Unfamiliar Territory_Research

unfamiliar territory
human needs reside in the contemporary culture at a given time. In this way the interpretation of nature is
always a political act, heavily charged with cultural projections and the idealized image of the ‘natural’.
Disturbed sites are the by-product of such an understanding and after ceasing to provide us with necessary
space or resources they themselves go through the same mechanisms of projection and familiarization through
the masking of the violence done to the land. With the use of the image of the natural and the carefully drawn
boundaries, marking out what is allowed to be seen, practised, experienced or even thought of, disturbed sites
are transformed into by now all too familiar image of predictable nature subservient to human needs.
What stays (or becomes) obscured and hidden are the relations between different actors in space (and their
outcomes) that transformed territory into what we now perceive as an ‘unhomely’ landscape. While disturbed
sites are disturbed precisely because they lie at the intersection of larger industrial, ecological and economic
processes and ever growing human needs, they are ambiguous and are fighting language, their understanding in
most cases largely focuses only on the ‘measurable’ nature of ecology. What often remains unspoken of is that
disturbed sites are extensively complex and uncertain, composed out of human and non-human, material and
chemical flows, natural, social and industrial processes that cannot be simply measured, traced or isolated.
Rather than places of distinct properties or predetermined experiences, they are sites of possibly infinite affects
and unknown encounters.
Such sites make us feel uneasy and anxious because they embody the blurring of distinctions that maintained
the distance between binary terms we grew so accustomed to. Man and nature. Architecture and landscape.
Public and private. Past and present. Object and field. Static and dynamic. Natural and artificial. Self and other.
They resist our tendency to make them comprehensible (without being overly reductive) and interpret them
through our habitual ways of seeing. Instead of remaking them into fixed and generalized images of the familiar,
they call for an approach that would focus on relations between different actors that together compose such
landscapes and would through reading and intervening acknowledge the past, present and future processes on
site.
When discussing disturbed sites it seems necessary to define what is actually meant by disturbance and/or
violence. Looking from landscape ecology perspective purely ‘human’ disturbance is not really that different
from ‘natural’ disturbance but the important distinction lies in extension, severity and frequency of such
events. 10 While disturbance can in many cases be seen as beneficial (forest fires importantly contribute to the
ecologically rejuvenating qualities in forest ecosystems, for instance), the capacity of an ecosystem to
incorporate it is limited and human disturbances in many cases fall outside this limit. Severity of the
disturbance, fragility of the ecosystem and scale of intervention often result in stressful processes that reduce the
complexity of ecological communities, consequentially affect population dynamics and landscape patterns.
One could argue that a volcano eruption, for instance, is nevertheless pretty violent as well and the severities of
it clear. In what way is it then different from mining or deforestation or any other human induced disturbance?
While it is commonly known that disturbances, either ‘human’ or ‘natural’ are never necessarily only harmful,
10
Farina, A. (2005). Principles and methods in landscape ecology. Boston, Mass.: Kluwer Academic, p.114.
10