Landscapes Of Desire Research Articles

How Integrated Ecological-Economic Modelling Can Inform Landscape Pattern in Forest Agroecosystems

The purpose of this review is to analyse recent advances in ecological-economic modelling designed to inform desirable landscape composition and configuration. We explore how models capture the economic and ecological consequences of landscape pattern, and potential feedbacks to the responses by policy or landholders. Modelling approaches are becoming increasingly interlinked, coupling components of empirical-statistical modelling, spatial and bioeconomic simulation, land-use optimization and agent-based models. We analyse recent methodological advances and find that only few examples capture feedbacks between landscape pattern and decision-making. We outline how future hybrid models could build on these recent advances by inter alia an improved representation of landscape patterns, refining the theory behind decision-making, incorporating uncertainty and reducing model complexity. We conclude that coupling recent developments in land-use optimization and agent-based models may help bridge gaps between modelling philosophies as well as parsimony vs. complexity. This fruitful field of research could help to improve understanding on the role of landscape pattern in social-ecological systems.

Irrational Economics and Regional Cultural Life

Irrational Economics and Regional Cultural Life

El nuevo paisaje turístico español a través de las tarjetas postales de los años 60

Si hay un producto que define lo turístico, ese es (era) la tarjeta postal (que además se apellida turística). Las postales seleccionan los encuadres de lo que hay que ver, presentan los monumentos principales de los destinos, las vistas de ciudades, sus paisajes más deseables y, además, proponen el punto de vista desde el que debemos mirar.A finales del siglo XIX, las postales comenzaron a tener ilustraciones en una de sus caras como ornamento estético (algo que dos décadas más tarde se convertiría en la propia esencia de la tarjeta postal). La postal ilustrada fue un fenómeno cultural y de comunicación fruto de los avances del fotograbado a inicios del siglo XX. Se inició entonces el consumo masivo de imágenes y la postal resultó ser el producto turístico por excelencia, un resumen del mundo que nos muestra las escenografías de la felicidad y el nuevo paisaje turístico de España.

Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale by Deborah R. Coen

Reviewed by: Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale by Deborah R. Coen David Cahan (bio) Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale. By Deborah R. Coen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 425. Hardcover $40. Deborah Coen's book is a study of the emergence and rise of dynamic climatology in the Austrian (after 1867, the Austro-Hungarian) Empire. Her analysis follows the theme of "scaling" used by an array of Austrian and other Imperial scientists within the Empire. Where previous scholars have [End Page 1103] concentrated on the work of Scandinavian, British, German, and American meteorologists and climatologists, Coen studies the development of dynamic climatology amongst Austrian, Czech, and other "Imperial-Royal scientists" (her designation, chap. 3), and argues that their political and cultural environment helped lead them into becoming dynamic climatologists in the first place and shaped their scientific work and attitudes. "Dynamic climatology" refers to the use of thermodynamics and hydrodynamics to study the atmosphere, that is, to explain climatic conditions. Coen argues that it was precisely because of the diverse political setting and the necessity of justifying and helping to unify the Empire's multicultural nature that Imperial-Royal scientists were led to think in terms of "scale." Thus, they worked with and thought about both the local and the global, the small and the large, and they mediated between diverse systems of measurement. Coen maintains, moreover, that "scaling" involved not merely the intellectual but also the emotional and political selves of the budding climatologists as members of the Empire. These Imperial-Royal scientists not only produced fresh meteorological data from throughout the Empire, but also recognized that dynamic climatological thinking was needed to understand their data and to help explain local weather. Indeed, they helped to recognize and define the meaning of "climate," especially in its global sense. To understand growing environmental knowledge, Coen argues, one must also understand its political and cultural (and here imperial) setting. In Part 1 of her three-part study, Coen examines the "Unity in Diversity" promulgated by Imperial-Royal scientists. She unearths the traditions of natural history collecting and of scaling work in the Empire, and shows how early modern collectors laid the material, institutional, and cultural basis for climatological knowledge in the nineteenth century. She analyzes "the Austrian Idea," that is, how the geosciences helped Austria explain itself as a spatial unit and so justify its rule over the Empire's non-Germanic parts (chap. 2). Here too she discusses the emergence of "Imperial-Royal scientists" and their work in leading the Empire's "dual task" of observing and relating the local in the Empire to the global (chaps. 3–4). In Part 2, Coen analyzes "the Scales of Empire." Here she first discusses the technical challenges that meteorologists confronted in visualizing "unity in diversity," especially by creating maps and atlases that allowed them to move from a static to a dynamic and multiscalar view of the Empire. She also presents "the invention of climatography," or the public representation and practical meaning of the Empire's "natural regions" (chap. 6). This in turn leads to discussions of several literary works (for example, Adalbert Stifter) to help appreciate the notion of scaling. Several scientists applied newly won knowledge of winds and atmospheric pressures to understanding global geography and climate. Coen shows, for example, how Max Margules sought to model atmospheric circulation, and how various [End Page 1104] dynamic climatologists helped to elucidate understanding of cyclones and smaller eddies that belonged to the atmospheric system. By 1910 or so, Coen concludes, "dynamic climatology" had come into existence as a term and a field; it was now understood to mean "the study of disturbances to the earth's climate system" (p. 235). Finally, in Part 3, Coen turns to "the work of scaling," here addressing how Imperial-Royal scientists came to understand deforestation as due to climate, the role of plants in the shaping of climate, and what she calls "the landscape of desire," that is, the emotional experiences of the new climatologists (chap. 11). Coen's book provides fresh, stimulating, and comprehensive coverage of the rise of dynamic climatology in the Austrian...

