Have you ever thought about why modernity has so many straight lines and squares
why do we order nature into this particular shape
some of you may have taken a flight across the US and I think it's really shocking you would see
hours after hours of squares this grid formations where there are squares inside of squares and this
right here is just a random part of Indiana you'll see it in many other places as well, modernity
is full of these squares which is sort of when you think about it's an arbitrary way of
ordering a landscape
why do we do it this way? and then James Scott has one kind of answer which is that it lies in a
particular way that the state sees things. So you reading an excerpt from a book called seeing like a
state and it's a very influential book very widely read book and after this book a lot of others have
taken up this idea of seeing like
something something you have stuff like seeing like an oil company seeing like a survey and
other things that I can't think of right now and some of you may notice that there's a lot here
that resonates with Foucault if you read him so Scott shares with Foucault many ideas about
how the states use its citizens they have similar ideas about the universal mission, Foucault has
the idea of the panopticon
there's this kind of an idea that we have a fancy modern fantasy that it's possible to have this
God's eye view of everything from nowhere and part of the argument is that states
has this urge to create a world where everything is visible and accountable and surveillable
but what we see in the Scott reading is that modernity doesn't just describe, it also creates the
things that it wants that it purports to describe so it's not just about measuring the world but
about creating a world that's measurable not just that they perceive an ordered and measurable World
instead of a disordered one but there are also actual interventions to make the world in their image
for instance to remove the things that they
Cannot easily measure so this is not just about perception not just seeing like a state it's not just
perceptions it is interventions as well, making something measurable. So Scott writes about the history
and development of scientific forestry in Germany and there's a really crucial point in this text
which I'd like to narrow in on, it is one of the steps in the development of forestry in Germany and
for the Foresters he writes about it was at that time
the next logical step in management of the forest after they had mapped the forests
this step was the attempt to create through careful seeding planting and cutting a forest
that was easier for state Foresters to count manipulate measure and assess so this is the point
where they go from measuring to making something that's measurable from assessing to making
something that's more easily accessible from counting to making something that can be easily be
counted so before they reach this step what
Scott describes is a sort of tunnel vision that they have a narrowing ambition that brings forth
certain things bring certain things into focus while obscuring and excluding a lot of other things
because it is a synoptic view of a selective reality. So the Foresters in Germany they saw the forest
with this kind of constricted mission as focused in on the forest as
Commercial wood and there were a lot of things that fell outside of this mission such as the
understory and the animals living in the forest and all of the other parts of trees that were
not just the log that could be sold for timber, they didn't see the whole complex
trees Scott says but instead what they saw when they looked at the tree was an abstract tree that
represented a volume of
Lumber. They sold the forest as a resource and he describes how they changed gradually their vocabulary
to fit with their vision describing not nature but natural resources and not a forest but a
crop of trees and the forest wasn't living in this Vision it was growing to deliver
sustainable yield of timber.
So in the first few pages we're squarely in the realm of knowledge presented by
These visual metaphors of how the forester see the forest, we get a sense of what their
vision and their conceptual apparatus must have been like for a forest to be sort of legible as a
resource
but then we get to this crucial point, the point at which the foresters no longer impose
a logic but actually changed the physical forest in order for it to fit with their vision so
through a range of interventions you can then go from forests to rationally ordered arrangement of
trees.
If at first every forest was the same conceptually sort of in their minds eye then now they
intervene so as to make every forest as far as possible the same in actual reality so we planted
monocultures for instance and they produce patches of trees where every tree was of
the same age even aged patches so they focused on one single species
That had large areas where every tree was the same age, now at first everything became a lot easier
right so they could much more easily calculate the yield and growth rates the forest became easier
to manipulate because there was less complexity and variation fewer other species of trees.
Another really interesting feature was that this neat arrangement of ordered trees could now be
surveyed by the chief
forester from back in his office, he wouldn't even have to go out there he could read it all from
graphs and tables it could all be managed based on calculations and assumptions because the forest
had been shaped according to those assumptions and graphs and tables were accurate measures of the
forest because the forest was constructed so that they could be accurately represented by those
graphs and tables and another thing is that this
kind of scientific forestry involves making universal models if a complex forest in Germany can be
physically transformed into a rationally ordered arrangement of trees, then it should in principle be
possible to apply those same principles anywhere. So local variation can be rendered irrelevant
and because of that this is something that can be done anywhere simply because local
variation is
irrelevant right, so that the trees were in a particular part of Germany shouldn't matter anymore and
you should be able to do the same thing in California or in India or in Australia or in Tanzania
or in Norway or wherever and this move of going from measuring to making measurable I think that's a
move that we see not just in forestry but in a lot of other places as well and we'll get more into
that next week when we talk about plantations.
For now let's look at another kind of landscape engineering.
