Aerial landscape reading reveals clear-cut forests as fragmented mosaic scraps expressing social indecision.

Evidence

From the windswept silence of Marys Peak, you can see the struggle unfolding. The land that stretches to the ocean, sparkling seventy miles distant, is broken into fragments. Patches of red earth, smooth blue green slopes, polygons of bright yellow green and amorphous dark green ribbons sit uneasily side by side. The Oregon Coast Range is a patchwork of clear-cuts and the second and third generations of Douglas-fir coming back with a vengeance. The landscape mosaic also includes a few scattered remnants of the original forest, the old growth that once stretched from the Willamette Valley to the sea. The landscape spread out before me looks more like ragged scraps than a patterned quilt. It looks like indecision as to what we want our forests to be. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 563

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the polyad’s Reading the Landscape course: reading disturbance history and land-use change from present landscape structure at a broad scale, complementing the moss-scale observations. — connects to: Quantitative inventories miss the lived quality that makes a place meaningful — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 258; Landscape reading answers some histories while opening further questions — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 28; A reasoned whole picture transforms scattered facts into landscape meaning — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 123 (+5 more)
• SEED: The phrase ‘indecision as to what we want our forests to be’ is a compact thesis for the landscape-reading essay.

Broader Connections

• Spatial practices cannot be read apart from social context #corroborates (0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1402
• Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations #corroborates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394
• Landscape fragmentation shrinks bird song repertoire in small habitat patches #exemplifies (0.72) — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology, 226
• Fragmented-landscape populations rarely reach equilibrium, defeating deterministic management #corroborates (0.70) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 1233