Prospects for ecologically and socially sustainable management of total grazing pressure in the southern rangelands of Australia

Numerous large herbivore species, both native and exotic, share the southern Australian rangelands with domestic livestock, which often account for only about half of the total grazing pressure. Although each presents its individual challenge to landholders, the management of kangaroos is a key component of ecologically sustainable management of the region because (a) they represent a significant component of the non-domestic grazing pressure, particularly in areas from which dingos and wild dogs have been (partially) removed; (b) commercial harvesting, the means of control that has the highest social acceptability, has been rendered ineffective by the actions of activist groups and market closure due to food safety concerns; (c) the task is largely beyond the capacity of individual landholders; and (d) the same constraints do not apply to other non-domestic components of total grazing pressure. Management of total grazing pressure, and particularly kangaroos, currently represents a case of market failure because the level of management that can be expected of landholders is not consistent with public expectations for resource conservation and animal welfare. Several avenues are available by which kangaroo management could be advanced to achieve both public and private benefits. These include adoption of an active, adaptive management approach to the kangaroo population, establishment of arrangements that will shift the general perception of kangaroos from pest to resource, development of an appropriate incentive framework to achieve desirable landscape outcomes, and continued evaluation of the benefits and costs of cluster fencing. These initiatives require both a greater commitment from governments to address the market failure and a proactive stance by industry to engage stakeholders, self-regulate, and objectively demonstrate environmental and animal welfare credentials.

