Nobody likes it when you mention the unconscious, and nowadays, hardly anybody likes it when you mention the environment. You risk sounding boring or judgmental or hysterical, or a mixture of all these. But there is a deeper reason. Nobody likes it when you mention the unconscious, not because you are pointing out something obscene that should remain hidden—that is at least partly enjoyable. Nobody likes it because when you mention it, it becomes conscious. In the same way, when you mention the environment, you bring it into the foreground. In other words, it stops being the environment. It stops being That Thing Over There that surrounds and sustains us. When you think about where your waste goes, your world starts to shrink. This is the basic message of criticism that speaks up for environmental justice, and it is the basic message of this book.
Timothy Morton. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. (2000)
A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names
and routes, maps alive to signihcant ecological and surface geological features. A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the socio-environmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized-treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official landscape -whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of those- is typically oblivious to such earlier maps; instead, it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental. Lawrence Summers’ scheme to export rich-nation garbage and toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as a grandiose (though hardly exceptional) instance of a highly rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of elite capture of resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems inhabited by those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls “dispensable citizens.”
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi – Pruitt Igoe sequence (1982)
landscape theory 