geography emphasized symbolic qualities of
landscape and avoided the morphology and
metaphors of natural agency characteristic of
traditional cultural geography. Key questions
were how nature and landscape were culturally
constructed and produced, how they could be
read textually, and how landscape representations
reproduced and transformed societies (Barnes
and Duncan, 1992; Cosgrove, 1983; Cosgrove
and Daniels, 1988; Price and Lewis, 1993).
Critical of Sauer’s superorganicism, ‘new’
cultural geographers used poststructuralism, dis-
course theory and deconstruction to identify
landscape not as the product of a realist ‘nature’
or an enigmatic ‘culture group’ but as a ‘text’
composed of signs and symbols whose hege-
monic reading both represented and reproduced
power relations, knowledge claims and dis-
courses that initially inscribed them (Cosgrove
and Jackson, 1987; Duncan, 1980; Jackson,
1989). Simultaneously, they promoted alter-
native readings of landscape by those marginalized
and/or exploited by virtue of their gender,
race, class and sexual orientation (categories
themselves often ‘naturalized’ or ‘animalized’ by
patriarchal or colonial powers: Anderson, 2000,
Davis, 1998). Such approaches were in the con-
tradictory position of making discursive space
for animal ‘others’ while criticizing any notion
of an extra-discursive or external nature of
which animals might be a part or from which
they might act.
For many political ecologists, animal rights
theorists, ecofeminists and activists, such views
also seemed to deny the very liveliness of the
world. Moreover, denaturalizing nature and
treating geographic places as cultural produc-
tions denied the agency of nature and especially
animals. As Demeritt argued, ‘the metaphor of
landscape as text ... suppresses any trace of
other, nonhuman actors from the production
of landscape’ (1994:163).
This ‘writing out’ of nature catalysed lively
debate with ‘new’ environmental historians such
as Worster and Cronon, trying to demonstrate
nature’s agency. Their project was to understand
how culture–nature boundaries were (re)drawn
owing to cultural process, ecological features and
agency, and their interactions. Increasingly,
animals were included within their understand-
ing of ecological agency. Merchant (1989) and
Cronon (1983), both writing on colonial New
England, exposed the significance of the region’s
indigenous animals. Commodification and con-
sumption of beaver especially led to its eventual
demise, but was also fundamental to the evolu-
tion of local, regional and transatlantic ecologies,
economies, institutions and social relations.Crosby (1986) identified the instrumental roles
played by Old World animals in European global
expansion and socio-ecological domination. And
in Nature’s Metropolis(1991) Cronon explicated
the roles of animals in organization and production
of space and spatial relations in nineteenth-
century Chicago, deftly exposing the spatial
implications of Chicago’s evolution as supplier
of beef to a growing nation in which cattle – in
both embodied and disassembled forms – were
primary actors linking economic and political
geographies of western producers with East
Coast consumers. Cattle were thus agents
embodying the complex history of urban–rural,
east–west and class-based relations, serving to
shape urban spatial structures, institutions and
social relations in Chicago.
The ‘new’ cultural geography versus environ-
mental history debate stimulated a reconsidera-
tion of the role of animals in the making of place,
region and landscape. Matless’ (1994; 1996;
2000) research on the British Broadlands, for
instance, examined two ways in which animals
of the Broads defined a relational human identity
and how differing expert practices and technolo-
gies – looking, touching, testing, killing, listen-
ing, tasting – each produced claims to authority
concerning local conservation and defined
acceptable behaviour toward local animals and
ecology. Similarly, Proctor’s (1998: see also
Proctor and Pincetl, 1996) work showed that
controversies over old growth forest were rooted
not only in actual Pacific Northwest landscapes
replete with declining timber towns, but also the
region’s ‘moral geography’ symbolized by the
spotted owl. Exploring debates over listing
the owl as a threatened species, Proctor found
that the owl’s political force emanated from its
multidimensional symbolism of Pacific North-
west landscapes. Under pressures of timber
industry restructuring and flight, Northwest resi-
dents linked owl protection to loss of timber jobs,
death of timber-dependent communities, and
elimination of a traditional rural way of life;
environmental groups saw the owl as a symbol of
nature’s wisdom, harmony and balance. Thus
place and region were discursively created
around the owl itself, symbolizing sagacity
of nature for some but community collapse
for others.
Domesticated animals are also powerful
symbols of places and ways of life and livelihood.
Place-specific breeds are intimately connected to
the histories and cultures of places and regions.
In Britain, for example, Cotswold Sheep,
Gloucester Old Spot Pigs, and Leicester
Longwool Sheep arose in particular places and
were adapted to place-specific features (climate,194 CULTURENATURES3029-ch09.qxd 03-10-02 10:48 AM Page 194