Venezuela: Biografía de un sucidio by Juan Carlos Chirinos

Juan Carlos Chirinos Venezuela: Biografía de un sucidio Madrid. La Huerta Grande Editorial. 2017. 139 pages. Juan Carlos Chirinos concludes Venezuela wishing that his book might be the portrayal of “a displaced soul that converges into a greater good—that of the possible, or art and ethics.” He is quoting José Balza, Venezuela’s greatest living writer, and expressing the modest hope of a younger opposition novelist for a country whose government adamantly encourages despair. Fortunately, the new Spanish publisher La Huerta Grande has a series of insightful and quirky brief essays by Spanish-language authors on contemporary topics from perspectives like Chirinos’s, whose Venezuela joins Argemino Barro’s analysis of Donald Trump’s ascendancy, El candidato y la furia. Chirinos’s book complies with many scholarly and popular expectations because his additional expertise as a historian and journalist keeps him up to date with the pertinent data needed to construct a vehement argument, partially explained by the glossary of “essential” Venezuelanisms appended to his essay. Those and other frequently humorous explanations are meant for a general public, not for the standard bearers of essentialist patriotism who tend to demand “authenticity.” Venezuela is clearly the work of a novelist , but one who has done his research. If the reader were guided just by the titles of its three principal parts, she would have a clear idea of the historical developments Chirinos analyzes with élan and conviction, relating a past that, not without paradox, leads to the suicidal present of Maduro and Co. Venezuela is not a diatribe against Chavismo, and Chirinos also shows the failure of the opposition, for whom going back to the old Venezuela means going back to the privileges of the upper classes. This invigorating essay, often autobiographical ,allowsChirinosto“screwaround,” as he says using vivacious Caribbean slang. That does not mean that arguments are left in the air. Rather, the journalistic patterns with which he disarms interdisciplinary pretentions show discipline in summarizing Gabriela Wiener Sexographies Trans. Lucy Greaves & Jennifer Adcock Restless Books This collection of provocative essays by Spanish writer Gabriela Wiener fearlessly explores the landscape of female desire, from the initiation of seduction to the expectations placed upon new mothers. Hilarious, thoughtful, and daring in equal measures , Sexographies is the perfect map for the shifting terrains of gender, agency, and identity that define this time in history. Yang Mu Hawk of the Mind Columbia University Press Translated from Chinese by a variety of translators, the work of Taiwanese poet Yang Mu brings vivid and playful pastoral imagery. He examines both Chinese and Western literary and cultural traditions through his personal lens, and his writing retains its beautifully lyrical nature through the translation. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 93 over two hundred years that, constantly interlaced, show a certain consistency in the Venezuelan character, which the author assumes with provisos. Venezuela is defined at times by what Leo Spitzer called “chaotic enumeration”— that is, a poetic listing which ultimately makes sense. If Western media are still concentrating on Venezuela’s present, emphasizing the opposition’s divisions due to a general sense of grandiosity, Chirinos —always attentive to the biases of digital sources, as in the “fake news” described in the section “Bolívar distorted in 140 characters”—provides instead a cultural panorama that reveals the lack of historical insight and ideological mysteries engendered by twenty-first-century socialism. When he says that he wanted to “point out the likely risks that made this perfect suicide possible,” it is evident that, more than the snapshot he modestly announced, he achieves more. His final words directly address the person most responsible for the situation: “Maduro, the people want freedom, their security and your cartel’s”; with added optimism: “The people will never surrender.” The Maduro government still blames everyone but themselves, and if it has been able to decelerate the opposition, it has not slowed down the daily and greater collapse of the economy and social contract. Venezuela: Biografía de un suicidio’s circumspect snapshots confirm that savage socialism is equal to or worse that savage capitalism, particularly in cultural terms, and that its author is one of the very few with intact courage and intellectual integrity...

The politics of landscape production in the history of development along Florida’s Atlantic coast

The politics of landscape production involve questions about the power to define what landscape means, who or what belongs to landscape and who or what belongs in landscape. Asserting the right to participate in landscape production and thus to help steer landscape along desirable development pathways remains a core component of landscape politics and grows in importance as many societies experience widespread citizen withdrawal from engagement in political processes. In this article, I review the history of landscape production in Florida, USA, to reveal the interrelated consequences of adjustments in political economy, administration, land use and spatial representations for future landscape development. In particular, my analysis of the strategic contestation of undesirable development in the production of the local landscape in a small coastal community highlights the increasing need to engage strategically in the politics of landscape production in the pursuit of socially and environmentally desirable landscapes the world over.

