Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

376 | HOW THE MIND WORKSstand one another. They frequently raid neighboring territories and killany stranger who blunders into theirs.We could afford this wanderlust because of our intellect. Peopleexplore a new landscape and draw up a mental resource map, rich indetails about water, plants, animals, routes, and shelter. And if they can,they make their new homeland into a savanna. Native Americans and Australianaborigines used to burn huge swaths of woodland, opening them upfor colonization by grasses. The ersatz savanna attracted grazing animals,which were easy to hunt, and exposed visitors before they got too close.The biologist George Orians, an expert on the behavioral ecology ofbirds, recently turned his eye to the behavioral ecology of humans. WithJudith Heerwagen, Stephen Kaplan, Rachel Kaplan, and others, heargues that our sense of natural beauty is the mechanism that drove ourancestors into suitable habitats. We innately find savannas beautiful, butwe also like a landscape that is easy to explore and remember, and thatwe have lived in long enough to know its ins and outs.In experiments on human habitat preference, American children andadults are shown slides of landscapes and asked how much they wouldlike to visit or live in them. The children prefer savannas, even thoughthey have never been to one. The adults like the savannas, too, but theylike the deciduous and coniferous forests—-which resemble much of thehabitable United States—just as much. No one likes the deserts andthe rainforests. One interpretation is that the children are revealing ourspecies' default habitat preference, and the adults supplement it with theland with which they have grown familiar.Of course, people do not have a mystical longing for ancient homelands.They are merely pleased by the landscape features that savannastend to have. Orians and Heerwagen surveyed the professional wisdomof gardeners, photographers, and painters to learn what kinds of landscapespeople find beautiful. They treated it as a second kind of data onhuman tastes in habitats, supplementing the experiments on people'sreactions to slides. The landscapes thought to be the loveliest, theyfound, are dead ringers for an optimal savanna: semi-open space (neithercompletely exposed, which leaves one vulnerable, nor overgrown, whichimpedes vision and movement), even ground cover, views to the horizon,large trees, water, changes in elevation, and multiple paths leading out.The geographer Jay Appleton succinctly captured what makes a landscapeappealing: prospect and refuge, or seeing without being seen. Thecombination allows us to learn the lay of the land safely.