Environmental Thought and Action Pre-modern Cosgrove

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ABSTRACT

Environmental thought and action: pre-modernand post-modernDENIS COSGROVE

Reader in Geography, Department of Geography, University of technology, Loughborough LE11 3TU

Revised MS received 8 February, 1990

The paper notes certain features of the post-modern debate within geography and in science generally: the crisis of foundationalism and the revision of geographical historiography. It draws parallels between these and aspects of natural

philosophy at the opening of the modern period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A progressivehistoriography of geographical science is challenged and the continued significance of analogical and metaphorical

understanding particularly in relation to visual images, is discussed. Specific attention is paid to the uses of mathematicsand geometry treated metaphorically, and to the relations between poesis and techne as morally distinct but related modes of human interaction with the natural world. The revival in recent years of many features of late Renaissance scientific debatesis examined through the work of some feminist and neo-romantic authors.

KEY WORDS: History of geography, Environmentalism, Post-modernism, Feminism, Metaphor, Geometry, Synchronicity

INTRODUCTION

. . . Words, after speech, reachInto the silence. Only by the form, the patternCan words of music reachThe stillness, as a Chinese jar stillMoves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence,Or say that the beginning were always thereBefore the beginning and after the endAnd all is always now. (T. S. Eliot: Burnt Norton)

This paper is a commentary on two features of contemporary thought in science generally and in geographyin particular. These are the collapse of foundation-alism now widely proclaimed in post-modemwritings, and revisions in the historiography of Western science, revisions now affecting our writingof the history of geography (Dear, 1988; Harvey,1989; Livingstone, 1988). These two features areclosely related Failure of belief in the possibility of constructing a meta-theory for both natural and socialscience and of a corresponding scientific meta-language allowing transparent representation of reality inevitably puts into question the validity of Modernist models of progressive historical change.

Radical doubt about the possibility of establishingepistemological foundations to scientific enterprise is

equally challenging to positivist, Marxist and histor-icist forms of explanation. By the same token it ques-tions the accepted historiography of geography,traditionally constructed on the same foundations asthe history of western science generally: as a pro-gressive movement from ignorance to enlightenmentabout the globe, its environments and peoples. Both of these features of contemporary thought bear heavilyupon the post-modern debate in geography, but it isthe former that has received the greater attention,

while the implications of a revised history of geography for present debate are only now beingexplored.

By speaking of post-modernism we imply a closure,an end point to the loosely-bounded historical andgeographical epoch we call the Modern era. Thisoriginated in the European Renaissance and ScientificRevolution and spread, with its characteristicfeatures of the capitalist world market, mechanicaland biological technology and individualism, acrossthe entire globe by the third quarter of the twentiethcentury. Those who seek to give precision to the endof Modernism vary in their choice of dates betweenthe early 1960s and the mid-1970s (Punters, 1988).

trans. Inst. Br. Geogr, N.S. 15: 34-.358 (1990) ISSN; 0020-2754 Printed in Great Britain


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Environmental thought and action 345

ome would challenge the whole idea of epochalhange, preferring to see recent movements as merelyhe latest chapter in a continuing Modernist epicHarvey, 1989). Here I point to evidence that we arendeed describing anew the outlines of the world,

making a new world of meaning through alteredmodes of representation but that the novelty of thenterprise may be deceptive. Unlike Harvey (1989), Iegard such alterations in representational modes asignificant but, as I shall demonstrate, some aspects of ontemporary representation are very old indeed.

What I intend here is a commentary on theModem period, not so much by examining it directly,s by drawing attention to some parallels betweenhe intellectual and representational modes of theeriods immediately preceding and following

Modernism. My argument is that both in the later ixteenth century-immediately preceding the

cientific Revolution, and in the closing decades of he twentieth century-following the scientific andntellectual contributions of relativity and psycho-nalysis, there have been serious attempts to collapse

Modernist distinctions between spirit and matter,umans and nature, subject and object, poesis andechne. In both cases understanding is constitutedeither in solely operational, nor entirely speculativeerms, but rather through the construction of meta-hor and image by individuals actively embracing the

materiality of the world, recognizing the necessity of mechanical intervention in transforming nature, butefusing to be ruled by the materialist and mechanicalision of Modernism. Metaphor and image are con-eived not as surface representations of a deeper truthut as a creative intervention in making truth In eachase, the place of humans in nature and their manipu-ation of the natural world, primary geographicalssues, are central to the debate.

Initially I make some comments on metaphor, fol-

owed by an outline of the defining features of what Ihall call Renaissance environmentalism(environmen-alism in the sense of a recognition that the wholeeing of humans is integrally linked to the vital beingf environing nature). I indicate the place of math-matical, mechanical and theatrical metaphors in rep-esenting this world view. These bear upon attitudeso human intervention in the natural world. A brief omment on the Modernist discomfort with such

metaphorical discourse allows us to remark upon itsecent revival in two strands of post-modern thinking

which adopt a universalist rather than a nihilistosition: green environmentalism and feminism. Thettention each gives to relations between humans and

the natural world has significant implications for geography as an environmental science.

Geography, science and the uses of metaphor One expression of recent change in geographicalthinking is the shift from biological and cyberneticmodels of environmental and spatial organization likeorganism or system, to metaphors derived from thearts like spectacle, theatre and text (Society andSpace, 1988; Cosgrove & Daniels, 1989). Thissuggests more than simply a casual reselection of spatial and environmental metaphors, and moves

beyond open acknowledgement of the inherently perspectival nature of all scientific discourse. The shiftin metaphor threatens to depart from its Aristoteliansense of the displaced use of a representation or wordwhich could otherwise truthfully capture an aspect of reality. Such catachresis has always been necessary if

science was to deploy ordinary language to rep-resent the findings furnished by its empirical perspec-tive. In some respects post-modernism promotes theevocative sense of metaphor as that which lies

between fact and idea. The metaphor may thus pic-ture or represent an understanding which must other-wise remain unarticulated: what metaphor namesmay transcend human understanding so that our language cannot capture it. In this sense discussionsof metaphor have rightly stressed its power to con-

nect, associate and gather together; metaphor wouldthus seem to be a force tending towards unity(Harries,1979, p. 72). Metaphor is closely aligned in this usageto the visual image which gives appearance to some:thing not in itself apparent, except that the referen-tiality of language makes for greater theoreticaldensity in verbal images. Scientific discourse hasalways been metaphorical in the Aristotelian sense,

but has proclaimed a privileged truth for its metaphors or models in representing reality. The rejection

of foundationalism in post-modern writings implies arelativity in which the competing claims of differentrepresentations cannot be evaluated (Harding 1986;Harvey, 1989). Acceptance of pure perspectivismopens the door, at least in thought, to transcendanceof its own limits, to metaphysics and thus to thecollapse of clear distinctions between science and

poetics (Harries, 1979).