Landscapes of Lesbian Desire

A review essay of Lisa L. Moore’s Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (2011).

“What is California? Nothing but Innumerable Stones”

This article examines the records of the last generation of German Jesuit missionaries in California (present-day Baja California). Removed from the colonial Spanish territory in 1768 by edict of the Spanish king, the missionaries formed a narrative of their efforts in California that they then brought back to Europe. In California, the missionaries attributed great spiritual significance to the dry climate of the region. The arid physical environment thwarted the missionaries’ efforts to build the landscape that they believed was vital to the spiritual development of the indigenous Californians. The Jesuits maintained the necessity of their desired landscape even as they came to accept the impossibility of physically creating it in California. Ultimately, the environment occupied a prominent place in the missionaries’ accounts which simultaneously justified their work in California and explained its shortcomings.

Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni

Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni

Better Ways to Work Together

This interpretive essay looks broadly at natural resources law in the United States, at the body of law that has emerged out of lawmaking efforts to divide nature into parts, to prescribe use-rights in these parts, and to resolve ensuing conflicts. Generations ago private use rights were defined clearly in ways that enabled owners and outsiders to know the reach of private rights. Most lands were devoted to single resource uses. The situation today has become quite different. Use-rights today are vaguer (with more vagueness to come). Also, more lands are thought to contain multiple resources and value now extends to aesthetics and ecosystem functions. The upshots include rising conflicts, more impaired markets in resources, and evident failures to promote either efficient resource uses or desirable landscapes. These upshots, the essay contends, are linked to a general inability to see clearly the functions that natural resources law is called upon to perform in setting after setting, and, going further, then to link today’s conflicts to the specific ways that current law poorly performs these necessary functions. For reasons considered, private resource-use rights need to be embedded more expressly within well-designed governance regimes; within governance systems that are empowered to resolve conflicts among competing interests and, in doing, to bring contextual clarity to specific private entitlements. This means moving beyond longstanding assumptions that (i) the law defines rights, (ii) governments regulate uses, and (iii) courts resolve disputes — legal functions that, in fact, increasingly overlap. Needed today are new governance systems that blend these legal functions so as to enhance resource-use flexibility, to tailor rights to particular settings (physical and social), and to accommodate shifting needs and values. The best systems will likely blend the public and private in novel ways to resolve disputes more quickly, at lower cost, and with more involvement by affected parties. As examples the essay considers wildlife, surface water (in riparian and appropriation systems), minerals, drainage, and fire regimes.

Landscapes of Desire: Tourists, Touts and Sexual Encounters at the World Heritage Site of Thebes

Cultural tourism capitalises on archaeological sites with World Heritage status on a global scale. The encounters of visitors from all over the world with local residents and other stakeholder groups, like local and international entrepreneurs, set off complex processes of interaction in which the physical and social space of the heritage site is negotiated, shaped and consumed. In a case study from Luxor/Egypt, this paper investigates a particular facet of these interactions, namely sexual encounters between tourists and members of the local community. It delineates the economic and social conditions of this phenomenon and discusses the role it takes in the production, perception and use of the World Heritage site of Thebes.

Policy Change and ELC Implementation: Establishment of a Baseline for Understanding the Impact on UK National Policy of the European Landscape Convention

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) now presents an important frame for the approach to achieving desirable landscape change in Europe. A response within national policy is seen as one way to achieve such change. This paper discusses the process of the construction of a baseline survey as the starting point for examining national policy change in relation to the ELC in the UK. It outlines the theoretical approach and methodology, the components of the baseline and provides concluding comment. The baseline was devised as i) an overview of present understandings of ‘landscape change’ in the UK context; ii) an overview of relevant sectoral policy and tools, iii) a detailed national policy content review and discourse analysis using the principles and Articles of the ELC as monitoring indicators, and iv) a survey summary. Collaborative working, complexity of criteria to judge ‘progress’, the need for transferability and manageability of information and the development of a monitoring framework with feedback mechanisms emerged as key considerations. This work was seen by UK government as a starting point for the development of a range of policy, attitude and physical indicators of change in relation to ELC implementation in the UK.

