Landscape and the Condition of Being (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

One of the most resonant and multilayered terms in our English language is the word landscape. Landscape cuts down beyond the level of vocabulary into concept, beyond concept into perception, and beyond perception into philosophy. So based on this premise, the premise that individual words are not trivial, I want to explore landscape before I attach it to ecology. Like many English words, this one seems to have multiple and simultaneous origins. The suffix "scape" derives from an old Germanic verb meaning "to create." That original old German term also morphed into another suffix, "-ship," which means a condition of being or a position, such as membership, friendship or township. At some point in scape's existence, it morphed into an Anglo Saxon version, which was "scipe," and also into an Old Dutch term "Schap." So we are going to follow "schap" in its peregrinations, as it combines to form the Dutch word landschap, which first appeared in the late 1500's, and which referred to a tract of land. As far as I can tell, landschap immediately took on some cultural baggage, as it evolved to refer to a group of local people banding together in common purpose, which in this case, was to reclaim land from the sea. So right away, you can understand how this ambiguity, this vagueness about where people end and land begins, bundled itself into the very earliest uses of the word landscape. Equally early on, in 1603 as a matter of fact, the word landscape was pre-empted by artists and turned into an adjective to describe an artistic genre. "Landscape painting," which the Dutch pioneered and excelled at, came to mean "painting representing natural scenery." Interestingly, it is this painterly definition of the term landscape that migrated into the English language, and morphed into the term we use today. So our language first appropriated the term in its aesthetic identity. It was only later that we came to use the word to define its contemporary and conventional meaning, that is, "a tract of land together with its distinguishing characteristics." Thus we were first introduced to landscapes through painting, and only afterwards did we recognize them in real life. Still later yet, all the way into the 1930's, landscape saw its first use as "landscaping," i.e., the laying out of lawns, gardens and trees for the purpose of beautification.