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY

ENVIRONMENTALISM

The Cartesian distinction between spirit and matter so central to Modernist epistemology has as its


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corollaries the principles of action by contact and thedenial of occult cause (sack, l980). It seeks to restrictmetaphor as a legitimate mode of scientific investi-gation and expression, favouring measurement, cal-culation and quantification as generators of certaintyin the scientific investigation of the material world.The story of how the grounds for this epistemology

were laid in the studies of planetary motion fromCopernicus through Brahe, Galileo, Kepler and Newton is familiar to us all, as is the resulting analogyof the created universe as a great mechanical clock whose parts move and coordinate with an incessantregularity in the silence of an inanimate void Viewedfrom the perspective of the progressive historiogra-

phy of Modernism, it is tempting to regard Cartesianepistemology and Newtonian cosmology as the inevi-table outcome of the age of European celestial andterrestrial discovery. That it was not necessarily sosimple is indicated by what historians of science haverecently revealed of attachment to concepts of universal sympathy, harmony and correspondenceon the part of thinkers like Copernicus, Kepler and

Newton (Vickers, 1984; Debus, 1978).A debate continues over the extent to which an

older monist and often occult view of nature withits characteristic combination of practical tech-nology and alchemy, astrology and magic, helpedor hindered the emergence of Modernist scienceand technology. Questions centre on whether suchthought merely faded before the compelling lightof Modern technology and causal explanation, or was actively suppressed for ideological and politicalreasons in favour of the new ways (Wright, 1975;Thomas, 1983; Hill, 1983). Recent writing expressesa baffled but increasingly resigned acknowledge-ment that rather than a shift . . . from an illuminist,fideistic, hermetic strain of the late Renaissance tothe empirical, rational, mechanical philosophy of the Modern period, both strands persist through-out the period-indeed both coexist in the samewriters and it is possible fur seventeenth-centurywriters to hold at the same time two or more---tous incompatible views (Vickers, 1984, p. 29). It isthis co-existence that I refer to as RenaissanceEnvironmentalism

The environmental picture of the late Renaissancewas neither scholastic nor mechanical To be sure, itowed as much to an inheritance of Classical and

Medieval thought as it did to the capacity of its ownthinkers to penetrate the world afresh. Its mostcharacteristically novel feature was neoplatonism, towhich were accreted hermetic, cabbalistic and magical

insights as well as earlier Renaissance re-readings of Classical authors like Vitruvius.

Common themes of a syncretic philosophy are to be found in the work of such diverse Renaissancewriters as Pico della Mirandola, Henry CorneliusAgrippa, Daniele Barbaro, John Dee and RobertFludd. An early exponent of this Renaissance natural

philosophy is the fifteenth-century Paduan doctor and student of optics, Nicholas of Cusa, Cusanus(Cassirer, 1963):

We know for a fact that all things stand in some sort of relation to one another, that, in virtue of this inter-relation, all individuals constitute one universe and thatin the one Absolute the multiplicity of beings is unityitself. (Cusanus, quoted in Debus, 1968, p. 4)

Cusanus still accepted a medieval cosmographyderived from Aristotle and Ptolemy--of a stable uni-verse composed of concentric spheres extendingfrom the elemental world of fire, earth, water and air through the planetary spheres to the celestial orb,and onwards through the unchanging and eternalemperium of angelic choirs to the Mens and Godhimself. But he, and the neoplatonists who followed,argued for a pattern of correspondences and sym-

pathies which united this whole cosmos with thesingle power of divine love, sensibly experienced inPythagorean musical harmonies. The cosmos wasthus imbued with spirit. It was a living soul, for in the

perfection of each part lay the unchanging perfectionof the whole, and vice versa-a corpus mysticum.Humans, created in the image and likeness of theDivine archetype, were microcosms of this greater order. Our physiology is composed of the four elements, and corresponds in its constitution to thespheres of the cosmos:

It is the unanimous consent of all the Platonists, that as in

the archetypal World, all things are in all; so in thiscorporeal world, all things are in all, albeit in differentways, according to the receptive nature of each. Thus theelements are not only in these inferior bodies, but also inthe Heavens, in Stars, in Divels, in Angels, and lastly inGod, the maker and archetype of all things. (Agrippa,1524; quoted in Jung, 1973, p. 76)

Envir onmentali sm and human intervention In principle therefore, any part or element of creationmay be transformed into any other- And Man (sic),

the perfect microcosm, was the creature called uponto perform such acts of intervention in nature, and indoing so to perfect and realize himself. As Pico put itin his Oration on the Dignity of Man:


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Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immor-tal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for

being honourable, art the molder and maker of thyself;thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thoudost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upwardfrom thy souls reason into the higher natures which aredivine. (Pico della Mirandola, 1492, p. 5)

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n the various forms of magic: 'natural'-operatingt the elemental level, celestial-astrology, andceremonial-operating at the supercelestial levelhrough numerology and cabbala, humans sought tonow and manipulate via images the occult forces

which inspired this cosmos. In making machinesumans applied fundamental creative principles tohe practical transformation of the earth: draining andrrigating, mining and building. Above all, inlchemy, which united the speculative or magical andhe practical, they sought a key to the transmutationf nature. This key, in European, as in all other lchemies-Chinese, Arab and Indian-was thehilosophers stone, born of the cosmic egg, an imagef rebirth (Eliade, 1978).

We now recognize that the philosophers stone wasot a purely material object but equally an interior,ivine illumination which could be achieved only byhe combination of empirical study and spiritual puri-ication on the part of the alchemist and the materials

f alchemical craft: furnace, retorts, sulphur and quick-ilver. The self is both the prima materia, the subject

matter, and also the means, the secret stone, of lchemy. Its intended result is the mystical marriage,he coniunctio, which unites and transcendsppositions: male and female, light and darkness,pirit and matter, sun and moon, Mars and Venus-ltimately God and creature. Matter and idea dis-olve in metaphor and alchemy is an act of continuousreation of meaning lying outside time and space and

vading expression in language. It yields only images,ke Michael Maiers Atalanta Fugens (1618) or JohnDees Hieroglyphic Monad(1591), akin to the mandalaymbol. Rather than analysis and distinction, soughty the natural scientist of the Modern period, thelchemist and neo-platonic scientists and technol-gists generally sought synthesis and unity. Thus,

while the teleology of medieval scholasticism saw theuture controlling the present, and the mechanicalhilosophy of the Modem period saw the past con-

olling the present, Renaissance Environmentalismllowed fur a present that simply is, as it has alwayseen. In this, both history and progress are chal-enged in a vision of enduring meaningful unity, but a

unity which has to be discovered afresh by eachhuman creature. There is a strong homology betweenthis alchemical vision and the Taoist philosophy of sympathy between principles of Yin and Yang whoseunity produces meaning and whose opposition

produces difference, separation and analysis (Jung,1973, p. 69-74).

