landscape values also emerged at this time.

Denis Cosgrove (Royal Holloway) in a summary paper on Nature and national identity: the dialectic of access and enclosure, argued that overall the research indicated that the term ' environment' was semiotically drained of the local and national associations closely

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Page 3: Nature, Environment, Landscape: European Attitudes (1920-1970)

IBG Annual Conference 163

connected with the terms ' nature ' and ' landscape ', especially in the inter-war period, and its use in post-war environmental legislation was a result of the triumph of Modernist language and culture. Further, if national identity can be related to each nation's iconic landscapes, its continued shaping requires both access to and simultaneous preservation of those landscapes.

The commentators for the first two modules (Mark Bassin (Wisconsin), Anne Buttimer (University College, Dublin), David Livingstone (Queen's University, Belfast) and Ian Simmons (Durham)) concentrated their remarks on the tensions between Modernism and modernisation, the differences between nation-building and the state, and the moral acts intrinsically embedded in representations of nature. Friday morning's two modules had the overall theme of Water, engineering and national landscape. Papers were intended to anchor the conceptual research, reported the previous day, in specific national water engineering projects undertaken during the study period in iconic national landscapes. Ken Olwig's (Odense) paper described the cultural history behind the re-meandering of the river Skjern in Denmark. A paper by Barbara Roscoe (Royal Holloway) and Simon Rycroft (Sussex) contrasted the planning and landscaping of two English reservoirs (Ladybower 1920-1945, and Rutland

Water 1968-1975), each set in rural landscapes distinct in topography, land use and settlement pattern, yet whose scenic features and social structures carried equal, if very different symbolic significance in representations of English identity. Regulation of the lagoon waters in the

making of a ' Modern ' Venice, was the theme of Stefano Soriani's (Venice) paper, which examined the conflicts engendered by the transformation of the naturally unstable environ

ment of the Venetian Lagoon, into one which supports not only modern production and consumption spaces, but also, in Venice itself, a ' landscape of memory', one of the major cultural icons of Western tourism.

Karin Bateld (Linkoping) compared the differing attitudes to the construction of hydro electric power stations, during the 1950s, between the north of Sweden where the Proci HEP scheme represented modernisation and technological progress, and the agrarian south of Sweden, where the Harnas project was seen as brutally tearing up the nation's traditional ' garden landscape'. The final paper by Denis Cosgrove (Royal Holloway) drew upon the

work of other research projects, funded by the European Commission in the same environ ment programme, to interrogate the meaningfulness of the concept of a ' European environment '. Balancing our historical research against the more contemporary work of the other 13 projects, it was possible to discern throughout a need to recognise the importance of the cultural and historical aspects of landscape change, and the specifics of their national expression. This was particularly important, as the majority of Commission funding for environmental research still reflected the Modernist concern, underlying dominant visions of Europe, with natural-scientific and technical aspects of environmental change. The secondary plenary session was preceded by discussion points raised by Brian Goodey (Oxford Brookes), David Matless (Nottingham) and Charles Withers (Edinburgh) which centred around local versus national issues of contemporary environmental perception, and the ancient and Modern (streamlining) symbolism of water.

Barbara Roscoe Royal Holloway, London

Local Environment Policy: Sustainability and Local Agenda 21 (LA21)

This joint session, focused upon the rapidly developing area of local environmental policy, and the papers presented and the subsequent discussion demonstrated both the wide range of issues involved and their complexity. The papers were organised in two modules, the first looking at the process of developing local environmental policy and the second examining the links between local economic policy and environmental policy. In the first module the papers by Denise Hill and Simon Turner (Brighton) and by Noel Bruder (West of England) examined the Local Agenda 21 (LA21) process. Using Brighton as a case study, Hill and

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