Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia by K. Valentine Cadieux Laura Taylor

Author:K. Valentine Cadieux, Laura Taylor [K. Valentine Cadieux, Laura Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415747615
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

This tension bespeaks what is arguably also the very crux of the exurban phenomenon. In many ways, these landscapes are examples of the “trouble with wilderness” as stated by William Cronon—that is, the way that “wilderness” hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is beguiling because it seems so very natural.67 Cottage country is seen by its users as a “natural” foil to the “unnatural” everyday landscapes of the more densely built-up metropolis, a setting in which reluctant city dwellers can sojourn amidst nature without having to get too close for comfort. Like exurbia, then, it is a way to reconcile an ideological attachment to the idea of nature while avoiding committing to its messy processes, which are distastefully complex, diverse, and uncertain—not unlike what Richard Sennett describes as the useful “disorder” of the city.68 Indeed, empirical studies of how nature is perceived by Americans and Canadians suggest that residents of cities and their metropolitan suburbs tend to view it as “scary, disgusting, and uncomfortable,”69 the same way many of them also describe city life—particularly those who choose to live in suburban settings.70 In this world-view, nature is something foreign to be kept at bay, somewhere “out there.” But by effectively getting its users to continue thinking of nature in this way, and to merely sojourn amidst it instead of coming to terms with it so as to better integrate our very ways of dwelling into natural processes, cottage country may be just another kind of “sprawl”—which can be understood as settlement patterns that do little to respond to their natural and cultural context.71

As elements of metropolitan-regional growth and development, then, both cottage country and exurban settings are genuinely problematic in terms of sustainability and biodiversity because they too often are rife with “dumb design”—a term used to describe the unresponsive, template-based postwar urban form that spills across North America, which ecological-design advocates Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan argue is literally “dumb” because it does not speak to its natural and cultural context.72 More to the point, though, attitudes toward these settings reveal what is wrong with our cities. In this is a great paradox, as Cronon puts it: “wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. . . . To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.”73

Compounding the problem is the collective difficulty we North Americans seem to have with accepting change in nature. There seems to be in both cottage country and exurbia a profound reluctance to admit the possibility for change, which is linked in many ways to our unintentionally uncritical reproduction of a nostalgic and romantic representation of “nature.” Cottage settings in particular are thought to be unchanging and unchangeable, as in this account by Edward Bartram, a

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