Metaphor and agency in Renaissance Environmentalism Mathematics and metaphor.Mathematics acted as therepresentational language of this science. But it was amathematics of correspondance and harmony rather than of calculation, measurement and quantification.True to its Pythagorean and Platonic ancestry,Renaissance Environmentalism declared empiricalmeasurement to be theoretically uncertain and imper-fect because it dealt with the temporal and mutable.

Number and geometry did not derive from empiricalobservation, they were pure creations of mind. Their statements and findings were invariate, universallytrue. Thus we find the English Renaissance thinker Robert Fludd attacking mathematicians like Descartesfor their insistence on addition, subtraction, multipli-cation and division, on roots and fractions. Fluddinsisted rather on the study of ratio and proportion andthe symbolic manipulation of number: a genuinelyPhythagorean science (Debus, 1978, p. 18).

This treatment of mathematics is a striking differ-

ence between the methods of Renaissance Environ-mentalism and modern science. Yet it does not implya purely speculative science on the part of the former,a mathematical poetics unconnected to mechanicaltechnology and the transforming role of human inter-vention in the natural world. Humans actively trans-form nature as well as contemplating it. John Dees

Mathematical Preface to the English translation of Euclids Elements (1570) outlines the ways that math-ematics gives access to knowledge of both worlds,

temporal and spiritual, and also directs us to the trans-forming power of the machine. Dees aim was to popularize the insights of Renaissance science for themechanics of London-the engineers, surveyorsand instrument markers-rather than for scholars,and to show that making machines and touchingeternal truths were not incompatible activities. Heopens with a threefold distinction of all creation intothings supernatural, natural or of a third being. Thatthird being isThyngs Mathematicall:

For these, beying (in a manner) middle, betwene thyngessupernaturall an naturall; ate not so absoluble and excel-lent, as thynges supernatural: Net yes so base andgrosse, as thing naturall: But are thynges immateriall:


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and neverthelesse, by material things hable somewhat to be signified. And through their particular Images, byArt, are aggregable and diuisible: yet the generall Formes, notwythstandyng, are constant, vnchaungeable,vntransformable, and incorruptible (Dee, 1570)

Mathematics can be divided into two principals:number and geometry. Number is entirely imma-

terial, having a mystical quality-it is the reason of God: All thinges (. . .) do appeare to be Formed byreason of Numbers. For this was the principallexample or pattern in the minde of the Geator (Dee,1570). The manipulation of number is a pure science-the intellectual understanding of the whole cosmos,and through that the speculative knowledge of ourselves, our world and God:

By Numbers propertie therefore, of vs, by all possiblemeanes (. . .) leamed, we may both winde and draw our-

selues into the inward and deepe search and vew, of allcreatures distinct uertues, natures, properties and Formes:and also farder, arise, clime, ascend, and mount up (withSpeculative Winges) in spirit, to behold in the Glas of Creation, the Formof Formes,the Exemplar Numberof allthinges Numerable: both visible and inuisible: mortalland immortall, Corporall and Spirituall. (Dee, 1570)

This is not number used as quantification butnumber as an internal discourse, as metaphor and aform of meditation: the sidereal mathematics of

essences, generation and creation, which allows us tocomprehend Gods original alchemy. At its highestform of application such numerical mathematics

becomes entirely mystical, the arcane cabbalistic artof conjuring angels and identifying the number of our own name, gloriously exemplified and registeredin the booke of the Trinitie most blessed and aeternal'(Dee, 1570). Pure number did have its practical value,especially in the calculation of proportions, to themerchant, surveyor, cartographer and engineer. It

assisted representation and use of the earths surfaceand resources.Geometry too can give us insight into things ever-

lasting particularly through the study of optics, of the rays of divine light and love beaming incessantlyupon us through the agency of the stars. The higher celestial science is astrolugy but the highest is puresacred geometry:

But well you may perceive by Euclid's Elementes,thatmore ample is our Science, then to measure Plaines: and

nothyng lesse therein is taught (of purpose) then how tomeasure Land. An other name, therefore, must nedes behad, for our Mathematicall Sciencie of Magnitudes: whichregardeth not clod, nor turff: neither hill nor dale: neither

earth nor heaven: but is absolute Megethologia: notcreping on ground, and dasseling the eye, with pole, perch, rod, or lyne: but liftyng the hart above the heaven by inuisible lines, and immortall beames metethwith refexions, of the light incomprehensible: and so procureth loye, and perfection vnspeakable. (Dee, 1570

Beyond this speculative side, geometry yieldsmore practical applications. It first emerges as anobservational and experimental (that is, empiricallyexperienced) science, the science of magnitudes Itoriginated in the Egyptian need to locate and mark

boundaries obscured annually by the Nile flood.Geometry yields a number of practical mechanicalarts derived, Dee claims, from the fields of Nature,These allow us to intervene in the mundane processesof the natural world. They include cosmography,geography, chorography, music, ballistics (Gunnyng),Statike (weights and pulleys), the study of water flows,horology and architecture. Following Vitruvius, Deeregards architecture as the Queen of the Arts becauseit allows us to create lesser worlds on the earth in theimage of the macrocosm (Barbaro, 1567). Renaissancearchitecture subsumed a range of environmental prac-tices including civil and military engineering, thedesign and planting of cities and the invention of machines. Architecture was the summary science of human agency in the natural environment. Dee himself was intimately involved in many of these practical

arts: collecting and making globes, maps and navi-gational instruments; instructing Gilbert, Frobisher and possibly Drake in navigation; correspondingwith the great Flemish and Iberian cartographers of the late sixteenth century like Gerard Mercator andGemma Frisius.

