Abstract
Environment, it would seem, is well understood. The environmental disciplines, ranging from environmental psychology and behavioral geography to architecture and regional planning, have investigated the human experience of environment. These disciplines have analyzed how the environment impacts people’s experience and how perception and technology shape the environment. Clearly, much has been done which is correct.
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Notes
The position developed here derives from the work of Martin Heidegger. See, for example, his On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); and Poetry, Language and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971 ). Perhaps the best access to the topic is Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976 ).
Samuel Woodworth Cozzens, The Marvellous Country or Three Years in Arizona and New Mexico (Boston: Shephard and Gill, 1873), pp. 100–107. I would like to thank J. Gray Sweeney for pointing me to this quotation and for his stimulating insights into the “aesthetics of nature.”
The account of the Oregon Trail experience used here is taken from Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), chapter 8, especially pp. 238–243.
Ibid., p. 240.
Ibid., p. 241.
Ibid., pp. 242–243.
Cozzens, The Marvellous Country, pp. 101–102.
For accounts of events during a recent major flooding of arroyos in Austin, Texas, see The Austin American-Statesman, issues for Memorial Day, 1981, and the week following.
The crucial difference is in the contrast between “arroyo” and the words “dry creek,” “creek”, or “gully;” in other parts of Texas the word “draw” would help considerably, but that word is not used in central Texas. For the basic distributions of these words, see Terry Jordan, “The Texas Appalachia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (1970): 409–427; and E. Bagby Atwood, The Regional Vocabulary of Texas (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1962).
G. García-Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude ( New York: Harperand Row, 1970 ), pp. 48–49.
Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta ( New York: Random House, 1910 ), p. 251.
Ibid., p. 671.
Henry Thoreau, Walden ( New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962 ), p. 71.
See, for example, Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1959); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Vincent Scully, The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1975 ); J. Gray Sweeney, Themes in American Painting (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Grand Rapids Art Museum, 1977 ).
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, S.E. Morison, ed. (New York: Knopf, 1952), quoted in Nash, Wilderness, p. 24.
Robert Coles and Jane Hallowell Coles, Women of Crisis, vol. I ( New York: Dell, 1978 ), p. 104.
Letter from W.P. Hermann, Grand Canyon Forest Reserve Supervisor, November 9,1898, quoted in Stephen Hirst, Life in a Narrow Place ( New York: David McKay, 1976 ), p. 2.
Lee Marshall, “A Master Plan for Grand Canyon Village by the Havasupai Tribal Council”, quoted in Hirst, pp. 260–261.
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques ( New York: Pocket Books, 1977 ), pp. 374–376.
Ibid.; see especially pp. 80 ff.; pp. 382–387; pp. 427–435; pp. 473-ff.
There is a large literature in language geography, folklore and history on the topic of environment and language. For an accessable overview, see Terry G. Jordan and Lester Roundtree, The Human Mosaic (New York: Harperand Row, 1982), bibliography to chapter five. But the vast majority of research has thus far concerned itself with the accurate and scholarly collection and analysis of the material. The interpretation of the modes in which language discloses the environment remains to be done. Though a survey of the field is not appropriate here, the following works are worth mention: Richard Weiss’ work on Swiss folklore, house form, and landscape in Volkskunde der Schweiz (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1984) and Häuser und Landschaften der Schweiz (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1973); Gerhard Hard, Die “Landschaft” der Sprache und die “Landschaft” der Geographen (Bonn: Ferd. Dümmler, 1970); Hard, “Mundartforschung und Mundartgeographie”, (Saarbrücker Hefte 21, 1965), pp. 27–50; George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). On landscape thought from the viewpoint of the body and philosophical anthropology, see Marjorie Grene, “Landscape,” in Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire, eds., Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982 ), pp. 55–60.
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© 1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Mugerauer, R. (1985). Language and the emergence of environment. In: Seamon, D., Mugerauer, R. (eds) Dwelling, Place and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_4
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