It’s only with great effort, if at all, that the traveler can recall the landscape of one, two decades past.
That is not true of people who inhabit those spaces.
Each piece of ground has its genealogy: successions of ownership, of crops, of buildings. Gullies formed and healed. Fences built and torn down. Trees planted, felled by lightening, the power company, the farmer’s bulldozer. Land drained, leveled, put in set asides… There is an intimacy with the land that those with generations of living on it bring to their experience of it. The landscape is, to use a concept from the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, part of people’s "life world" in a way that it is not for those who only visit it.
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That is not true of people who inhabit those spaces.
Each piece of ground has its genealogy: successions of ownership, of crops, of buildings. Gullies formed and healed. Fences built and torn down. Trees planted, felled by lightening, the power company, the farmer’s bulldozer. Land drained, leveled, put in set asides… There is an intimacy with the land that those with generations of living on it bring to their experience of it. The landscape is, to use a concept from the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, part of people’s "life world" in a way that it is not for those who only visit it.
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