The meaning of machines.If mathematics was bothmetaphor and practical skill, the machine also had acomplex meaning within the discourse of Renaissance

environmentalism. In it we encounter a significant andindicative distinction between Renaissance scienceand Modem mechanical philosophy. The arts Deedescribes are called mechanical and include themanufacture of machines to alter nature. But the rootmeaning of mechanical here lies in its counterpositionto liberal and speculative. The mechanical artswere those which supposedly required no intellectualinput and thus might be performed by mere mechan-icians. Dee attempts to show that such arts may indeed

be related to the higher liberal and speculative arts,for both are equally inspired by an understanding of nature--the machine of the world. It is precisely theanimation (inspiration) of the machine by the spirit of


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understanding that turns it from a passive model to anactive device, or, in the terms used by Italians to makehis same distinction, from macchina to fabbricaBrusatin, 1980). Dees practical works, his allegienceo the mechanics of London and his criticism of

university scholars, reveal his desire to raise the statusof the mechanical arts (Clulee, 1988). Robert Fludd,he most sophisticated and arcane of the English

Renaissance Environmentalists, having criticizedmathematics for calculation and measurement, none-heless praised Archimedes for his invention of

machines. Fludd referred to the Greek as a perfectnatural magician, implying that, as in alchemy, prac-ical intervention depended on self-understandingi.e. the domain of the liberal arts). This suggests anctivity which unites pure speculation and mere

unthinking human action. A contemporary Italianhumanist, Daniele Barbaro, clarifies the distinction inhis commentary on Vitruvius Architecture. He opensChapter X, devoted to machines, with a celebration of he perfect natural form. The circle both moves and istationary at the centre, ascends and descends, has aircumference at once concave and convex, and a

diameter which moves quickly and slowly at the sameime (Barbaro, 1567). The circle and revolutionary

motion thus contain and resolve oppositions. Vulgar people, Barbaro claims, do not understand this prin-iple and thus are caused to wonder at the effects

of rotational movement, regarding machines asmarvellous or magical.

But, as Dee also confirms, it is nature whose prin-iples guide us in the manufacture and animation of

machines:

the origin [of machines] is in necessity which moves mento accomodate themselves to their needs; nature andanimals teach them and offer examples from which, itappears, many artifices take their principles-above allthe continuous rotation of the world, which Vitruvius

refers to as a macchination: and thus it is called themachine of the world. (Barbaro, 1567, p. 441)

To follow natures example in the manufacture of machines we must apply reason and intellect, abovell mathematical knowledge, for the form and prin-iple of machines is circular motion. Barbaro illus-rates his commentary at this point with reference to

hydraulic machines for lifting and moving water,drawing his examples from direct observation along

Venetian rivers of locks, sluices and pumps to assistnavigation, control flooding and reclaim land LikeDee, who promoted the art of navigation, explo-ation for a north-east passage (Taylor, 1930), and the

planting of American colonies, Barbaro was directlyconcerned with geographic change, in creating newworlds through human agency in nature (Cosgrove,198; 1989).

Fur those lacking understanding the mechanicalarts appear magical. Indeed, within Renaissanceenvironmentalism the distinction between magic (the

production of effects for which the cause is mysteri-ous) and machine is occluded. The transformations of alchemy or the practice of natural magic are predi-cated on the same understanding and the same ani-mating spirit operating within a unified nature as arethe invention and practical application of machines- Inthis sense there is a significant difference between theidea of the machine in Renaissance science and in themechanical philosophy of the Modem period.

optics and the theatre as spatial metaphor.The animatingspirit which makes both machine and magic operativeis light, the first form whose diffusion generated

body or corporeity by drawing dimensionless firstmatter into three dimensions. . . The essential func-tion of light was to be the basis of spatial dimensionand physical extension, and to be the original physi-cal cause of all natural movement and change (Clulee,1988, p. 47, 54). Optics was the key to Gods rep-resentation and construction of the machine of theworld, the globe. Geometric optics, perspective, also

underlay human discovery: geographic, microscopicand telescopic (bringing new worlds to light) andhuman picturing of the terrestrial orb (Edgerton,1975; 19887'; Alpers, 1982), whether in mapping or

painting landscapes, or in constructing lesser worlds.Theatre was the domain in which humans most

fully represented the cosmic principles of light and persective. Renaissance architects made detailed geo-metric studies of circular Classical theatre buildingsand developed complex perspective constructions for

stage scenes. Dee himself had been closely involvedin that aspect of theatre which brought the mechanicalarts into contact with the liberal art of drama: as aCambridge student he constructed mechanical devicesfor 'magical' illusory effects on stage (Yates, 1966;1979). Both the metaphor of theatre, and perspectiveconstruction of theatres as representational spaces,hold an important place in Renaissance Environmen-talism The theatre was more than an entertainment,its illusory world both mirrored and represented the

perfection of greater worlds and its meaning encom- passed the idea of a conspectus, a totalizing represen-tation. Thus Abraham Ortelius titled his great worldatlas of 1570Teatrum Orbis Terrarum,Elias Ashmole


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onstitutive of it. That belief became the more firmlyeld as science was allied to a belief in historical linear rogress through technology and materialism

Modernisms faith in measurement, calculation, thetablishment of empirical laws, material technologi-

al progress through applied science, and historicism,gether with its distrust of the poetic, the meta-

horical and the intuitive as valid forms of knowing,l stand in opposition to Renaissance Environmenta-sm. The pre-modem apprehension of the world wasf course never entirely expunged. It remained how-ver an obscure and subordinate theme, especially inhe realm of scientific endeavour, only becoming of xoteric interest again in post-modem thinking.onetheless, as a subordinate theme in the Modemeriod such attitudes did surface in some surprisinglaces,

In the work of Athanasius Kircher (Godwin, 1979),

lias Ashmole (Yates, 1979), and even Isaac Newtonmself (Westfall, 1980), strong strains of the environ-entalist philosophy remained into the early Modem

eriod. As a separated and esoteric tradition it waspheld by Rosicrucians, Theosophists and Masons,ut its significance is difficult to interpret preciselyecause of the secrecy with which adherents sur-ounded themselves. How far that secrecy was asponse to the suppression of ideas associated withenaissance philosophy during the triumphant

eriod of the mechanical philosophy (Hill, 1983), andow far it was part of a more general irrationality andesire for secrecy among adherents is debatable. Out-de both formal science and secret societies it is poss-le to trace elements of views similar to those of enaissance Environmentalism in the representationalorld of literature and the arts whose embrace of etaphorical truth remained understandably strong.omantic writers particularly were attracted to anified poetic vision of human and cosmic life.

oethe, von Humboldt and Ruskin come readily toind. Even Modernist writers of the early twentiethentury: Eliot and Yeates were committed to such asion. But art and science were defined as separatealms and the world of poesis had little regard for,deed a deep distrust of, the world of the machine:chne. More impressive in this respect are the ideas of

ome of the engineers during the Modem period:en like Ferdinand de Lesseps, engineer of the Suezanal and promoter of similar grand schemes of nvironmental intervention like the Panama Canalnd the flooding of the Saharan chotts (Heffernan,989). Like a number of Third Republic French engin-ers, at the height of Victorian scientific positivism,

de Lesseps adopted the utopian visions of St Simon.de Lesseps saw his schemes in mystical terms: the SuezCanal would provide more than merely a channel of trade for imperial France, but would link the malespirit of Europe with the female spirit of Asia, realiz-ing harmony the world: ideas which echo John Deesreasons for promoting navigation of the north-east

passage. Modernist planners like Patrick Abercrombylooked to Eastern concepts like Feng Shui to satisfytheir sense of an underlying order of being to berecognized when humans intervened in nature.Modernist historiography has tended to exclude suchfeatures from accounts of the engineering heroes of

progress, or to treat them as embarrassing deviationsfrom a rationalist faith. When placed alongside theenvironmental vision of sixteenth-century engineerssuch ideas seem less isolated. We are able to re-evaluate them today precisely because of our own

distrust in the Modem project.