도시 경관향상을 위한 경전철 교각의 시각적 특성

Urban sprawl has been the limits of traffic accommodate and the supply road. Thus, Light Rail Transit(LRT) has been proposed as the best alternative. Owing to landscape damage from construction of LRT, landscape planning should be considered seriously in the urban planning step. This paper therefore seeks to determine landscape improvement direction of LRT pier. First, the methods in this study shared landscape improvement direction type of LRT pier through previous studies such as planting of surface(30%, 60%, 90% planting of surface), graphic(character, commercial advertising, symbol), and surface treatment type(exposed concrete, white painting, pattern dies). Next, respondent evaluated 3D simulated landscape image accordingly shared types by preference and landscape adjectives using in streetscape evaluation. As a result, visual preference was the highest in planting type of surface and the lowest in the surface treatment type. Covering 60%(4.48) in planting type of surface was the highest. Because it is similar to the golden ratio considering the visual principle, we will need to take advantage through the result of this paper. Also, most landscape improvement direction which satisfied with significant level showed a positive effect from landscape improvement. Comprehensively based on these results, it suggests desirable landscape improvement direction of LRT pier in the city for solution of landscape inhibition problem.

Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Ireland’s Victorian and Edwardian public parks were landscapes in which normative models of class, gender, and colonial identities were constructed. This paper will explore how the materiality of these landscapes—their drinking fountains, railings, bandstands, and benches—facilitated forms of social practice that underpinned an ideology of improvement, creating regulated spaces of display and consumption in which the natural world and the urban populace could be objectified, domesticated and their moral worth evaluated. Yet, parks have always been sites of transgression so that from their earliest years, vandalism and other forms of subversive behavior created alternative narratives of identity.

Nonlinearities in biodiversity incentive schemes: A study using an integrated agent-based and metacommunity model

We report results from over 20,000 runs of a coupled agent-based model of land use change and species metacommunity model. We explored the effect of increasing government incentive to improve biodiversity, in the context of other influences on land manager decision-making: aspirations, input costs, and price variability. The experiments test the four kinds of policy varying along two dimensions: activity-versus-outcome-based incentive, and individual-versus-collective incentive. The results from the experiments using boundedly rational agents, and comparison with profit-maximisation reveal thresholds in incentive schemes, where a sharp increase in environmental benefit occurs for a small increase in incentive. Further, the context affects the level of incentive at which turning points occur, and the degree of effect. Variability in outcome can also change with incentive and context, and some evidence suggests that environmental benefits are not always monotone increasing functions of incentives. Intuitively, if the incentive signal is large enough, land managers will farm the subsidy; and if the subsidy does not exactly match desired landscape outcomes, deterioration in environmental benefits may occur for higher incentives. Our results, whilst they suggest that outcome-based incentives may be more robust than activity-based, also highlight the importance of context in determining the success of agri-environmental incentive schemes. As such, they lend theoretical support to schemes, such as the Scottish Rural Development Programme, that include a localised component.

The Changing Landscape of Female Desire: The Growing Chasm Between “Hotness” and Sexual Obsolescence in a Digitized, Surgicized, and Pornographized World

Melissa Feldmann Secrest: Welcome, everyone! On behalf of the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, our Editors Steven Kuchuck and Deborah Pines, Associate Editor Shelly Itzkowitz, our jo...

