Our Future Environment

Landscapes are symbolic environments created when persons place meaning in nature and the environment and give the environment definition and form according to particular perspectives, values and beliefs. (Berger & Luckman 1967). Cultural groups transform the natural environment into landscapes through the use of different symbols that bestow different meanings on the same physical objects. These symbols and meanings are social constructions and they result from ongoing individual and social negotiations in a cultural context. It is commonly accepted that people reside in a natural world that preexists each individual, but, the world is meaningless without individual interaction. The symbols and meanings that comprise landscapes reflect what people in cultural groups define to be “proper” and “improper” relationships among themselves and between themselves and the physical environment.
The concept of landscapes highlights the conflict of proper and improper relationships within communities with respect to the natural environment. For example, very different meanings associated with water emerged in a rural community of the western United States as the community faced a proposed environmental change (Greider & Little, 1988). Before the proposed change, most community members shared an unspoken symbolic meaning attached to water in its role in irrigated agriculture. After a proposal to transfer a large quantity of water from agriculture to an electricity-generating power plant, competing symbolic meanings of water emerged and led to significant social consequences. One group of community residents asserted a quasi-religious meaning to the use of water in irrigated agriculture, strongly opposed the transfer and condemned neighbors who supported the transfer. Another group who supported the transfer symbolically attached the meanings associated with the rights of private property to the water. The unspoken consensus fell apart in the face of the proposed environmental change and led to a renegotiation of the symbolic meaning of community water and the relationship of people who socially interacted in the context of their water use. The resulting competing definitions of water and their relationships with each other led to the emergence of competing landscapes.
For this paper we are interested in examining the competing definitions of ‘proper’ relationships between landowners and tourists and the landscape itself. Tourism can be an ideal context for studying issues of political economy, social change and development, natural resource management and cultural identity and expression. Thus, many major questions that concern social scientists appear in studies of tourism.

Filed under: anthro of property, natural landscape, environmental planning on April 16th, 2008