Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World

Environmental History, Oct 2003 by Cooper, Alix

Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World. By Kenneth Olwig. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. xxxii + 299 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

Long before environmental history arrived as an academic field, geography and geographers were already there. Such prominent authors as Carl Sauer and Clarence Glacken, for example, had early in the last century already helped to frame many of the questions about nature, society, and culture with which contemporary environmental history continues to engage itself. Nor has geography ceased its contributions. This book by Kenneth Olwig, an ambitious and wide-ranging study of how visions of landscape have been created and contested over the last five hundred years, has much to say to environmental historians about the conceptual foundations of the field.

In its attention to the history of ideas and their implications for land use, Olwig's book might in some ways be compared with Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind, which untangled many of the European origins of American "wilderness" ideals, or William Cronon's Changes in the Land, which showed the crucial role that English settlers' understandings of land ownership and of land "improvement" played in the reshaping of the New England landscape. Olwig, however, here tackles an even broader kind of conceptual history: that not only of the idea of landscape, but also of a host of other critical terms, from "land" itself to "country," "nation," "nature," and the "native," to cite but a few, showing their interconnections, subsequent contradictions, and ultimate effects in debates over land use.

Olwig's basic argument, reiterated in the introduction by the noted geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, is that modern environmental debates-and in particular American debates over wilderness -must be seen as deeply rooted in much earlier European (and especially English) conflicts over the proper relation of landscape to power. The most important such conflict, Olwig convincingly maintains, was that between traditional European views of landscapes as fundamentally social units, based in local communities and reflecting differences in customs and practices, and newer conceptions of landscape, promulgated by absolutist Renaissance princes, as representing an entirely natural or geographical space, which emerging nation-states then could have the authority to reshape freely as they wished.

To illustrate and draw out the implications of such conflicts, Olwig takes the unusual step of framing the entire book around a single moment in history, namely the performance in 1605 of a masque, or multimedia theatrical piece, before King James I of England and his bride, Queen Anne of Denmark. Returning again and again to this seemingly unlikely starting point, Olwig teases out a series of broader conclusions about the connections between and the transformation of ideas, history, politics, law, literature, art, architecture, science, and nature over the last five centuries. Olwig obviously has read not only widely but also deeply in each of these fields, and the book is rich with insights from each of them.

In the book's final chapters, these insights are then applied to some of the canonical figures of environmental history, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, by highlighting some of the broader European cultural contexts against which their ideas emerged, Olwig lets us see these important figures in new ways. The result of all of this is a book dense with ideas but deeply rewarding. While individual readers may take exception with some of Olwig's interpretations-for example, some of his conclusions concerning race seem overstated-nonetheless, the book represents a significant achievement. It should be of interest to any environmental historian involved with American, European, or colonial environmental history; and more broadly to anyone concerned with questions of the political implications of the presence-or absence-of people in the landscape.