Jerry Zee in Machine Sky gives us another example. There's a lot that is
similar to Scott but this is also a challenge or a corrective to some of the things that Scott
argues, Zee describes a mega project of sand control initiated by the Chinese state. So these
sandstorms frequently happen in Beijing and sandstorms for Zee this is an interesting argument
in itself it's sort of a phenomenon that can't be reduced to either land or whether it's as
closely tied to the landscape as it is to the wind, so the storms they cover Beijing in
these encompassing clouds of dust and sand that block out the sun and give the sky this eerie tinge
as you can see on the picture here and this is what the the Chinese government wants to avoid then
and so to do that their
Ambitions of control you might say they extend into the skies.
I don't know about you guys but to me this high modernist fantasy of controlling the
weather it has something almost Godlike about it there's something godlike about being able
to control the weather right, so this is one of those pinnacles of human efforts to gain mastery over
nature or at least that's what it seems like, and cloud seeding experiments or projects are a
good example
you might have heard of this so cloud seeding is it's a technology that revolves around spraying
either dry ice or some kind of salts into clouds from the airplane with the aim of getting those
clouds to produce rain and as you can see here this is actually done in many places eight
states in the US are are doing this right now but it's also at the same time very unclear whether or
not it's actually working so you know in keeping with the theme of you know becoming
Godlike and controlling the weather there seems to be an element of Faith also in this these
projects and but anyway so the Chinese States tries to shape the weather and to control dust
storm in a somewhat similar but also sort of more indirect way compared to those cloud seeding
experiments
so the Chinese government they see the Chinese interior the interior parts of China as a windshed
for Beijing and you know it's a it's a wind shed it's a similar thing as a watershed right. So
north of Beijing in the interior parts of the country there are large areas of desert and there
are also these persistent winds that persistently blow in the same
Direction that carries sand southwards so sand dunes up in northern China are in the eyes of Chinese
landscape managers they are dust storms in the making.
One way to avoid these dust storms is through Sand Dune stabilization upwind of Beijing,
concretely what they do is they plant seeds in order to make vegetation grow in areas with a lot of
sand and if there's vegetation there then the wind won't as easily pick up the sand and you won't
get sandstorms
and in the process they sort of they tried to use the patterns of air flow through to
their advantage. So wind effects the landscape right they create sand dunes and picks up sand and
so on but the landscape and the vegetation also affects the the movement of the air so at first they
plant where they can where it's possible to plant things and then those first plants create
wind Shadow which we say we say in Norwegian "le" wind shadow which creates more possible plants
places to plant after that and and on and on so it goes. And all this very very local on-the-ground
stuff that's going on in the north of China this stuff affects the skies in in Beijing so the
interaction that the very local
interaction between wind sand dunes and vegetation up in the Arid parts of northern China can
either become or prevent sandstorms in Beijing
the Chinese Foresters then in theory can manipulate Beijing Skies by shaping landscapes in the North.
Zee writes about this as a strategy for affecting the Dynamics of sand and wind and they sort of
they work with the landscape to channel the wind and in this process they try to turn the wind from
a troublesome problem thing into something that they can harness as a tool and the same with sand
dune so they turn something troublesome the dunes where the wind can easily pick up
sand into a resource or a tool and namely a vegetated landscape which then acts as a barrier for
sandstorm so for the land managers landscapes in northern China our approach as components for the
modulation of downwind sky, the Landscapes up there are like buttons they can push and tweak to
change or program the weather in China these Landscapes are sort of in a sense like
the control panels for Beijing skies, and here we see a shift again shift from problems turning
Troubles into tools and this is a different shift than the German Foresters shift from
measuring forests to making forts measurable and I think that the difference highlights two
different kinds of landscape engineering.
One thing is that air and wind much more clearly and dramatically than European forests poses some
challenges to notions of mastery and control you just simply cannot master the wind right, you cannot
create a weather system that fits with your ambition and your plans and your tables and your
calculations that just doesn't work you might as well try
catch the wind as the old song goes right. Another point is that engineering is not always about
Mastery and control it might also be about experimental programming of unruly more than human
machines so according to Zee there's an appreciation here of the unruliness of landscapes and
there's an appreciation that they are more than human and this is also in reference to
Anna Tsing but it's still transforming them so while there's an appreciation that
they are unruly and more than human is still an effort to transform them from something
Troublesome into a resource.
It's not also about forcing nature into the straight lines of modern fantasies these are not
mastered environments but environments approached through an engineering rationality and this is an
important point to end with here, so the engineering rationality sees the world kind of as a machine
where anything can be made into an input that you can tweak and and
and then outputs that you can get from tweaking inputs, where every element has a function and can be
manipulated to yield some kind of output force for instance in this imaginary is an element
you can manipulate to yielding outputs the same wind it's it's something at that you can harness
in order to draw some resource, nature becomes a set of tools and resources and then the
engineers can then harness landscape processes and proclivities in
in their engineering puzzles, this logic works not just within China but on a larger scale as well
where the world the whole world is sort of seen as a machine that is tweakable and and tunable by
the Chinese States.