Synchronicity One reason for contemporary change in the way weread the work and ideas of people in the past is theinfluence of psychoanalysis on our understanding of human motivation, as well as the subjectivist strain intwentieth-century philosophy derived from phenom-enology, and semiotics. And it is in the work of one of

the giants of psychoanalysis that we find the clearestrestatement of the Renaissance environmentalistfaith, although subtly reworked. Carl Jungs classicessaySynchronicity:an acausal connecting principlewasfirst presented in a lecture in 1951 and expanded in1957, alongside a monograph by the professor of theoretical physics W. Pauli (Jung, 1973). Its major impact came in the late 1960s. Jungs essay may beread as an early anticipation of some of the concernsof post-modernism.

Jungs essay grew out of psychotherapeutic experi-ence and his theory of archetypal symbols in thecollective unconscious. It drew together his interestin the meanings of alchemy and, signficantly, hisunderstanding of the crisis of visualization or per-spectivism in quantum physics in the light of relativ-ity theory, the recognition of sub-atomic particlesand Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. For Jung, these theoretical and observational advanceshad finally laid to rest-at least in the arena of advanced scientific thought--the unqualified belief inscientific certainty through causal laws. Alternativeexplanatory principles were demanded. Synchronicityhe proposed as one of them: a coincidence in time of


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two or more causally unconnected events which havethe same or similar meaning (Jung, 1973, p. 25).

The emphasis in Jungs essay is on meaning. Rather than attacking the causal explanation of naturalevents inherited from the Modem scientific view,which he accepts as valid for explaining much of whatoccurs in nature and experience, Jung argues that it is

insufficient to explain all. There exist phenomenawhich cannot be explained causally unless one per-mits oneself the most fantastic ad hoc hypotheses(Jung 1973, p. 26). Jungs position would find someagreement from scientific realists and critics like PaulFeyerabend. Relativity theory indicates that spaceand time may be reduced to zero under certain con-ditions where, logically, linear causality becomesimpossible. It collapses distinctions between beingand becoming. Only an enduring unity, or an inex-

plicable discontinuity make sense under these con-ditions, description becomes purely contextual. Toaccept this unity may render us silent. But character-istically humans seek to create meaning and do sothrough metaphor. The metaphors of synchronicityare those of harmony and correspondance which wefind in Agrippa,.Dee and FIudd. Jung points to their

parallels with the Chinese philosophical concept of Tao, which he translates simply asmeaning:

There is something formless yet completeThat existed before heaven and earth

How still How empty!Dependent on nothing, unchanging,all pervading unfailing.One may think of it as the mother of all things under heavenI do not know its name,But I call it meaning.If I had to give it a name, I should call it The Great(quoted in Jung, 1973, p. 10)

This principle of meaning cannot be graspedthrough empirical observation or measurement, butrather is apprehended phenomenologically, belowthe intellectual level of formal science, We arereminded of John Ruskins comments on the scientificunderstanding of nature:

And I was quite sure that if I examined the mountainanatomy scientifically, I should go wrong in like manner,touching the external aspects. Therefore, . . . I dosed allgeology books, and set myself, as far as I could, to see theAlps in a simple, thoughtless and untheorising manner;

but to see them, if it might be, thoroughly. (Ruskin,1903-13, p. 475)

The principle of wholeness or unity to which bothJung and Ruskin allude is often grasped most fully bythe unthinking mind, the unconscious, and becomesrepresented symbolically, most commonly in dreams,exceptional psychic conditions or near-death experi-ences. We know too that there are techniques whichhumans can develop in order to increase the frequency

of such unitary experience of self and world.Unlike causality, which reigns despotically over thewhole picture of the macrophysical world and whosuniversal law is shattered only in certain lower orders omagnitude, synchronicity is a phenomenon that seem primarily connected with psychic conditions, that is tsay with processes of the unconscious. Synduonic phenomena are found to occur-experimentally-withsome degree of regularity and frequency in the intuitivemagical procedures where they are subjectively convincing but are extremely difficult to verify objectiveland cannot be statistically evaluated. (Jung, 1973, p. 95

The key problem with synchronicity, as Jungsuggests, lies in the difficulty of representing its find-ings within the metaphorical limitations of Modemscience. But, as Goethe or Ruskin or the RenaissanceEnvironmentalists discovered, they do yield to rep-resentation in verbal metaphor or graphic image. Theequivalences of synchronicity are contingent, and, inJungs words, the contingent is a formless substance

in the realm of pure intellect. In psychic introspectionthey appear as archetypal images, classically the man-dala as a symbol of unity, or the monad which Deeattempted to represent in his obscure alchemical work (Dee, 1564). Jungs own emphasis on symbolic rep-resentation, the significance of images, pictures andmetaphors calls to mind Fludds position in the pol-emic with Kepler, as Jungs colleague Pauli was keenlyaware (westmann, 1984, pp. 207-12).

In the closing pages of his essay Jung argues that

synchronicity is merely a special instance of generalacausal orderliness, a broader principle which includeacts of creation (productions of the imagination-

poesis), properties of natural number (as we see inDees preface), and the discontinuities of theoretical

physics. Such orderliness is not esoteric (although itsrepresentations often make it appear so to theModem mind). It is intuitively known to us all:

.. . only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power ocasuality . . . creates intellectual difficulties and makes appear unthinkable that causeless events exists or eveoccur. But if they do then we must regard them ascreative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern thexists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and i


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Environmental Thought and action 353

Today we live in a world so saturated in reproducedtransform them and through them, their referents.

images

. . . that nature itsself threatens to become what it was for.the Middle Ages: an encyclopaedic, illuminated book overlaid withomamentation and marginal glosses, everyobject converted into an image with its proper label or

signature . . .The quintessential modem experience of this new 'book of nature is the stroll through the scenicwonders of a national park with a plastic earphone thatresponds to triggers embedded along the path, (Mitchell,

not derivable from any known antecedents. (Jung;1973, p. 102)

It is this which accounts for the cross-cultural andrans-historical stability of certain symbols, imagesnd magical practices in&ding alchemy (Zimmerman

1984) and for belief in a world animated by creativepirit, a consciousness that depends upon represen-

ation in images for its expression and indeed its verypprehension

POST-MODERN CONCEPTIONS ANDNVIRONMENTALISM

ungs argument brings us close to some of the ideaseing advanced in contemporary post-modernism.

