The Field

by Darren Sears

In part 1, published last week, we took a look at how immersive representations of ecological islands and contrasts evolved into a kind of artistic map design; today’s post explores how these maps might convey multiple ways of relating to our ever-changing environment.

My urge to heighten the feeling of psychological control over clearly defined pieces of the natural world has expanded to include an additional, less idiosyncratic aspect—a kind of protective impulse. That’s because these islands of nature, whether they’re defined by environmental conditions or human-created in the first place, tend to be especially vulnerable to climate change, invasive species, and other threats. (Feeling the “world at your fingertips” is appropriately similar to “holding the fate of the world in our hands.”) The faceted structure of the maps doesn’t just compress the geographies they represent. It also seems to freeze those geographies in space and time just as they’re on the verge of shattering, as if they were delicate crystals. Those of us who think of such islands as fragile and “precious” do so both because of and despite the fact that we know that their fixed boundaries are an illusion. We realize that, at least at some spatial and temporal scale, the natural world is inherently and constantly changing thanks to a combination of human interactions and its own processes.

I think this illusion is possible (I’d guess not only for me) because we psychologically compartmentalize stability from change, rather than blending them together into a continuum where change essentially infiltrates and forces out any notion of permanence. We can preserve some abstract idea of “pristine” nature as hiding “within” or “beneath” an overriding instability. Sometimes, and some places, it bubbles up toward the surface to make the place feel timeless in the moment. I give this conception (or “imaginary” as cultural geographers might call it) of stability-with-change the label of “isolation.” It sees nature as fundamentally apart—from physical change, human-caused and not, but also from our own fluid psychological framings of what nature means to us in the first place.

Or then again, could the mosaic quality of the maps alternatively be read as evoking “natural,” inherent ecological flux, rather than “unnatural” disruption to an underlying stability? And could the sense of journeying from one facet to the next, often along fragments of trails or roads, underscore the fundamental human-ness of these places in a way that individual, detached scenic views can’t? (There’s been plenty written about how the disruption of the static gaze in photomontage can suggest immersive, “lived” experience—see James Corner (1999) and Holly Getch Clarke (2005), for example. I’d add that this immersion could represent human-environment impact running in both directions.) In contrast with “isolation,” I think of this more positive (and realistic?) interpretation of change and interaction as “integration.” It sees an exciting dynamism and interconnectivity, rather than a distancing coupled with a physically and emotionally shattering disintegration. Nature from this perspective, both in physical form and in concept, is fundamentally contingent. This interpretation, again, isn’t what I’ve been aiming for in the maps. But in my head at least, thanks to the influence of those years in design, integration has managed to join isolation and live there at the same time. And so, I’ve decided to let it surface in the maps on its own. Maybe the dual interpretation of the faceting can shed some light on how the (apparent) conflict between isolation and integration might be resolved?

I originally thought of the isolation-integration relationship in the maps and in my mind—as a competitive tension along a continuum between two poles. But I’ve come to realize that the two concepts might not represent a duality at all. They might actually coexist on different planes— essentially a higher order of layering above the compartmentalization I see within isolation itself—that in the maps are knitted together by the faceting. Integration is based on the physical reality of environmental flux and human presence, but isolation is a perception (an imaginary more literally “imagined”) with its own kind of reality. So both can be “real” at the same time, and it’s possible for us to embrace both of them. In fact isolation, as a perception or image, is itself a component of integration: it’s the part of integration that considers nature to be a cultural and psychological construction to begin with.

Where and how the two layers interact in the maps depends on the viewer’s perspective and the particular composition (the facets are more shard-like, evoking shattered glass, in some than others). This is paralleled in the real world, with implications for design, planning, and conservation. Whether the environmental change we’re witnessing today is “natural” or “unnatural”—an exciting opportunity to be highlighted or a disruptive transformation to be prevented or obscured to the extent we can—depends on the place in question and the person you’re asking. It’s certainly some of both. I personally think we can justify preserving an image of the “pristine”—basically a collection of living museums—if we know and make clear that it’s the image we’re preserving rather than a physical reality. And it’s likely that the fragility and artificiality of that image—actually, the centrality of fragility to that image—is itself an important piece of the reason we’re drawn to it. (For better or worse we’re drawn to actual museums, and crystals, in the same way.)

This art/cartography detour away from design practice has led me in some unexpected directions—in large part back toward landscape architecture, with a clearer understanding of these (ostensibly) conflicting views on ecological stability and change both within the field and my own mind. Whether I end up going full-circle, or finding a way of more consciously integrating the two pursuits, remains to be seen.

References

Corner, J. (1999). The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In Denis Cosgrove (Ed.), Mappings (pp. 213–252). Reaktion Books.

Cosgrove, D. (2008). Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Getch Clarke, H. A. (2005). Land-scopic Regimes: Exploring Perspectival Representation Beyond the “Pictorial” Project. Landscape Journal, 24(1–05), 50–68.

Nassauer, J. I. (1995). Messy ecosystems, orderly frames. Landscape Journal, 14(2), 16-170.

Sears, D. (2023). Fracturing & Fluidity, Isolation & (Dis)Integration: Mapping Ecological Islands & Edges in Painting & Music. International Journal of Cartography, 1-22.

Darren Sears is an artist-cartographer based in San Francisco. He received his MLA from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and BA from Stanford, and has practiced design with Terrain Studio, SWA Group, and Martha Schwartz Partners. Darren is represented by HANG ART Gallery in San Francisco, and further explores the themes of his visual work through journal articles, musical composition, and regular talks at cartography and geography conferences.