Introduction to the landscape

‘Le gout des vieilles pierres’, story telling on a walk through Saint-Geniès.

‘Je suis un paysane, je vis dans mon pays, je façonne le paysage, et le paysage me façonne’.

Words spoken by storyteller Clément Bouscarel on a spring evening walk around Saint-Genies. Though his Occitane had a Quercy flavor to it, it hardly mattered as few people on the tour could make much sense out of the rolling R’s and vaguely Italian or Spanish echoing sentences.

A flat, functional and rationally controlled landscape, the Netherlands.

A landscape (paysage) is a spatial record of past and present activities and interactions of natural and cultural forces into a unified whole. The word 'landscape' can be traced to Germanic languages of the 12^th century and was used to refer to inhabitants of a region. It covered the shape of the land, the customs of the people and the material forms generated by these customs as well as the immaterial laws and organizations.

The bright city lights: Three dimensional, free market, 24 hour economy, Hong Kong.

The landscape is not just a product of nature; climate, relief, soil, flora and fauna. But also a product of people; their (un)intentional interventions. The landscape is a product of organizational (political), material (economic), technological (knowledge), cultural (perceptions) and natural forces. The landscape is not just matter but also a product of the mind. We perceive the face of the earth and interpret the scenery. We can ‘read’ landscapes through our own experience and that of our shared cultural memory.

The red soils and dry high forests of the Togo hills, Ghana.

As people grow-up in a landscape they often get attached to it (benchmark) and derive part of their identity from it. Landscapes are ephemeral: Ephemera are things people collect such as old postcards, posters and bus tickets, which were only intended to last a short time when they were produced (or for a particular function). The ephemeral manifest itself in the landscape in Temporarily Obsolete Abandoned Derelict Sites (TOADS), edgelands that have lost their function and have not yet found a new one. Landscapes ought to survive us so we can revisit the landscape of our youth, but the landscape of our youth might not even survive our youth (You can’t go home no more).

‘France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men’.

Regretting fast and large scale changes, what conservationists want to conserve at any given time is the status quo at a particular point between one set of human interventions and another – residue of yesterday’s ‘progress’ after it had acquired ‘patina’ a ‘feel of naturalness’ or ‘tradition’. People made changes to the landscape and have impacted on the environment where ever and whenever they appeared. New is the awareness of the change and the pride/shame it gives, the landscape became a product of people, and the people a product of the landscape. Find out more about the landscape, history, vegetation, the villages and life on the causse:

The index of this blog.