The underlying contentions are that the foundation-list philosophical position derived from Descartes,

Locke and Kant is exhausted, the Enlightenmentelief in reason no longer philosophically tenable.

The key distinctions of object and subject, appearancend reality, being and becoming, upon which Modernhilosophy was erected have collapsed in the face of nsights from Neitzche, Husserl, Heidegger andthers, and we have witnessed the limitations of inear discourse. In social organization the era of Fordist' production and of organized capitalism withts specific historical contributions and contradictions

s theorized by Marx and Modernisation writers isassed (Harvey, 1989). It has ceded place to a newrder, or rather a new dis-order-to an era of self-enerating consumption, of hyper-realy, a societyf the spectacle, a culture of euphoric surfaces+

Discourse of the Modernist, rationalist type groundedn meta-theory fails to capture consistent meaning inhese circumstances partly because of the impossibilityf generating empirical chains of causality for co-xistant events. Today meaning may be constructed,

at all, only in a discourse of images whose con-ingency is actively embraced. This is reflected in theact that the Modernist programme in the arts andulture, for example that projected by Futurism,

Cubism or the International Style, which aligned therts to the construction of a new, rationalist socialrder, is bankrupt. Art and literature seem doomed (or eleased) to the play of those images and apparentlyrbitrary meanings that Modernism regards as super-icial. In post-modernism however, images no longer

lustrate, reflect or disguise a reality existing belowhemselves rather they present themselves as simu-acra, constitutive of their own realities. Their mean-ng is unstable, subject to our voluntary capacity to

1980, p. 395)

Meaning is thus increasingly constructed throughimages, calling to mind Dees reference to thingesimmateriall: and neverthelsse, by material thingshable somewhat to be signifed.

For French former Marxists like Baudrillard the post-modern cultural condition appears nihilistic andwholly negative, a chaos of fragmented and meaning-less images. For David Harvey (1987; 1989) it ismerely a cultural vehicle for the most recent stage of capitalist evolution: fiexible accumulation andModernist space-time compression, an interpret-ation which leaves Marxist meta-theory inviolate as amode of criticism. Far others, however, the post-modern experience heralds the possibility of a newworld, or rather, once again the possibility of pene-trating an old one, largely submerged by the excessesof Modernism; the world of synchronicity, themonad, of Renaissance Environmentalism. As a dis-course of human life in the context of nature geography has a contribution to describing this world, but todo so will place new demands on its languages of description and modes of representation.

The main proponents of such a view are associatedwith the most environmentally-sensitive of themany ideological strands identifiable within post-

modernism. These are the green ideology or newromanticism and certain feminist positions. In rather diverse ways these suggest that the holistic perspec-tive is recoverable precisely because we are newlyopened to non-linear logic, once again freed from thetyranny of subject and object, appearance and reality,surface and depth. We are thus able to understand andaccept the contingent truth of metaphorical discourseand the creative construction of meaning throughimages. The explosive and fragmentary aspects of the

post-modern experience outlined by writers likeJameson (1984), Berman (1984) and Mitchell (l980)offer the conditions for realizing an implosiveexperience of meaningful rhythms beyond- the


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354 DENIS COSGROVE

fragments, an experience realizable itself only inimages. I will comment briefly on some of these ideas.Significantly both the new romanticism and femin-ism turn to a vision of the natural world and our placewithin it directly apprehended through creative actsof image and metaphor construction, thus to the con-cerns of Ruskin, Humboldt, Goethe and further back

to Agrippa, Dee and Fludd. These more recent writ-ings however, often fail sufficiently to address theissue of technical intervention by humans into nature,an issue which I shall deal with in conclusion.

New romanticismThe emergence and growing socio-political impact of contemporary environmentalism parallels the periodmost commentators define as post-modern. Its power-ful and often populist strains of holism, unitary, or whoIe earth, vision, of a new age seem and oftenare, naive. But the philosophical and ideological rangeof the Green movement extends further than itsmore simplistic expressions. Here, I approach its con-tentions by way of two serious writers who haveaddressed this strand of post-modem sensibility: theEnglish art critic Peter Fuller and the Czech-American

philosopher, Erazim Kohak.Fuller, in an essay titled Neo-Romanticism (1985,

pp. 83-91) notes a significant shift in artistic predelictions over the past decade in England andelsewhere:

the return to landscape has become something of a stam- pede. Ten years ago, no self-respecting art student (. . .)would have touched a box of watercolours or have gonenear lakes, valleys, rolling fields and small Gothicchurches. Today the hills are alive with the sight of pleinair painters once again. (Fuller, 1985, p. 83)

Modernism in art, he argues, drove a wedge betweenthe pursuit of art and the study of the natural world. If,as the Modernist philosophy argued, nature lackedmind, and even the divinity that Romantics likeJohn Ruskin sought to read in nature did not exist,then nature was unworthy of artistic attention or consideration---it was quite literally anaesthetic. Sucha philosophy finds its expression within modemgeographys representation of the natural world.Fuller points to the ecologist Gregory Batesons claimthat this belief, coupled with the practical implicationsof apparently unlimited technological progress, haveincreasingly obvious consequences not merely for the external environment, but for our personal lives,our bodily ecology and our spiritual welfare. These,

despite our pretence to the contrary, are still ulti-mately sustained by the natural world. The death of the higher landscape in art, that is the failure of a

belief in a moral value within nature and in our capacity to realize that value in images and represen-tations, articulates a more fundamental loss of faith.Art becomes either pure aesthesis-a response to

sensuous pleasure-or it is aligned, as Modeernists believed, to a technological utopia, poesis divorcedfrom techne. Under such a dispensation Ruskins con-cept of theoria, the response to beauty of ones wholemoral being, simply makes no sense as a programmefor art. But, Fuller argues, in recent art, for examplethe paintings of Australian landscapists Sidney Nolanand Fred Williams, we may detect a break withModernism, a serious attempt to realize a newaesthetic in nature. If nature is not a product of mind,

then, as Freud and Jung argued, mind may be a prod-uct of nature. The function of art then becomes onceagain representational, to picture and console thepotential space of creativity opened up in the human

pysche as we pass from the infantile illusion that wecreated. the mother (and, by extension, the world)who nurtures and supports us, to the adult recog-nition of our human separateness from nature andmother (Fuller 1988, p. 25). In contemporary

painters Fuller claims to find a new resolution to the

universal questions of our relations with the world of nature:

We have become peculiarly ill at ease in the nature thatnurtures us, constantly worried that through our ownactivities we will cause it to fail, certain that no Godexists within the rocks and trees to save and console, surethat not much is for the best in this, our only possibleworld . . . The stubborn refusal of a Sidney Nolan, or a FreWilliams, to accept the intractability of the Australianlandscape, their insistence upon realizing an aesthetic

response to it, was not merely something new andadmirable in art: it also bore witness to that irrepressibleimpulse in the human breast to affirm beauty in, andunity with, the natural world, regardless. (Fuller, 1988,

pp. 28-29)

Fuller shares with Jung the belief that is in natureapprehended through the psyche rather than treatedmerely as an analytical object that the unity of self and world sought in environmentalism is to be foundThrough images and metaphors we simultaneouslyapprehend and create nature as meaningful andgeography need not be excluded from this endeavour.

