Landscape Transformation Quotes

I think the Netherlands will become one big city at a point. It is inevitable when you live in a country with so many people. You cannot afford to leave nature as it is. Some people believe that the dunes should be left in their original state, but I think it's strange to let things become how they were 500 years ago.

Long Island is shaped the way it is largely because of Robert Moses. Long Island is a perfect example of how political power shapes people's lives every day.

Art is transformative. It's not 2+2=4. It works like the sea. It changes geography through its constant and relentless movement, just the way plants and water shape the world.

By now, the morning sun was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb—more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here—andless open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.

Phoenix is an interesting example. Drive around and see the golf courses everywhere, and you see people's big green lawns. And you live in a desert! I've always remarked about the capacity of human beings to look at somewhere and move there because of its uniqueness and its beauty and then change it.

The Colorado River did not form the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was formed as the flood went down.

Arizona, our beautiful state, was built on mining.

Formerly, Ireland was a vast forest…. It is now almost destitute of trees.

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.

Everybody's seen a stream or a wood they knew replaced by a strip mall.

One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God's great plough.

Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.

Look at the commercial and industrial development that is going on along the 101. A lot of the infrastructure - the sewer lines and drainage that make development possible - was put in during the freeway construction.

Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.

Dublin dwindles so beautifully; there is no harsh separation between it and the country. It fades away, whereas London seems to devour the country; an army of buildings come and take away a beautiful park, and you never seem to get quite out of sight of a row of houses.

All of my work comes out of a deep concern for human expansion into the landscape.

Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.

Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.

Injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir would certainly change the local environment and thus affect the organisms that live there. Some will thrive, and others will suffer. While we should minimize such impacts, they cannot be avoided completely. The same happens when one plows a field, builds a house or a road, or waters a lawn.

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.

My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money.

I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?

I still don't know why, exactly, but I do think people can have a spiritual connection to landscape, and I certainly did in Iceland.

With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.