spatial manifestations of popular culture. Donald Meinig was a central figure in
the emergence of new perspectives in cultural geography in the late 1970s, which
was partially a reaction to thequantitative revolutionthat had redirected geo-
graphical research a decade earlier. One of his most significant contributions has
been to integrate intellectual approaches from the humanities, especially literature,
into the spatial perspective of geographical research.
The work of Meinig, Yi Fu Tuan, and other cultural geographers has given rise
to humanistic geography, a subdiscipline that is centered on the landscape perspec-
tive.The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, an edited collection of landscape
research Meinig produced in 1979, has had a lasting influence on subsequent
directions in cultural geography.
The past two decades in fact have witnessed the emergence of innovative ways of
critically analyzing landscapes. How a landscape is interpreted is an important con-
sideration in the so-called new cultural geography that is theoretically grounded in
the philosophy of the French scholar Michael Foucault and the writings of other
post-modern and post-structuralist thinkers. Some who are engaged in the “new”
school of landscape interpretation regard a landscape as a kind of textual feature,
which may be “read” in a number of different ways, depending on the perspective
and background of the observer. A given landscape may be interpreted quite differ-
ently based on the gender, race, social class, age, sexual preference, or even political
affiliation of those viewing it, and therefore the significance and meaning of the
landscape varies accordingly. Other key issues for cultural geographers regarding198 Landscape
George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882)
A Vermonter and a lawyer, Marsh served in the diplomatic service of the United States in the
middle decades of the 1800s. He was a remarkable scholar who was widely traveled and could
read over 20 languages. His travel and studies led him to think about human destruction of
landscapes. He had widely read contemporary European geographers and was struck with
ideas that connected humans and nature. He crystallized his thoughts inMan and Nature, or
Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action(1864) andThe Earth as Modified by Human
Action(1874). He argued that human interaction with the landscape had both consciousand
unintentional consequences and that some actions of humans were clearly deleterious to
landscape. Though well received, Marsh wrote in a time when America was completing its
“Manifest Destiny” of human domination of the supposedly infinite resources from Atlantic
to Pacific. His thoughts did not resonate in political circles to be translated into public policy.
He was an intellectual father of the conservation movement and his works were highly influ-
ential on the intellectual growth of the discipline of geography in the United States. Marsh’s
work is sometimes evoked as seminal in the man-land tradition of the geographic discipline.