Fullers comments on Modem art echo ErazimKohaks on Modem philosophy (1984). Kohak also


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regards the crisis of Modernism as ultimately a crisisof nature and our relations with it:

If there is no God, then nature is not a creation, lovinglycrafted and endowed with purpose and value by itscreator. It can only be a cosmic accident, dead matter contingently propelled by blind force, ordered byefficient causality. . . If Godwere dead, so would nature be

and humans would be no more than embattled strangers,doomed to defeat, as we have largely convinced ourselveswe in fact are. Kohak, 1984, p. 5)

His text is structured around the natural rhythms and passages from day to night through dusk to dawn, of winter passing to spring, summer and fall, as he con-structs his house in the New England woods. Kohak seeks to realize an intimacy with the natural world, buthis argument is no more a restatement of ThoreausWalden than Fullers is of Ruskin. It is a sustained andcritical commentary on Modem philosophy and anappeal for a post-modem environmentalism, for a

philosophy which recognizes the being of humans asintegrally linked with the being of nature (Kohak,1984, p. 8).

Such a philosophy restates many of the assump-tions we have traced through sixteenth-centuryscience. It conceives of a cosmos which is vital andmoral, a more intuitively correct thesis than theModernist vision of a measured and mechanicalnature which is as morally neutral as the mathematics

by which its elements and dynamics are calculated,measured and described. There is however a differ-ence in the relation of metaphor to this cosmos.Renaissance Environmentalists still accepted theauthority of a divine text through their sharedChristian faith. Their metaphors were thus both con-stitutive and grounded. Although one senses a desirefor grounding in Fuller and certainly in Kohak, a rejec-tion of aesthetic self-sufficiency, they have too great

a sensitivity to otherness to claim a particular transcendental authority for the metaphor, whoseconstitutive capacity is thus free-floating.

Kohak points out that the Modernist vision sur-vives today largely at the popular level rather than atthe leading edge of theoretical physics or the philos-ophy of science (Kohak, 1984, p. 18). But, he claims,the nature of contemporary life and the penetration of advanced technology through consumer productsinto every sphere of our lives has made the Modernist

creed existentially convincing. Thus his relationshipwith the machine is uneasy. He finds it necessary to

pass beyond the powerline for a direct contact withthe natural world, not so much in order to abandon

the framework of modem life as to grasp an order which continues to underpin our lives, to recover themoral sense of the cosmos and of human life therein

beneath a layer of artifacts and constructs (Kohak,1984, p. 26). In so doing his attention is directed atthe same foci of observation as the Renaissanceenvironmentalists: the firmament, the earthly

elements and the rotations of the spheres as evi-denced in the seasons and the skies. How he willintegrate these insights with the world of techneremains unclear.

Feminist critique of ModernismIf Fuller and Kohak represent the green strand of post-modem culture, Sandra Harding (1986) and ElizabethGrosz (1987) serve to articulate a feminist strand.Feminists have both contributed to and furthered the

post-modem criticism of rationalist epistemologyand belief in the capacity of human reason to consti-tute a single language of true meaning. They criticizetoo Modernisms capacity to universalise culturallyrelative presuppositions into potentially tyrannical

philosophical systems (Scott & Simpson-Housley,1989, p. 232). But they read these features in gender terms: Grosz argues that the Modernist scientific pro-

ject is inherently phallocentric, privileging mind,intellect and logic, conventionally gendered as male

attributes, over heart, empathy and intuition(gendered as female) in the search for humanunderstanding:

Science affirms the unique contributions to culture to bemade by transhistorical egos that reflect a reality only of abstract entities; by the administrative mode of interact-ing with nature and other enquirers; by impersonal anduniversal forms of communication; and by an ethic of elaborating rules for absolute adjudications of competingrights between socially autonomous-that is, value-free-pieces of evidence. These are exactly the socialcharacteristics necessary to become gendered as a man inour society. (Harding, 1986, p. 238)

The practice of Modem science, and indeed itsepistemological foundations, are thus regarded as anexpression of patriarchal suppression of alternativeforms of knowing. Some historical evidence for this is

provided by Merchants (1980) interpretation of changes in the gendering of nature in RenaissanceEnvironmentalism and the changing meanings

attached to human interventions into nature duringthe period of the Scientific Revolution. She claimsthat the death of nature, recognized by Fuller andKohak, was in large measure a consequence of


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356 DENIS COSGROVE

Modernist universalising of a male-gendered dis-course. Certainly within alchemy and its finalmetaphor of the mystical marriage there is a moreandrogynous vision of nature. Speaking for today, both Harding and Grosz appeal to a broader science,informed by feminist theory. The five features of suchscience which Grosz identifies are to be found in the

characteristic thinking to both pre- and post-modemenvironmentalism: (1) admission of context andobserver dependency in scientific knowledge; (2) therelational nature of theory, rejecting the binary divideof subject-object; (3) the fluidity of language andrepresentation; (4) the continuity and relatedness of self and world and (5) rejection of the hierarchyimplied by binary categorizing.