“Where Did Gender Go?” Same-Sex Desire and the Persistence of Gender in Gay Male Historiography

The scholarship on gay male social history identifies a shift that supposedly takes place in the landscape of same-sex desire, practice, subjectivities, and associations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to this historiography, these landscapes were fundamentally and diversely gendered in that the organization of same-sex desire flowed from the varying performances of, and identifications with, masculinity and femininity. Beginning with World War II, however, object choice displaces gender as the defining feature of homosexuality. This essay disputes this periodization and offers a somewhat different perspective on writing histories of male homosexuality. Using insights from queer studies and from ethnographic methods, I argue that gender does not disappear from these landscapes. The dominant narrative glosses over the nonnormative expressions and subcultures that persist throughout these periods that exist parallel to, and at times interrupt, the dominant model of the hetero-homo binary. Just as importantly, the dominant model glosses over the gender sameness — normatively masculine men desiring normatively masculine men — that also defines an important form of erotic subjectivity in the modern period. That sameness — an erotics of normative masculinity — is left uninterrogated as an important historical formation in and of itself and also as a means by which the hetero-homo binary was constructed. Instead, the histories shift their attention from sexual-gender subcultures and subjectivities to gay community building with its attendant “problems” of organization formation, infrastructural development, and liberal politics.

For My Own Pleasure and Delight

For My Own Pleasure and Delight

5. Small Figures in Large Landscapes

5. Small Figures in Large Landscapes Anthony Channell Hilfer Paul Bowles’s first view of North Africa was enough to tell him that he had landed in his landscape of desire. Only twenty-one years old and still a musician rather than a writer, he had found his spiritual home: Straightway I felt a great excitement. Always without formulating the concept, I had based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the earth’s surface contained more magic than others. Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic, I should probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind. (The operative word here is “direct,” because in this case it was equivalent to “visceral.”) Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death. And now, as I stood in the wind looking at the mountains ahead, I felt the stirring of the engine within, and it was as if I were drawing close to the solution of an as-yet-unposed problem. (Without Stopping, hereafter WS, 125) This is one of the many passages in Bowles’s writings where he reveals a passion for North Africa and, most of all, for the Sahara, at least equal to Abbey’s for his desert and Broyles’s and Bowden’s for theirs. It’s all the more odd that Bowles found his way there by chance concatenations, especially the suggestion of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that he go to Africa as an alternative to the trite American apprenticeship in France. Bowles later declared, “Like my fifteen-year-old counterparts all over the world, I was seduced by Lafcadio’s acte gratuite” (WS 67). While it seems unlikely that fifteen-year-olds all over the world were reading André Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican, whose protagonist’s principal ethos is to act on whim, in one incident pushing a man out of a train to his death simply because the thought occurs to him, the tendency is consistent with Bowles, who let gratuitous suggestions lead him to momentous choices. Eventually, the Sahara became not only Bowles’s muse but also part of his being in the world. He discovered in it the nothing that is: “I realized that I loved all those things: the sun, the silence, the nothingness” (Conversations with Paul Bowles, hereafter C, 225). When very young, Bowles adopted the “practice of pretending not to exist” (WS 131), but this did not work well in Morocco; a blond westerner could hardly escape notice. Still, the desert’s appeal was in its negation of ego. As Bowles commented to an interviewer, “I don’t see myself, really, I have no ego” (C 115). This [End Page 270] is why he didn’t engage in the kind of literary gamesmanship for which, say, Norman Mailer is known: “To take part in such games, you have to believe in the existence of your personality in a way that I don’t” (C 119). This skepticism about the value of salient selfhood very much carries over to his fiction: “For years critics have objected to the facelessness of my fictional people, although that is deliberate on my part. And at the time I was writing [. . .] I did not have reactions to people as people, but only as forces to propel me, as a glider uses air currents” (In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, hereafter L, 439). The gratuitous act substitutes for personal motivation. More importantly, it is the landscape, not the people, that is central; the usual foreground and background of fiction switch off: “Places have always been more important to me than people. That is to say, people give the landscape scale; the landscape is not a background to them” (L 440). Thus in The Sheltering Sky the apparent protagonist, Port Moresby, dies halfway through. The Sheltering Sky is not quite like...