answer to this question. In many instances, human alteration of landscapes has created verdant green patches in arid zones and allowed crop varieties to flourish, while in some other instances it has led to the disappearance of exotic animals and plants from the face of the earth, as discussed earlier. The nature of human interaction with physical and biotic systems can best be summarized as dual in nature, as having both a benevolent and a malevolent side.
After all, transformation of the earth’s surface seems to be one of the inevitable concomitants of human societies down the millennia….we should therefore be concerned that such metamorphoses ought to be creative rather than destructive. Yet there seems a persuasive case that no alterations ought to be total. (Ibid: 425)
As the landscape is taken as the visual manifestation of the complex web of existences and processes that goes by the name of an ecosystem, it can be observed that such effects bear upon the ecosystem as well, thereby altering it and making it evolve in ways that are poorly understood, even at present.
tourists and outside observers, who view the landscape from outside. The recent trend is a holistic appraisal of the landscape, and hence the incorporation of both insider and outsider views for a fuller understanding. Denis Cosgrove (1998) points out that by introducing the human imprint upon the face of the earth, John Brinkerhoff Jackson has given the landscape a humanistic flavor, which is often missing in ecological appraisals of the same:
Of landscape as a formal term Jackson has admitted that ‘the concept continues to elude me’, and gives the reason as his refusal to treat it as a scenic or ecological entity and his determination to accept it as a political or cultural phenomenon, changing in the course of its history….landscape is anchored in human life, not something to look at but to live in, and to live in socially. Landscape is a unity of people and environment which opposes in its reality the false dichotomy of man and nature which Jackson regards as a Victorian aberration. Landscape is to be judged as a place for living and working in terms of those who actually do live and work there. All landscapes are symbolic, they express ‘a persistent desire to make the earth over in the image of some heaven, and they undergo change because they are expressions of society, itself making history through time. (Cosgrove, 1998: 35)
Thus landscapes are social and cultural products. They can be fully understood by analyzing the sociocultural life of the inhabitants who ‘make’ that landscape.
They cannot be understood by only the ‘forms’ that they present to the observer’s eye, they have to be analyzed from the angle of the ‘processes’ that give rise to those ‘forms’ and by analyzing the actors who engage in the ‘processes.’
Cosgrove goes on to add:
The treatment of landscape in humanistic geography, despite its shortcomings, demonstrates that the issues raised by landscape and its meanings point to the heart of social and historical theory: issues of individual and collective action, of objective and subjective knowing, of idealist and materialist explanation. If traditional geographical studies of landscape stressed the outsider’s view and concentrated on the morphology of external forms, recent geographical humanism seeks to reverse this by establishing the identity and the experience of the insider.
(Ibid: 38)
It is this approach that this research also tries to employ while exploring the changes in the landscape of the Ajoy river basin region. This requires the researcher to learn from the experiences of the people inhabiting the landscape and to identify the social processes which become the causal factors behind the change and metamorphosis of this landscape. This process is open ended, and the research does not seek to prove or disprove a hypothesis that arises from a particular theoretical framework. On the contrary, this research tries to learn from repeated observations, from stories told by the local subjects, and by tapping the reservoir of historical memory of that same landscape in people who are associated with it in different capacities. It tries to indicate a pattern behind the changes manifested at the visual or interactional levels, or even unearth some juxtaposition of different patterns in the manifestation of these changes. The
researcher here assumes the role of the outside observer of the landscape; his view of it, though mixed with his own experiences as a child who grew up to be a man near the region in question, nevertheless, is removed from the day to day realities of the landscape. Though I myself was born and brought up in a town not far from the river, my experiences of it came through the eyes of a casual tourist in my childhood and subsequent adult years, and then, for the second time, through a temporary visit to the land with this research work in mind, which finds its roots in sociological and environmental discourses. Thus, the researcher adopts a stance of a careful observer, open minded and ready to incorporate views of others, but staying an ‘observer’ till the end, for in his quest to analyze the phenomena of continuity and transition in the given landscape, he imparts the notion of ‘objectively judging’ the landscape from the point of view of ‘others’.
In contrast, the views the subjects present make no conscious effort to see the reality ‘objectively’ or, as removed from the experiences that generated them in the first place.
By combining the subjective and objective views, the researcher aims at building a conceptual framework which can account for the causal factors behind what he observes and what his subjects say they do. This approach, thus closely
follows the three steps of ‘grounded theory’ that Strauss and Corbin (1998) specify:
Description: The use of words to convey a mental image of an event, a piece of scenery, a scene, an experience, an emotion, or a sensation;
the account related from the perspective of the person doing the depicting
Conceptual Ordering: Organizing (and sometimes rating) of data according to a selective and specified set of properties and their dimensions
Theory: A set of well-developed concepts related through statements of relationship, which together constitute and integrated framework that can be used to explain or predict phenomena
(Strauss and Corbin, 1998: 15)
CHAPTER 3:THEORETICAL INSIGHTS ON NATURE,MAN,ECOSYSTEMIC
CHANGE AND LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMATION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PRESENT
STUDY
The eternal mystery of the world is its intelligibility.
Albert Einstein3