Similar arguments are put by Harding in her studyof the history of Modem science. She argues that the

non-metaphorical appearance of Modem science andits languages belies an elaborate system of metaphorsas necessary to conceptualize this as any other domainof human knowledge. Both the nature of these meta-

phors and the very lack of recognition serve to repress both females and ways of knowing gendered asfemale. Harding too promotes a new science, empha-sizing among other features personal experience as aform of knowledge (Harding, 1986, p. 240)-a fea-ture which she too associates with late sixteenth-

century science--and the search for a unity of knowledge combining moral and political withempirical understanding (Harding, 1986, p. 241):

there is another world hidden from the consciousness of [Modem] science-the world of emotions, feelings politi-caI values; of the individual and collective unconscious; of social and historical particularity explored by novels,drama, poetry, music and art-within which we all livemost of our waking and dreaming hours under constantthreat of its increasing infusion by scientific rationality.(Harding, 1986, p. 245)

Like Grosz, Harding promotes a scientific discoursewhich would incorporate this hidden world. Thesewriters argue that a more gender-equal approach tounderstanding self and nature would produce rep-resentations more in line with those broached by newromanticism or green environmentalism, in other words holistic and intuitively convincing,

CONCLUSION

A striking quality of experience in the late twentieth-century world, noted by all post-modem commen-tators, is its fragmentation and surface-like appear-ance, that loss of a sense of order and direction which

has followed the death of Modernism: its apparentirrationality. We are in new times (Smith, 1989), anew world, a world of machine-generated imageswhere we leave the VDU screen after a days oper-ations, perhaps among the flickering simulacra of capital transfers on the world financial market, tospend an evening at a Korean restaurant in a con-

verted Parisian warehouse, a Zen meditation class onVenice Beach or a jog through Regents Park withHaydn on the Walkman. Ours is a world where dif-ference is encountered in the adjoining neighbour-hood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth(quoted in Gregory & Ley, 1988, p. 116). The materiand immaterial are confused, there is much that istheatrical, even magical about the world we experi-ence often vicariously through a continuously elabor-ated range of media. The collapse of foundationalism

in philosophy is becoming existentially as convincingas Kohak argues technology makes the Modernistcreed so that the construction of a moral order for such a world appears a daunting task

But ours remains simultaneously an old world,whose unchanged natural rhythms still evoke our

powerful responses and inform our knowledge, asfeminist writers especially have shown. The disjunc-ture between these two sets of experience: of con-stantly elaborating techne, ever more sophisticated

machines on the one hand, and of poesis, wonder atthe deeply felt sense of moral order in nature on theother is one of the most disturbing features of post-modem living. It informs the work of all the contem-

porary writers I have discussed here. In different andless immediate ways it confronted also the sixteenth-century environmentalists. For them the machinetook its form and meaning from the same principlesthey felt governed nature. Human intervention in thenatural world followed rules inherent in that self-sameworld, but those rules became known to us preciselythrough the human capacity to create meaning inmetaphor and image.

Despite the dire warnings of both the death of nature and the alienation of human spirit we remainable to embrace and create meaning in our lives out of the fragmentation and to discern the possibilities of amoral order, The ecology of our bodies seems no lesssecure-if rather more consciously nurture&than itever was. We live in a world of images, most of themmechanically generated. And the machines we maketoday are increasingly designed to produce andcreate images, either directly in the sense of image or sound reproduction systems, or indirectly in the formof consumables whose prime use value lies in the


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creation or enhancement of personal or group status

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

images. It is however precisely the fluidity of meaning,the instability of cultural codes, that liberates us, offersnew freedoms to touch and creatively picture thesense of unified meaning understood by RenaissanceEnvironmentalists, To achieve this we are not obligedto seek some romantic primitivism, an escape intopure poesis. The machine image itself has the creativepower of metaphor, we may evoke our place in naturevia the word processor as much as by living in a logcabin or painting landscape. Only our inability toescape Modernist categories of man and nature, sub-ject and object, makes us believe that our machinesand our images allow either escape from or alienationwithin the cosmos. As Barbaro and Dee recognized,they are merely part of it, transformations of it, andthrough them we constantly re-work nature in theonly way we can-as meaning.

Geographers have always claimed the role of describing and making sense of both the order of thenatural world and the role and record of humans intransforming it. Geography is neither purely technenor pure poesis and is damaged perhaps more than anyother sphere of knowledge by dualistic thought. Atthe height of Modernism geographers embraced aparticularly vulgar form of environmentalism andremain wary of the environmental heritage of their discipline. The collapse of many of the structures

of thought associated with modern science, andcertainly with scientism, together with a new respectfor the power of images to create meaning offersenormous scope for geographical descriptions sensi-tive to the unity of human life and the earth on whichit is lived.

REFERENCES

I suggest that the Modernist belief in linear reason-ing and progress may be aberrant historically andculturally, that our relations with nature over time arebetter understood as a constant re-working by

humans of eternal moral questions: of self, nature andsociety, of the appropriate forms which human livesand institutions should take, of the ways in which theexperiential unity and wholeness of our world havebeen given meaning. As we learn to grasp a newsense of order beyond the fragments of our world werecognize that its only possible mode of represen-tation is through images and metaphor, that our philosophy, and indeed our geographies, are endlessreconstructions and re-presentations of the same

world, constantly differentiated in the manufacture of meaning. In this a geography which describes our world to ourselves is a central science. The Renaissanceworld picture both made and was made by the

rediscovery of Ptolemys global projections andexperienced anew in the global navigations. The

post-modern world is similarly being re-made and re-experienced by global representations: its most powerful environmental icon is the image of our world sent back by those marvels of advanced tech-nology, the satellite and the remote-sensed image.We need to locate the history of our discipline withina broader historiography of constant metaphoricaland imaginative reconstitution of nature and our

place within it, not seeking ultimate foundations for spatial and environmental metaphors and images butrather respecting them as more or less adequate andfragmentary repetition of that speech which nature,or perhaps God, addresses us (Harries, 1979, p. 88).

I should like to thank all those who commented help-fully on drafts of this paper, specifically RobinDoughty, Steve Daniels, Mike Heffeman, partici-

pants at The Engine Historyconference at Texas A &M University (1988), where it was first presented, andtwo anonymous reviewers for Transactions,

ALPERS, S, (1982)The art of describing: Dutch painting in the seventeenth century(John Murray, London)

Architerrura e utopia nella Venezia del cinquecento (1980)(Electa, Milano)

BARBARO, D. (1567) I dieci libri dell' architettura di M. Vitru-vio, tradotto et commentati. . . (de'Francheschi & Chrieger,Venezia)

BERMAN, M. (1983) All that is solid melts into air: theexperience of modernity(Verso, London)

BRUSATIN, M. (1980) La macchina come sogetto darte,in Storia d'Italia, Annali, 3: Scienza e technica'(Einaudi,Torino) pp. 31-77

BUCHER, B. (1981) Icon and conquest: a structural anaIysis of De Bys Great Voyages(Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago)

CASSIRER, E. (1963) The individual and the cosmos in Renaissance philosophy(Harper, New York)

CLULEE, N. H. (1988) John Dees natural philosophy: between science and religion(Routledge, London)

COSGROVE, D. (l988) The geometry of landscape: prac-tical and speculative arts in the 16th century Venetianland territories,' COSGROVE, D.. & DANIELS, S. (eds)The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic rep-resentation, design and use of past environments(CambridgeUniv. Press, Cambridge) pp. 245-276

COSGROVE, D. and DANIELS, S. (eds) (1989) The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation,design and use of past environments(Cambridge Univ.Press cambridge)


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