8 - Exclusionary Landscapes: Shenstone and the Development of a Romantic Aesthetics of Enclosure

Summary

It did not occur to me until the green, undulating slopes of the Yorkshire Dales came to the train windows that I had taken the scenic route out of Glasgow Central. It was 10 August 2015, a typical English summer's day of cloud and dappled sunshine. Looking upon the land of sheep, cows, horses, dogs and their walkers, hurtling past at sixty miles an hour, I asked myself: what makes a landscape beautiful? On recalling the places I’d been to, or experienced second-hand through the mass media, I was at once struck by how few of the scenes in my mind's eye had people in them and how many had none at all.

Assuming that ‘notions of what makes a beautiful landscape are’ – to quote Swiss sociologist and economist Lucius Burckhardt – ‘historically determined’, what then is the provenance of this misanthropy underlying my sense of the beautiful, which seems to me remarkably widespread and durable? The French geographer Augustin Berque voices the sense that people today have lost the ability to produce beautiful landscapes, and across the developed world the restriction of human activity, if not of the human presence itself, is accepted as the necessary corollary to the maintenance of ‘places of great natural beauty’. Indeed, the activists of Earth Liberation Front and the Sea Shepherd Society believe that the best thing we can do for our rapidly degrading world is to leave it alone. To restore our planet's biodiversity, they argue that we have to commit ourselves as a species to depopulation and economic recession. This misanthropic sentiment is recapitulated in sources as diverse as the anarchistic graphic novels of Alan Moore, James Lovelock's proposal of sustainable retreat in The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and the videos uploaded to YouTube on the return of nature to retreated environments, most notably to the irradiated landscapes of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Returning to the Yorkshire Dales and other green spaces in and about the cities, towns and villages of England, is it going too far to assert that the etiquette of picking up after a dog, or conceiving whatever a human being might leave behind these places as ‘litter’, is yet another manifestation of the same misanthropic feeling?