Natural landscape
[note 3] In Silent Spring (1962) Rachel Carson describes a roadside verge as it used to look: "Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year" and then how it looks now following the use of herbicides: "The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire".
Chunglin Kwa suggests, "that a seventeenth-century or early-eighteenth-century pen could experience natural scenery 'just like on a painting,’ and so, with or without the use of the word itself, designate it as a landscape.
[9][10][note 4] Andrew Jackson Downing was aware of, and sympathetic to, Humboldt's ideas, which therefore influenced American landscape gardening.
[17] The dualism of the first definition has its roots is an "ancient concept", because early people viewed "nature, or the nonhuman world […] as a divine Other, godlike in its separation from humans.
"[18] In the West, Christianity's myth of the fall, that is the expulsion of humankind from the Garden of Eden, where all creation lived in harmony, into an imperfect world, has been the major influence.
[22] Initially it was believed that all that was needed to do was to separate what was seen as natural landscape and "avoid disturbances such as logging, grazing, fire and insect outbreaks.
[24] However, this policy was not consistently applied, and in Yellowstone Park, to take one example, the existing ecology was altered, firstly by the exclusion of Native Americans and later with the virtual extermination of the wolf population.
Maria Kaika comments: "Nowadays, we are beginning to see nature and culture as intertwined once again – not ontologically separated anymore […].What I used to perceive as a compartmentalized world, consisting of neatly and tightly sealed, autonomous 'space envelopes' (the home, the city, and nature) was, in fact, a messy socio-spatial continuum".
"[31] Here he bends somewhat the regular dictionary meaning of wild, to emphasise that nothing natural, even in a garden, is fully under human control.
[32] These high summits are of course only part of the Cairngorms, and there are no longer wolves, bears, wild boar or lynx in Scotland's wilderness.
[39] Even the remote Yukon and Alaskan wilderness, the bi-national Kluane-Wrangell-St. Elias-Glacier Bay-Tatshenshini-Alsek park system comprising Kluane, Wrangell-St Elias, Glacier Bay and Tatshenshini-Alsek parks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is not free from human influence, because the Kluane National Park lies within the traditional territories of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations and Kluane First Nation who have a long history of living in this region.
Through different intervals of time, the process of natural landscapes have been shaped by a series of landforms, mostly due to its factors, including tectonics, erosion, weathering and vegetation.
Examples of cultural intrusions into a landscape are: fences, roads, parking lots, sand pits, buildings, hiking trails, management of plants, including the introduction of invasive species, extraction or removal of plants, management of animals, mining, hunting, natural landscaping, farming and forestry, pollution.
